John Forrest Tomlinson said:Quoted message said:I sometimes wonder whether the increasing death toll on the ski slopes
is just a matter of far more people skiing
Perhaps I missed the information, but is there really an increasing
death toll skiing? And is the rate of death per hour skied increasing?
Dear John,
Good point--I'm not sure.
As I wander toward senility, the good old days become ever rosier.
But I don't remember people crashing into trees and being killed on
Colorado ski slopes in the 1960s and 1970s. Broken legs and ankles
were news back then.
I think that with better bindings, the leg injury rates dropped, but I
could be wrong about that.
My impression that skiers crashing into trees and killing themselves
is a recent phenomenon might be only an illusion. If the rate of such
accidents is say only 1 per 10 million skier-days, there would
probably be no accidents to notice back in a ten-year period in the
early days of Colorado skiing when there were only 500,000 skier-days
per year.
Thirty years later, with far more resorts, snow-making, and people
wealthy enough to spend time sliding down mountains, the same 1 fatal
tree-hit per 10 million skier-days might yield half a dozen deaths per
year.
So far, I can't find any figures going back to the 1960s and 1970s.
This pdf is interesting. The long-winded legal point seems to be that
one skier was going so fast and so recklessly that he was airborne
when his skis hit another skier in the head and killed him, but the
court didn't think that this reckless:
"The decision below acknowledged that the Defendant-Respondent
(“Hall”) was skiing recklessly, too fast for conditions, on an a slope
open to the public, and that Hall’s speed was so great as to inflict
on the victim (“Cobb”) fatal injuries, as if Cobb had suffered a high
speed car accident. The record below contained testimony from which a
jury could conclude that Hall was skiing recklessly, at a high speed,
sitting back, directly down the fall line, bouncing off of moguls,
becoming airborne, and colliding into Cobb, probably with Hall’s skis
striking Cobb in the side of the head, killing him."
The decison:
"The Court does not find that a person of ordinary prudence and
caution would infer, in the absence of other evidence and under the
circumstances of this case, a substantial risk of death in the event
of collision, from the fact that Defendant was skiing too fast for
conditions and out of control. (Order Affirming County Court Judgment,
1/13/99)
http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/nathanhall/amicusskibrief.pdf
If you don't like the way I ski, don't let my skis hit you in the
head!
The ski industry was protesting that not holding the killer
responsible was bad for skiing.
I'll keep looking, but so far I can't even find a reference to a
Colorado skier killing himself by hitting a tree in the 1960s and
1970s. Again, there may just not have been enough skiers for this to
happen.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
