DCHAS-L Archives, Aug 11 2019 - Re: [DCHAS-L] [New post] Health and Safety II?

There's a skydiving outfit a few miles from my house (you can often hear the opening of chutes and whoops when in my backyard). I've been keeping track -their clients die in accidents at the rate of approximately1 person per year for the past 13 years. I lack good data before that. Each time, they resume skydiving within hours (sometimes just an hour) with operator or fellow enthusiast statements along the line of "it's what they would have wanted" instead of stopping to do a safety stand-down and careful self-analysis. I suspect the fail to suspend jumps is more about the money, but as I have yet to see any post-incident failure analysis concerning one of the accidents in our local media I can only conjecture. Anyway, from what I can tell, it appears they could use a good dose of safety culture. This article is now behind a paywall, but here's the public preview snippet from the September 12, 2006 Philadelphia Inquirer:

I've idly dreamt of a law that would require any thrill ride operator to post a large picture of any severe injuries or death at their facility along with a root cause analysis and any corrective actions taken where the customers wait in line to pay or participate.

Getting back to chemistry - I believe a fair number of folks suffer from a self-reinforcing chemical hubris quite similar to that of our free climber that started this discussion. Thoughts along the line of yeah, this is dangerous, but I am an expert, I don't make stupid mistakes, safety is inconvenient/interferes with my experience, and I can deal with problems, and I've never had one-.well, there were those close calls, but I survived them just fine and that shows just how good I am...

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On Aug 11, 2019, at 5:46 PM, Stuart, Ralph <Ralph.Stuart**At_Symbol_Here**KEENE.EDU> wrote:

And they are not unique to the wilderness environment, when things like distracted or impaired driving occur with far greater frequency and potential to impact far greater numbers of people directly or indirectly.

Another environment where I have heard that this discussion occurs is skydiving. This came up when I was talking to an assistant dean about safety culture; she is a skydiver recreationally. She explained that nationally, the recreational skydiving industry has a strong, coordinated safety outreach effort (see https://uspa.org/safetyday for information on their annual "Safety Day" event). However, skydiving's public image as a safe activity is undermined by daredevil sky divers who like to take video of unnecessary chances they take and post their stunts on Youtube. The industry believes that this daredevil image is an important marketing problem it faces. In support of this idea, I have had conversations with several people who are interested in trying skydiving, but have been forbidden to do so by their family. And I have heard that Chinese students interested in studying chemistry face family opposition for similar reasons.

In my mind, there are parallels to chemistry educators \

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