New safety rules

[wkb21]

Both Scottish Hill Runners(SHR) and UKA, represented at the inquest by Keith Burns and John Temperton respectively, had reviewed the witness statements. Whilst much has already been said/intimated on this thread about the UKA input, the SHR input has not been mentioned. Both Keith and John appeared as witnesses towards the end of the inquest. Keith followed John and was able to inject objectivity and realism into the interpretation of the facts from the point of view of an experienced race organiser and runner. For example he pointed out that fellrunning is a dangerous sport that cannot be made risk free and that accurately monitoring people round a course is not always straightforward eg in bad weather when waterproofs are obscuring numbers and when there may be runners on the course who aren't in the race. All of us with a passion for fellrunning should be grateful to SHR and Keith for their input.

I attended the inquest as an observer because I wanted to hear first hand what had happened.

With regard to improving the content of the "FRA Safety Requirements" one thing that struck me during the inquest was a need to stress to organisers the importance of accounting individually for each and every competitor at the end as a "did not start", did not finish (retired) or as a finisher with a time and any discrepancies resolved as quickly as possible. Since this is the end stop I think it should be differentiated from the monitoring at checkpoints round the course. At Buttermere Sailbeck the organiser had relied on a headcount of finishers plus retirees. Unfortuneately one retiree had in effect been double counted.

I mentioned this requirement to Graham at the inquest but was told it was too late to make any changes to the version of the "FRA Safety Requirements" which had been referenced on the FRA website on Sept 11th and already circulated to other interested bodies. However, at the end of the inquest the Coroner announced his intention to write to the FRA re Matters of Concern (Regulation 28) at which point I assume the committee realised it was unlikely to be the final version!

Margaret C

I am grateful to Margaret for this clarification. I would also like to emphasise that in SHR's role as independent reviewers of all the evidence, both before and during the inquest, we expressed the view (as 4 competitors/ organisers with over 100 years total experience of competing and race organisation) that the Sailbeck Race was better organised than most we had experience of. As with all races in our experience, there were human errors. NONE of these errors had any bearing on the tragic outcome. This simple point seems to have been lost during this extended debate on issues peripheral to the tragedy. We now face the risk of over-reaction with more prescriptive safety requirements which could lead to unintended consequences which could actually jeopardise safety culture in fell racing. Let us hope that the collective wisdom of the FRA Committee will save us all from such an outcome, even at such a late stage.

Race Organisers have very good reason to be alarmed.

KB