Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

I have a really dim view of people who hold a dim view of health and safety, especially around stuff like this. This sort of old-school machismo is encouraged by industry because doing things with a higher margin of safety is slower and more expensive. Often not by much, especially compared to the volume of money being made overall, which is what makes it even more reprehensible.

Falls from heights are a huge cause of workplace deaths in construction: https://www.osha.gov/fall-protection

It doesn't take much height to do so: https://cdn1.hardhattraining.com/wp-content/uploads/how-high...

Any time an employer or company encourages you to take risks or pressures you to not observe safety regulations, find another job, fast. Your life is not less important than profits or productivity. Ever.

Edit: not impressed at all. This guy is an asshole - aside from the fact that multiple clips show him picking something off chimneys or towers, giggling, and throwing them casually off - here he is laughing about how he and a coworker purposefully dumped a bucket of cement water off the top of a tower and came down to found they'd damaged a guy's nice sports car. Which he thinks his hilarious: https://youtu.be/ezX_o0H5FuE?t=217

Tbf to Dibnah be belonged to a different era, pre Heath and Safety at Work Act (1974). He was in possession of a very much niche and specialised skill and worked in a normally very contained environment where only two people were normally at risk. With modern rope access equipment much of the residual risk of falling could be mitigated in the video, but the method could have been maintained. FYI the video is mislabelled (like a lot of Youtube) as from 2011(upload date). He died in 2004! I believe it was filmed in the early 1980s.

If you want to attack Fred, maybe attack his selfish devotion to his hobbies at the expense of his family, but not for having an attitude to health and safety that was somewhat normal for the era he worked in.

I think having good regulations and meaningful safety culture are important. I also think this guy taking a dim view is not warranted. That said, a lot of safety regulations nowadays is about minimizing liability and increase in safety is incidental.

I worked in a British company (that had a warehouse) in an office as an IT contractor, and in the 3-storied office all stairwells were full of posters telling me I should hold the handrails and that kind of completely pointless garbage.

Fred is from a time where there were no other means to climb a chimney. He worked safely for that time period. Worlink in a lithium mine these days is more dangerous.

His safety is based on skill rather than technology and documented rules. That can work really well for an individual working with minimal assistance which is exactly how Dibner worked. It just doesn't scale to teams.

Don’t disagree with you on the vital importance of health and safety but that infographic

> It doesn't take much height to do so: https://cdn1.hardhattraining.com/wp-content/uploads/how-high...

does a really poor job of conveying the relative risks - and presumably these incidents are generally occurring when workers are following the rules which isn’t confidence inspiring.

Anecdotally from a number of relatives who work in the construction trades, the majority of accidents are due to alcohol and drug use — which I suppose often go hand-in-hand with lax standards. It seems to me that keeping people from getting high and drinking during the workday improves safety by an order of magnitude, however that’s easier said than done.

Easier said than done, whilst paying minimum wage and giving people extreme physical work to do yes...

The other thing to note is that most people who fall from height are 'unskilled workers' (remembered stat, I held a Construction Safety Certification Scheme gold card in the past) . Ie, they shouldn't have been up there in the first place. Typically people plucked out of the pub to become 'roofers'. Iirc falling through skylights was the number one cause. While we value cheap labour, safety will always be second best

That link's broken; do you have a screenshot?

Didn’t realise copying / pasting longer HN links fails.

Here is the full link

https://cdn1.hardhattraining.com/wp-content/uploads/how-high...

I'd have expected the death rate to increase as the height increased. Any idea what's behind the seemingly random distribution?

This isn't really reporting a death rate, it's reporting the distribution of heights given you died falling from a height.

I'd guess falls from higher heights are more deadly, but less likely (you're more likely to use fall protection on a 8 story roof than a 1 story roof, I'd guess; and there's also a lot more 1 story roofs than 8 story roofs)

That's the percentage of fall deaths caused from each height, not the mortality rate of a fall from a given height.

In other words, assuming falling probability doesn't vary with height, its estimating what % of time people spend at each height * probability of a fall being reported at that height * probability of death at a given height.

It probably depends a lot on what you are going to hit as you fall. A drop onto a safety line over an empty void may be safer than a 2m fall onto a piece of equipment.

There is a proverb, may be Italian: it is better to fall from the window sill than the roof.

Add it up as you go up. :)

He was also self employed.

These men from decades ago and before are why you live your easy privileged life.

The risks they took built society.

If you think "Bullshit Jobs" is real then I hope you realise that's exactly you. These men are doing real work. And the idea they could just get other work is pretty insulting.

How much OH&S should be done in today's society is complicated. But what still keeps society running is a whole class of men doing hard dangerous work.

(And this an awful example about working from heights, that kicks in at 7 feet. The fact it start low is what matters. He is doing speciality work which is totally seperate and obvious he'd die)

I'll think you'll find that your take on things is what gets people killed and exactly why health and safety/OSHA exist like they do today.

Yes, many people in my family actually work(ed) in the building profession, and are/were “real men”.

They are/were more passionate than anyone about safety in building, because they have literally seen people killed when safety was poor.

The jobs are things that needed doing, yes.

Doing them in a dangerous, cavalier way? Not really. A bridge isn't really improved in any way if 20 people die falling from it during construction.

And yeah, maybe that kind of thing made the bridge noticeably cheaper, but was it cheaper really when you account for the effects those deaths had? We pay less for the bridge, then pay more for funerals, compensations, negative effects that workers dying had... it's just nowhere in the bill for the bridge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com