Safety Matters

[alwaysinjured]

New safety update.

A race plan sent out to a number of people in FRA for discussion was just brushed aside by the secretary with the wording "we do not accept that HS legislation applies"

Disregarding whatever was in that document - I have yet to read it in detail - the FRA response roundly misses the point, despite how many times it has been said by competent people. Safety management practice is universal whether or not imposed legally. So it seems we have to say it again.


Many facets -Just take a couple.

Take the core essence of safety - the fundamental way safety improves is the result of REVIEW. Every race must do it. You cannot review unless you can determine whether problems arose
(a) because people did not do what they were instructed or
(b) because they misunderstood what they were asked to do or
(c) someone forgot to instruct them or
(d) personell changes leading to wrong assumptions made by people who do things a different way or
(e) because instructions were faulty and had not allowed for an unusual event. etc etc
So You cannot review unless you can see exactly how people were instructed in the first place, which is an essential function of a written plan. And the result of review is to amend the plan whilst the incident is fresh in the mind. NOT allow a year of forgetting.

The review process has also to be capable of involvement of a third party (eg FRA auditor) which can also only be done in written form. So you cannot improve safety without a written plan to review what was decided against what took place. Simple. Or it should be. When you consider that many accidents have a contributing cause of bad communications and misunderstanding, the need is clearly a slamdunk.

Nothing to do with HS legislation , all to do with common sense good safety practice. The fundamental lesson of sailbeck, yet to be heeded.


Many other examples.

Take you do not introduce anything as good practice without creating an operating procedure for it and checking that procedure works, and that the instruction does not leave ambiguity or misunderstandings.

A typical result of doing this FRA fashion? - People at nine standards tried to use the number grids outside their tested use and function by using them as the prime recording mechanism and it failed miserably. Nothing to do with HS legislation. All to do with people meddling in safety without sufficient experience and not taking advice on the matter – so failing to grasp the importance of writing a procedure to use the grids (however short) and then process qualification to determine the limits before stating as good practice. Those grids are fine, provided the context of them is defined, stress tested up to a level of runners, and only used in the tested context. What works as a process at 20 runners a minute, may not work at all at 50.

I have no criticism of the grids. Only the unsafe way they were introduced. (Had we been allowed to do a presentation, or even review the documents before being accepted: That would have been predicted in advance). Safety is about predicting in foresight, not closing stable doors afterwards.. Now see the growing heap of untested documents mounting and now mislabelled as good practice and be worried…. I will wager there was no written review of that grid incident, as there should have been as tasked by what should be our guidelines.

But in the end it is all about the "next" incident.
There will be one, the only question is when. And a lottery of which RO.

What can the RO show to others ,to save himself and his marshalls from a similar verbal mauling as happened at sailbeck inquest? Apparently at Graham Breezes instruction or so he implies.

Under FRA rules , nothing at all: Other than a thicker book for the prosecution to beat the RO around the head with.

The RO can only do what they did at sailbeck, refer to half remembered conversations about what he thinks he asked marshalls to do, but as Sailbeck proved the variation in what they actually did proves that they were not instructed properly or unambiguously which can only happen on paper.

And NOTHING FRA has so far said or done has changed that. And as you will see if you read the sailbeck evidence, you will be made to look bad as marshalls - and had it got to civil or criminal claims, the receiving end of an uncaring QC ripping you to shreds it would be a whole lot worse. It is not where you want to be..

All because FRA committee are not listening as demonstrated by secretary's remarks above. So It has nothing to do with safety legislation. Event planning of anything is clearly a must.

A good plan - in particular a list of written instructions for you and the critical parts of your team is a damn fine document not just to help make sure things happen as you expect them (so less chance of oversights, misremembers, mishears and all the things that happen in practice) but aslo to show in the attempt to show the world that you took reasonable steps and "non negligent" behaviour. So when push comes to shove you can say “we did this” showing a good quality document, and it seemed to work the last few years.

Or you can rely on your memory which is how a gate was still locked barring the path of runners, minutes before the secretarys race, last time I was there. Inconsequential? In that case yes. But PRECISELY the kind of oversight that can and does lead to a tragedy: and an army of "hindsight wisdom" blame lawyers making it sound as though it was obvious.

Notice a locked gate was also EXACTLY a nominated root cause of a coroner stating an RO contributed to a death at a cross country RO because emergency services could not get to the scene of an accident, because of the locked gate!

Is the planning process frightening or a burden? No.
All our secretary had to do , was put "get key for gate" on his own pre race checklist, and an instruction on his own list, to give it to a specific official, and put "open gate" on his officials checklists and a time for him to do so. There is an auditable written plan. If it did not work out you can review and amend it.
It will work even if the marshalls change, so they are not relying on memory.

He does not seem to want such plans because he thinks it is "HS legislation". I will wager there was no written review of his closed gate either. It is actually common sense safety. Or perhaps he misunderstands what was meant by a “plan” because of refusing the presentation by qualified and experienced people!

This is not raking over old history.
Same problem still there. This week. Same people in charge.