Grit, I never check the forecast, there is no point, as I go out in any weather anywayand it really cannot be much worse than it was on Saturday
Grit, I never check the forecast, there is no point, as I go out in any weather anyway
Hmmm, yeah, then there is the matter of keeping the map in its envelope
That is going to be the hardest bit... but... I reckon on day two we will be heading south towards Wasdale/Langdale
Hypo, you want to join us with your partner? I know you did long score, but we can all congregate somewhere near the planned overnight camp in the evening and have some fun?
Mark Weir has no room to comment on the OMM being safe etc, when was it only last week that two sets of school children had to be rescued from his mines due to flooding!
Sorry if this has already been posted.
Well that IS interesting ! Might have to give BBC Cumbria a call to see if they can confirm that
Maybe that's what made Mr Weir go a little overboard at the weekend.
A year and a half ago while I was on my way to Honister from Scafell supporting a BGR, my kids wandered into the slate yard behind the car park. There was no works traffic about but they shouldn't really have been there. My son (9 at the time) had just discovered a very exciting helicopter hidden in a hollow and was considering a closer look, when he spotted a man striding purposefully towards him. At this point he shouted for his Mummy which distracted my wife from her chat. My daughter and son were by this time in the company of Mr Weir and my wife decided she had better go and apologise.
My daughter had several nice bits of slate in her hands that she was in the process of collecting / pilfering.
My wife approached and apologised to be greeted by a smile from Mr Weir who said they were discussing the helicopter and if they wanted they could have a sit in it.
They then had a guided tour of the helicopter and after maybe 20 minutes Mr Weir said that he was going to take off now so could they stand back while he did. My wife apologised for the obvious slate pilfering to which she was told that the kids could help themselves. Mr Weir then took off, flew towards Buttermere, turned back aerobatically and swooped past the kids giving a big wave as he passed. They talked of little else for days.
I've never met Mr Weir but from my family's experience he is a genuinely nice chap. I think he misunderstood the events at the weekend. Being the sort of person that obviously makes decisions and runs with them - you don't make enough money to fund a helicopter without being - some of his decisions at the weekend were wrong. We all make wrong decisions sometimes but we're not usually operating with news hounds egging us on. Perhaps it's time to drop the negative comments and just put it all down to experience.
I think I welcome this posting.
Whether he was right or wrong or somewhere in between I am prepared to give Mr Weir the benefit of the doubt over his actions. I doubt if he expected his "morgue" soundbite to be headlined in newspapers and he appears to have provided welcome comfort to many OMM competitors.
He appears to be running a successful business and probably felt someone had to step in and direct and make decisions etc. because that is what business men do. And who knows what advice Mr Weir was given by the different bodies involved?
One sided demonization of people is easy sport.
And if after all this Mr Weir's business gets a fillip: where is the harm in that?
Last edited by Graham Breeze; 30-10-2008 at 03:58 PM.
Any one who has been directly involved with the media will absolutely know the toxic distortion of the truth that it engenders. In that regard, the actions of some of the media has been quite commendable in this case! There was almost a balance!!
There are also lots of other skills that successful businessmen possess that Mr Weir did not display!Originally Posted by GrahamB
This extract from the OMM site makes interesting reading:
We asked Mark Weir from Honister Slate Mine not to transport competitors down to Cockermouth but he continued to do so under his own initiative. This made it more difficult for us to account for them. He had also complained that competitors were taking shelter in his café, eating their own food and preventing his other customers from getting access to the cafe. We offered, there and then, to pay for all food and drink consumed by competitors.
The last section about eating thier own food in his cafe is hardly a comment made by someone volunteering to manage a disaster situation!
I couldn't agree with Graham more. Furthermore, since the organisers were disseminating no information at all to the public at large and in the main inadequate information to the competitors themselves (on arrival at the Buttermere, "it's cancelled, go back to the event centre" was the sum total of it to those competitors I have spoken to) they can hardly complain that Mr. Weir saw fit to step in.
With all that said, the criticism (of everyone, on this board) has now been overdone. It seems to me the one lesson here is that no one really had a crisis plan (which includes both actions and the provision for words when something goes wrong) and that being the case, it was inevitable that things would spiral out of control as they did.
Likely all of those involved got some things right and some things wrong but a little humility in certain quarters really wouldn't go amiss. The hills are alive with the sound of keyboards, I guess.
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