Being a safety guy, I always feel a bit uneasy walking past rides at local fairs and fetes.
I catch myself eating my fairy floss and drifting into thoughts about maintenance regimes, engineering checks, failsafe mechanisms, regulations, and risk assessments.
Anyway, I suspect it’s the same with most other safety professionals. Some of these rides just don’t give off the feeling of the highest standard of safety. Then a video like this lands in my inbox and I crawl under my desk and suck my thumb.
I went looking for some data on the scale of death and serious injury at fairs and fetes in Australia. Not easy to find clean numbers, but one useful reference from Work Health and Safety Queensland indicates 111 serious amusement ride incidents between 2001 and 2016 across all of Australia.
Compare that with road trauma over the same period. Somewhere in the order of 465,000 people killed or seriously injured across Australia.
Wildly different exposure levels, of course. But interesting to think about. And we think about vehicles, same pondering applies – maintenance regimes, engineering checks, failsafe mechanisms, regulations, and risk assessments.
One might even argue that amusement rides receive more scrutiny than some of the vehicles operating on our road network.
Some older work from MUARC (Rechnitzer, Haworth and Kowadlo) suggests vehicle defects contribute to around 6 to 8 percent of crashes, and potentially more.
More recent work from the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator reinforces what most of us already suspect. Good maintenance is not just good practice. It directly improves road safety.
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Being a safety guy, I always feel a bit uneasy walking past rides at local fairs and fetes.
I catch myself eating my fairy floss and drifting into thoughts about maintenance regimes, engineering checks, failsafe mechanisms, regulations, and risk assessments.
Anyway, I suspect it’s the same with most other safety professionals. Some of these rides just don’t give off the feeling of the highest standard of safety. Then a video like this lands in my inbox and I crawl under my desk and suck my thumb.
I went looking for some data on the scale of death and serious injury at fairs and fetes in Australia. Not easy to find clean numbers, but one useful reference from Work Health and Safety Queensland indicates 111 serious amusement ride incidents between 2001 and 2016 across all of Australia.
Compare that with road trauma over the same period. Somewhere in the order of 465,000 people killed or seriously injured across Australia.
Wildly different exposure levels, of course. But interesting to think about. And we think about vehicles, same pondering applies – maintenance regimes, engineering checks, failsafe mechanisms, regulations, and risk assessments.
One might even argue that amusement rides receive more scrutiny than some of the vehicles operating on our road network.
Some older work from MUARC (Rechnitzer, Haworth and Kowadlo) suggests vehicle defects contribute to around 6 to 8 percent of crashes, and potentially more.
More recent work from the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator reinforces what most of us already suspect. Good maintenance is not just good practice. It directly improves road safety.
————-