Short of a Darwin

I can't approve of the Darwin awards (so called because they are supposed to recognise a version of natural selection where people killed because of their own foolish actions remove themselves from the gene pool), because accidental death is just not funny even if the circumstances are potentially comic..

But one of the incidents shortlisted in this year's awards involved no fatality so I'm going to risk recounting it:

Kerry Bingham had been drinking with several friends when one of them said they knew a person who had bungee-jumped from a local river bridge. The conversation grew more heated and at least 10 men trooped along the walkway of the bridge at 4:30 AM. Upon arrival at the midpoint of the bridge they discovered that no one had brought a bungee rope. Bingham, who had continued drinking, volunteered and pointed out that a coil of lineman's cable, lay nearby. They secured one end around Bingham's leg and then tied the other to the bridge. His fall lasted 40 feet before the cable tightened and tore his foot off at the ankle.. He miraculously survived his fall into the icy water and was rescued by two nearby fishermen. Bingham's foot was never located.

Other foolish acts short of a grisly end are recounted here

Children and risk

I was at the House of Lords yesterday for the IOSH honorary vice presidents' lunch (apostrophe after the s because there's more than one honorary VP and in fact two new ones were appointed at the lunch: HSE chair Judith Hackitt and the tory peer Lord Brougham and Vaux).

Judith Hackitt gave a speech saying she really wants to draw attention to the worrying signs that there's a generation growing up who will be prevented from going on school trips because they are perceived as dangerous. She was talking about a Channel 4 Cutting Edge programme a couple of weeks back: Cotton Wool Kids, which featured parents explaining why they never let their children out to play with friends and followed one mother driving round town with her young daughter pointing out passers by who looked like kidnappers.

Hackitt says she's woried there'll be a whole load of people entering the workforce who are either "risk naive or risk paranoid".

I half agree and I'll post some thoughts on the other half another time.

On a purely trivial note, the Houses of Parliament are breathtaking, the most impressive of Victorian gothic bling you'll find anywhere in the UK, all intricately carved woodwork and stone and handblocked allpaper. But the tented area on the terrace beside the Thames, where they hold visitors lunches like the IOSH one, is a far cry. It was church-hall chairs and Argos chandeliers and the walls looked like curtain netting. Food was good though.

Risk and personality

I was talking to a senior safety manager at one of the big transport groups yesterday. She said they're starting a project to risk assess people's attitudes and personality types alongside the more traditional activity-based assessments.


They want to find out, and control for, some people's increased willingness to run red lights.


She says it'll be a long project and will only pay off over a couple of years if at all, but it fits with their competency based approach to recruiting people with the right aptitudes for any job.

I'm hoping we'll get a chance to cover it in HSW when it's a bit further advanced. In the meantime I'd be interested if anyone has examples of other organisations who've tried this kind of approach.

Smart lawyers

I was talking to health and safety lawyer Stuart Armstrong of McGrigors yesterday about the way personal injury lawyers have become much more clued up in the way they pursue work-related claims. Where there has been an accident at work and the HSE is investigating for a possible criminal prosecution, the victim's PI lawyers will often wait for the HSE's case to be decided before taking their claim to court.

Armstrong says one neat trick on the part of the PI lawyers is to request diclosure of safety documentation such as risk assessments from the employer, and if they don't get it, to mention it to the HSE investigators with the implication that the company may have something it wants to hide in that area.

A new benchmark for fatality fines

Ofwat (water regulator) head Regina Finn was on the radio just now explaining why she had fined SevernTrent water £38.5 million for misreporting its customer service ratings.

Finn said the penalty is 3% of Severn Trent's annual turnover and that it is "proportionate and appropriate" and will act as "a deterrent to this kind of behaviour".

The Sentencing Guidelines Council has been consulting since November on new guidelines for judges setting fines for corporate manslaughter convictions and prosecutions for fatalities under the Health and Safety at Work Act. Their draft recommended fines of between 2.5% and 7.5% of a company's annual turnover for HSW Act convictions, but there has been speculation that these percentages might be reduced to less punitive levels.

Now we know the order of magnitude of the offence of fibbing to a regulator about your customer satisfaction levels is a 3% penalty, let's hope the final advice on what it should cost a business to neglect employees' safety to the point of fatality doesn't set the bar any lower.

Harriet Harman goes protected

So Harriet Harman feels the need of a stab-proof vest when she tours Peckham. Perhaps she lives in fear of Sabatier-wielding Labour voters rushing at her shouting "You robbed Alan Johnson of the deputy leadership!" or "This is what you get for voting for top-up fees!".

Sadly, the greatest risk she probably faced was that no one would recognise her, even with a police escort.

I have to report an injury

I am a figure of fun in the office because I shortened my thumb by 4mm yesterday with a Stanley knife and spent several hours in A&E.

It was stupidity: I was cutting a piece of veneered chipboard with only an aluminium rule between the blade and my thumb (next time I'm using angle iron). But in my defence I've spent the last four years taking a whole floor of a house "back to slab" as they say in the refurbishment sector, remaking ceilings, stud walls and door frames and fitting a new kitchen and bathroom, and my dynamic risk assessments protected me pretty well up to now. Unless it was just luck

It certainly brings you back to what a great thing the opposable thumb is, though, being robbed of the use of one for a while.