Are These A Good Idea?
This advert for noise-cancelling head-phones are on buses all over London.
Are These A Good Idea?
Personally, I have always hated head phones, even when I flew aircraft, but surely to cut the noise of traffic out, is not necessarily a good idea for pedestrians and cyclists.
We need a serious analysis of accidents involving pedestrians and cyclists.
Something Concrete About Cycle Safety
I was waiting for a bus, when I heard a voice repeating.
This lorry is turning left.
It turned out it was a recorded message on this cement lorry.
Something Concrete About Cycle Safety
I think it could be a good idea. Except for deaf cyclists.
When Was It Known Hillsborough Had No Safety Certificate?
It has been said many times in the last day or so, that Hillsborough had no safety certificate, at the time of the disaster on April 15th, 1989.
Perhaps, my memory has gone, but although I can remember the disaster, I can’t associate it with what I was doing at the time. I wouldn’t have been at football at Ipswich, as at that time I didn’t go. I can remember where I was when I heard about Lockerbie a few months earlier.
So for how long has it been known that Hillsborough did not have a valid safety certificate at the time of the disaster?
Surely to knowingly book the stadium without a valid safety certificate, is akin to flying a Boeing 747, without a valid certificate of airworthiness.
Or was that something that always happened in those days?
In trying to get more answers to my question, I came across this page on the web site of the Football Industry Group at Liverpool University. It is something everybody should read. This is one of the page’s conclusions.
The disaster was basically caused by the failure of South Yorkshire Police to control a large
crowd of Liverpool fans outside the Leppings Lane End, and the poor state of the ground,
but it was also clear that football’s total failure to learn from the numerous disasters that had
afflicted it during the twentieth century, and a police force conditioned to view supporters as
potential hooligans and so always expecting violence, contributed significantly to the 96 deaths
and many hundreds of injuries.
I agree very much about learning from the past. In the 1960s, I was in a few crushes at White Hart Lane and Highbury, and how they avoided a Hillsborough-type disaster in some matches, was more down to luck than any planning.
The page also says this about the safety certificate and emergency plans.
Sheffield Wednesday had redeveloped parts of the ground without obtaining
a new safety certificate, or telling the emergency services: the result was that the safety certificate was
outdated and useless, and that plans Sheffield Wednesday had developed with the local emergency
services could not be put into practice, as the layout of the ground had changed.
That to me is inadequate, to say the very least. An emergency plan like that, only works without an emergency.
Safety On Zebra Crossings
Every morning, when I go to get my newspaper, I have to cross a zebra crossing twice, that has a very busy and sometimes dangerous mix of cyclists and pedestrians. Sometimes, if a van, bus or other obscuring vehicle is waiting for a pedestrian to cross, cyclists will undertake the vehicle and then find a pedestrian is on the crossing.
Perhaps a convex mirror placed at the correct angle under the beacon, might make it easier for cyclists and pedestrians to avoid each other. The cyclist could see across the crossing and the pedestrian could see behind the obscuring vehicle.
Zebra Crossing Beacons
There’s plenty of space on this pole.
Panorama on the Gulf Oil Spill
A fascinating program, which probably asked more questions than it answered.
I’ve worked on some fairly dangerous chemical plants and you always put safety first, last and at every place in between. You might be lucky taking a short cut, but can you live at peace with yourself, if that short-cut proves to be fatal for others? I couldn’t!
So when doubts are raised about the working state of the blow-out protector by an engineer and it would seem these warning are ignored by BP and Transocean, I raise my engineer’s head in despair.
But then other engineers and managers have ignored such calls. I worked on a plant at ICI Mond in the late 1960s, where one of my colleagues installed an instrument, that said under some operating conditions, the plant could explode. The plant operation was immediately modified to avoid this condition. However the non-ICI designers of the plant saidthat no instrument could measure what we had found and refused to shut a similar plant in continental Europe.
They were wrong, not to do something which may have been important for safety.
Lightning Sadly Strikes Twice
Hopefully Felipe Massa will be OK after his freak accident, whilst qualifying on Saturday, but tragically Henry Surtees was not so lucky. Both were hit with bits of other cars, that happened to be bouncing on the track.
Motor racing is dangerous, but so are other sports, like horse riding and rugby, although motor racing has just had a bad week. But what is interesting is that the authorities are probing the reasons for the accidents and that some of the ideas they incorporate eventually filter down to our daily life.
But as a statistician, I can’t help feeling that both accidents were against odds of thousands to one.
After all on Sunday in Hungary, Alonso’s Renault lost a wheel and it bounced harmlessly down the track, before coming to rest by a crash barrier. But that was totally avoidable, as the mechanics had not put the wheel on correctly.
It also has lessons for us all, in that how many of us check all the wheels before we take our car on the road?
Sometimes I do, but on my last trip to Holland, I found on return that I had a damaged tyre, which probably should have been changed before I left. A failure would have been supremely annoying, as my Jaguar does not have a proper spare wheel! And do you know how to change a wheel on your car?
So although the tragic events on the race track of last week, were very sad and my heart goes out to everyone involved, do we take those simple precautions that would make us all safer on the roads, at work and especially in the home?
I doubt it!
The Dangers of Gas
I don’t like gas and for that reason I keep my propane tank twenty metres or so from my house. And the boiler is in an out-house. I also intend to go to some electric heat-pump system in the next few years. They have just got to get better.
So I was saddened to see this accident in Italy that has killed at least 15 and injured 50.
And people are recommending putting LPG into road vehicles. We worry about bombers, but more disruption is caused by transporting this explosive gas by road and rail.
The Anonymous Widower 