-TV news airs story about a triple balcony collapse at one of U. Berkeley’s campus apartment properties. Collapse was due to too many people on the top balcony during a party, combined with ancient, rotting wood and a lack of inspection/attention by the owner/college for an undetermined amount of time. No one died, but many people were injured.-
Dad: Well if there were too many people on the damn balcony of course it fell.
Me: Dad that’s not the point. No one’s inspected it for years. The damage was done with or without the people out there. Those things could have come down next week with no human interference.
Dad: But it’s common sense to not go out when it’s crowded.
Me: But if someone had been tending it in the first place, the problem never would have occurred.
Dad: -grunts-
A lot of basic old white republican complaints- too many people mooching on food stamps, we’re losing our jobs overseas, immigration- could easily have been solved if policies defending and raising minimum wage, taxing and controlling corporations, and moving organically to change our immigration laws were kept in place.
But they weren’t.
My father- and many like him- will stick their fingers in the dam.
Many people like myself (but not all) will point out that if we’d been allowed to fix the dam in the first place, none of this would have happened.
his argument is fallacious anyway. it’s not “common sense” to not go out on an already-crowded balcony. Nobody builds balconies with posted weight limits. A reasonable expectation for a balcony is that it will not collapse even if people are packed onto it like sardines. anything less is an UNSAFE BALCONY THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIXED.
old republicans will blame you when the system that helped them fails you, and call it common sense.
The hierarchy of controls–the system by which OSHA and the like advise the mitigation of exposure to occupational hazards–goes as follows, ranging from most effective to least at preventing injury:
- Elimination: remove the hazard.
- Substitution: replace the hazard with something less dangerous.
- Engineering Controls: isolate people from the hazard.
- Administrative Controls: change the way people work.
- Personal Protective Equipment: blunt the harm of contact.
Inspecting the balcony and keeping it in good repair is part “remove the hazard” and part “replace the hazard;” it only falls short of removing the balcony entirely, which is not ideal because people enjoy having balconies and the risk of a (well-maintained) balcony falling is negligible compared to the enjoyment people get out of them.
Changing how people work, meanwhile, is way down near the bottom, and this is much harder to do in a social situation than a workplace one, where you can generally tell people what to do and expect that they do it. Admonishing everyone to stay off crowded balconies, to calculate the risk that this amount of people will cause it to collapse when they have no information about the structural limits of the balcony or its state of repair, is not going to be well received by the community of drunken revelers that form the crowd on the balcony.
It makes much more sense to protect people by shaping the situation as best one can without destroying its benefits (elimination of the hazard, while at the top of the list, is the solution most often discarded as impractical or unworkable–a workplace might need spinning blades, or dangerous chemicals, or contact with potentially-violent individuals, to perform its function, and risk is both an unavoidable part of many pleasant activities and a necessity in learning to recognize and evaluate danger).
Declining to work at replacing hazards (replace minimum wage with living wage, for example, or replace rotted timbers in a balcony with sound ones) and expecting people to just change their behavior with a warning or three, is not good risk management.