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Comment by galleywest200 | Hacker News Reader

> According to The Washington Post, the internal policy states “Interior shall not confirm a death,” and that this policy applies to “all Interior bureaus and offices” plus “all Interior communications involving fatalities, suspected fatalities, serious injuries or emotionally sensitive incidents.”

So now I cannot learn about known bear attacks when I plan a backpacking trip?

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If you are going into an area with bears, you should be prepared for bears. Appropriate behavior isn't conditional on someone dying recently. The risks in an area are widely published and posted by the National Park Service. This is basic safety.

It is common to see people in National Parks flagrantly ignore the many warnings. Honestly, I am surprised it is only 350 deaths per year.

If there is heightened animal activity in an area it helps to know, especially if they are aggressive. We adjust where we go to avoid especially dangerous situations.

The National Park Service continuously posts updated guidance based on animal activity and will temporarily close areas of the park if there is an aggressive animal. This isn't being changed by the policy in the article.

Allowing arbitrary NPS employees talk to the public about people that may have died isn't required for any of this. To be honest, I am surprised that this new policy didn't already exist. It is very common practice to manage incident comms this way.

But aggressive animal presence is indicated by incident frequency not fatality frequency. It would seem that you still have access to the former.

> Honestly, I am surprised it is only 350 deaths per year.

Isn't this exactly why we need to know how many deaths there are -- so we can judge the level of risk we face?

The number of deaths tell you relatively little about the risks because almost all of them are preventable. If you don't ignore the myriad highly visible warnings, the risks are below the noise floor. You take a bigger risk of death driving to the National Park.

For example, dozens of people die every year due to heat stroke and dehydration in places like Death Valley, Joshua Tree, and White Sands. The National Park Service posts many large signs warning you to bring sufficient water that thousands of people ignore. Most people that ignore the warning don't die but you could eliminate the risk entirely by simply staying hydrated.

You keep using numbers to underpin your comments. The parent's point is that it's important to have access to numbers like this. From where I'm sitting it seems like you very much agree despite your comments sounding like disagreement or deflection.

The National Park Service post signs in specific areas that keep a running tally of how many people have died in that spot. I don’t have any objection to those signs, they are kind of interesting in a train wreck sort of way. Despite that, the numbers on those signs go up every year.

Knowing about a death in the last 24 hours doesn’t matter because it doesn’t materially impact the prevalence of the behavior that is the root cause of the deaths. At the same time, the government has an interest in not letting random employees with hot takes talk to the media with incomplete or erroneous information; this also is a liability. That is standard operating procedure almost everywhere, I just find it weird that we care here, particularly when it has zero relevance to safety.

No lives are being lost or saved by this policy. As an observation, I think few people would accept the kinds of policies that would be required to actually reduce deaths in National Parks.

Sometimes the wild animal that attacked a person is still in the area, but I agree with you in general the signs are not helping prevent deaths

You mean like > 10 == take bear spray, > 20 == cancel the trip? Because how do you even come up with that formula? Is it a per-capita number or total?

Also: How many people killed by falling coconuts would cause you to cancel a Hawaiian vacation?

How many people die climbing half dome? Do the deaths tend to happen I only inclement weather?

Do you realize how divorced from reality you people sound?

Why are you directing this at me? I couldn't care less about people dying climbing half-dome. It seems like one of the better ways to go.

In your post above, you quite clearly are making the case that information and statistics about casualties at national parks isn't useful.

Actually, they are, because they help you make judgements on e.g. whether to climb Half Dome.

The fact that you couldn't even make the connection shows just how out of touch you are here.

What did you mean by "you people" though? What group do you think I belong to based on that post? People who make a particular case about national parks?

It's genuinely bewildering why you would say "you people" there.

Of course you can: https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/mortality-data.htm

This is incomplete and only shows incidents that were validated by the NPS and opted to be released to the public by the park service. The only way to get the true number of cases is through a FOIA request.

If you're hiking into brown bear country just take a 10mm and some bear spray, regardless of whether there have been any recent attacks or not

What would you learn?

You should always be prepared to encounter unrestrained nature when backpacking in a national park.

It's a bit like saying weather forecasts are useless in Seattle as you should always be prepared for the rain.

I’m somewhat experienced in wilderness backpacking, and I always look into bear protocol anywhere I visit (including talking to the rangers there in person). But it’s disingenuous to suggest that you’d learn nothing from death statistics. Are you suggesting that there’s no need to know that, because if the numbers were too high in an area they’d close it down?

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