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the best use of the Incident Forum
BASE has had a rash of fatalities. Maybe it's just the summer season and an increase of activity. I don't know.

Every fatality has a chance to create the friction from those desperate to know the facts, and those wanting to remember the deceased in a positive light.

Read a few threads, and you might see what I mean.

So, here is a thread to have that dialogue. Let's keep the friction here, and NOT in individual threads.
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Re: [wwarped] the best use of the Incident Forum
i think the current forum is just fine.

to a point, we should be able to post anything we feel comfortable posting. be it facts, statistics, advice, flaming, or grieving for a friend, it all belongs here.

each incident affects us differently why place caveats on how we react to them.
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Re: [wwarped] the best use of the Incident Forum
It has been said/suggested before, but this is my vote. Make another Forum for condolences, memories, Fly Frees, BSBDs, etc, etc, etc and keep this for discussing details. I dont ever read dorkzone but I believe they have something like this.

Bottom line is people CAN learm (especially newbies) from incidents if details are known and discussed. I think we'd all be suprised how many newer jumpers read these forums but never post or comment......so people are learning something we just dont know it.
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Re: [dride] the best use of the Incident Forum
people need to stop dying in this sport. that is the only logical solution to this issue. BUT when it does happen to a friend, brother, girlfriend, mentor, father, loved one, etc....it sucks. it fucking sucks. In my preverse mind I try to imagine it as if it were on sports center, not for the glorification, but the play by play. I yearn to, for whatever reason,know the ins and outs of an incident. I never needed to see a video of the fatality I have witnessed. I saw it. it fucking sucks. this sport isnt for kids. we deal in life and death situations, its part of the game. If you can't handle people talking about death after someone you know goes in, how are you going to handle your friend going in IN FRONT OF YOU. It fucking sucks. Keep the forum the way it is. I am not saying we bash on the deceased, but to question thier judgment is OPEN to conversation. If, of course, there isnt hard proof of the incedent, we are only left to the "official" repor and speculation. But as I said, if y'all would stop dying, this would be moot! But if I go in, I want details!
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Re: [nicrussell] the best use of the Incident Forum
People aren't going to stop dying in this sport. More people are jumping, so more people will die. I think the numbers will support my claim. My objections to people "discussing" incidents and accidents on this forum is that most of the information being posted is not of an academic nature and does not further people's ability to jump safely. Eye witnesses and subject matter experts who have inspected the equipment, if possible, can issue a statement, but what good is talking about a bunch of hearsay? In my opinion it is simply gossip. A bunch of my friends have been killed by everything from speeding ledges to massive carbombs. I don't mind talking about it. I just think it's silly and pretentious to act like this website is some sort of investigative body and that someone is a subject matter expert simply because they know how to throw a pilot chute and maybe flare.

Having said that, I don't care what y'all do with this forum.
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Re: [stinkydragon] the best use of the Incident Forum
is this video helping you?

Long time focus on a matter is helping! We have proved statistic about information change human behavior! If well known information can save your friend, in base or combat I am sure you would like to share with others as well.

http://www.metacafe.com/...WHYk/unsafe_driving/
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Re: [434] the best use of the Incident Forum
I'm just going to reiterate what I said before: "I just think it's silly and pretentious to act like this website is some sort of investigative body..."

Share info, AFTER all the pertinent facts have been gathered and organized. This isn't combat, and a bunch of people aren't going to die if you don't push out new enemy TTPs immediately. Almost all fatalities have been because of pilot error, and usually while doing the same things everyone knows you shouldn't do. Do you really need to hear that another person fertilized a Swiss field to know that pulling low adds danger to your jump? If that's what you like to do, is that going to stop you? Did DARE stop anyone from doing drugs?

*for those of you who are unfamiliar with the program, DARE, which stands for Drug Awareness and Resistance Education, was (is?) a program in public schools in the US. Their shirts were hugely popular at raves for a long time.
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Re: [stinkydragon] the best use of the Incident Forum
I guess you know same as me, there is BASE jumpers and there is base jumpers. Some is educating themselves all their carrier, and others jump on the first needle and stays at it and there is no way back!

I am not sure how to explain in other way!
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Re: [wwarped] the best use of the Incident Forum
The "friction" mentioned is the chief reason I got out of BASE fatality record keeping business. And how the BASE community responds to fatalities has changed drastically between the time I started "the list" in 1989 and today.

The main issue, as I see it, is too fine a line being drawn between pointing out the mistake(s) of the deceased and what is perceived as bashing them. So the prevailing attitude is fast becoming, "Johnny is dead, Johnny was a great guy. Now let's pray for Johnny and move on." In a memorial sense that's fine, but it does zero for preventing similar fatalities in the future.

Fatality and accident reporting has a long history in BASE jumping. Carl Boenish himself began reporting on mishaps in the world’s first BASE publication called BASE Magazine which he published until the early 1980s. Those reports were eagerly read and studied as BASE jumpers looked for any edge to keep themselves alive and unhurt in a time when BASE knowledge was basically non-existent and everyone was still operating on the knowledge they gained from skydiving. That sounds ridiculous today but this was a time when if you had fifty BASE jumps you were considered a god.

In the latter part of the 1980s Phil Smith’s BASEline magazine appeared and continued the practice of reporting on mishaps. But it fast became noticeable that something was already beginning to change in the BASE community. I don’t know what to call it, ego maybe, or more so the innocence of early BASE jumping was beginning to wane. Typically an accident would be reported on in one issue and inevitably the following issue would included a rebuttal written by a witness or the jumper himself (if still alive) that always degenerated into a cat fight. And the result was whatever valuable lesson may have been had was lost in the noise. I talked to Phil Smith’s assistant editor at the time and mentioned he tone that stuff down and stick to the facts but his answer was, “Controversy sells, bro.”

In 1989, or so, I published the first complete version of the List in the Fixed Object Journal. At the time there had been only 12 BASE fatalities since the modern version of the sport began in 1978. At face value that doesn’t sound too bad but the number of people actually BASE jumping throughout the world at the time was only a fraction of the number today. The original List wasn’t a list at all. It was only intended as a one time article for the magazine, but as soon as the next fatality occurred it just seemed right to add it to the others and an actual running List was born. I planned originally to publish it just once a year like USPA runs the annual skydiving report in Parachutist Magazine.

But when the FOJ folded in the early 1990s I put the list online for the first time. I also added some ground rules for myself. Instead of hearing about fatalities third or fourth hand and then adding my own speculation I wanted actual eyewitness reports from the field. I would rewrite them to make them readable but without an actual report from someone on the load I’d stick to the who, when, and where and let it go at that. And I learned from experience that eventually the truth would come out. And often the dust had to settle on people’s emotions before that occurred.

Having the List online had one specific advantage as every BASE jumper in the world now had easy access to it and so the reports came in easier and everything was going along fine for a while. Then in 2002, Brian Stout, #63, appeared on the List. I need to stop here and explain how most of looked upon these fatalities at the time. Beginning in the mid-90s we had the altitude that if death wasn’t your friend it became your enemy. That sounds kind of childish now but the underlying meaning of it was, embrace it, know it, and learn from it. Outside of that we had a somewhat cavalier attitude about death and a popular refrain of the day was, “better him or her than me.” Now sure, when it was a close friend, or when we actually witnessed it, it hurt and we grieved but we did it more or less in private. There was no hand wringing about, “OMG, these fatalities need to stop, this is terrible, what’s going on here?” We already knew it would never stop. So prevention became the key and the List became even more relevant.

Then when Brian died at the Perrine and I added him to the List I received a very angry letter from his father. His secondary point was to refute the conclusions of the report with a “my son would never make a mistake like that” defense (when the evidence at the time pointed to the fact that he did.) But his larger point was he felt the BASE community was somehow using his son, and defaming him, by putting him on the List. I’ll admit my first reaction was F this guy. But then as I re-read the letter several more times empathy got the better of me and I put myself in a father’s place. And all of sudden the concept of “who owns a fatality” dawned on me. I mean did this information belong to the BASE community or was it something we actually had no right to use?

That right there was the very beginning of the end of my involvement with the List.

All through the 1990s the sport of BASE was still being conducted mainly in the shadows. But when it started to go public around the year 2000 people started Googling “BASE jumping” and the List started to pop up. That’s when it began that no reporter writing a BASE story (be it a fatality, an event, or whatever) would not include the current number of fatalities from the List. And that’s when I started hearing from people that the List being public was hurting the sport. It first reminded me of when Carl Boenish heard the same thing in 1978. Many said by advocating BASE jumping he was hurting the sport of skydiving.

But I was seriously thinking of taking the List down, but for a different reason. I was beginning to figure almost every mistake possible to make on a BASE jump was already somewhere on the List and sadly it was beginning to get redundant. So I was about to tell everyone to print out the current version and end it. But then something completely new start happening. Wingsuits started going in. And that created a new set of lessons worth publishing. And after that proxi flight mishaps began and soon I realized we would never stop inventing new ways to do ourselves in.

Around then I made a trip to the Perrine. And I met a group of out of town jumpers in the park. We introduced ourselves and I got, “You’re that guy who writes the Fatality List?” And for the rest of the weekend whenever those guys saw me coming they quickly changed direction to avoid me like I was the Grim Reaper or something. It was kind of comical but it was, “a thing.”

The final straw was the death threats. No, not from families, but from certain BASE jumping friends of a recently deceased jumper. “We know where you live and if you put my friend on your f-ing list we’ll kill you and your entire family.” And that was finally it for me. It wasn’t that I felt the need to start sleeping with a gun under my pillow, but more so, and maybe worse, I finally realized the BASE community, as I knew it, was over . . .

NickD Smile
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Re: [NickDG] the best use of the Incident Forum
Nice post Nick. Somethings you can only understand with time and through experience (be it both bad and good).

I think the main issue is a time & place thing - people post condolences and analysis in the same thread within hours of an incident.

Grieving and analysis are both necessary for closure but should be kept separate IMO.

Some restraint in critiquing those no longer among us would be nice but this is the inter-net after all.

I could post a full account of the recent ITW fatality but there is no rush and hopefully someone closer to the deceased will beat me to it.
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Re: [stinkydragon] the best use of the Incident Forum
stinkydragon wrote:
My objections to people "discussing" incidents and accidents on this forum is that most of the information being posted is not of an academic nature and does not further people's ability to jump safely. Eye witnesses and subject matter experts who have inspected the equipment, if possible, can issue a statement, but what good is talking about a bunch of hearsay

hmmm...
I think I have a different perspective on BASE. BASE has no organization setting standards. those setting the standards typically lean heavily on an investigative arm.

with no organizational structure, BASE lacks both.

thus there really aren't any trained specialists to investigate incidents. thus there can NOT be any authoritative, detailed reports. (and "authoritative" reports are regularly questioned. sometimes it is just politics, sometimes not.)

BASE requires each and every jumper to make decisions from only partial information. nothing is guaranteed when a jumper's feet leave the edge. people will insist on trying to make sense of whatever facts are available. it can be viewed as brainstorming.

getting people to think about possible scenarios should also get them re-thinking their jumping activity. just trying to assess an incident might get them to realize something they had overlooked. it might be totally unrelated to the incident, but the incident gave them an opportunity to reflect, reappraise, and learn.

feel free to consider it gossip if you like.
I like seeing people doing what the can to understand and benefit.
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Re: [NickDG] the best use of the Incident Forum
thanks.
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Re: [wwarped] the best use of the Incident Forum
wwarped wrote:
BASE requires each and every jumper to make decisions from only partial information.
There is the problem. Too many would be mentors think that the EGO God shines on them for teaching. But in reality, teaching SHOULD demand that you think back to when you started, and make sure that the young jumpers learn about each and every mistake you made, or heard of making.

This way, for example, you tach new jumpers to wear body armor, cause you, or someone you know was killed because they did NOT wear the armor. That is just one more advantage they can have.

This will not be 100% guarantee, but everything helps.

in case you have not seen this, there is a great Statistics page on the fatalities that should be read and digested.
http://www.blincmagazine.com/.../Fatality_Statistics

It is just very sad that jumper continue to die from simple, avoidably mistakes. Not from pushing the envelope, but ignoring lessons learned.
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Re: [mickknutson] the best use of the Incident Forum
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Re: [wwarped] the best use of the Incident Forum
Contrary to what has been said by some jumpers. Other sports do compose fatality and incident lists.
The American alpine club for instance. Here's there publication.
http://www.americanalpineclub.org/...ericanmountaineering
They have been compiling stats since 1951. Maybe we can learn from them about how to present and compile information?
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Re: [stinkydragon] the best use of the Incident Forum
stinkydragon wrote:
My objections to people "discussing" incidents and accidents on this forum is that most of the information being posted is not of an academic nature and does not further people's ability to jump safely.

I read the list, and alot of this forum for years before deciding to jump. I haven't been jumping all that long, and I'm not the most conservative jumper in the sport, but I am certainly way more conservative then I would have been had I not read and re-read the reports and discussions on this forum. Information that wasn't of an academic nature still heavily effected me, and made me think emotionally about what is involved in BASE, which in turn affected my choices of which jumps/ objects I was happy to do. I do realise it's not my right to know what happened, I'm just saying that I feel I have definately learnt from alot of what I've read and maybe the biggest lessons weren't even the technical ones.

Just sayin.
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Re: [434] the best use of the Incident Forum
Wow. I just re-read this post after someone posted recently on this thread.

“Some is educating themselves all their carrier, and others jump on the first needle and stays at it and there is no way back!” Really? So someone is either on your side or a figurative intravenous drug addict?

“I guess you know same as me.” Nope. I have no idea what you mean. I never stated, implied, or insinuated that I was against learning or the progression of safety in parachuting. What I object to are individuals who feel they are entitled to hasty information about an accident so they may contribute to the online rumor mill dung pile that accounts for 90% of the posts on here. Despite what was said by Warrped, there are subject matter experts in the areas of equipment malfunction and failure. If I have to tell you who these people are you shouldn’t have ever made it past skydiving. My point is that people should chill the eff out a minute when there is a serious incident or accident and wait for correct info to come out. The only thing you will gain by obtaining information early is a piece of trivia to shock and impress people with – a rumor.

“I am not sure how to explain in other way!”

You should try.
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Re: [tgolsby] the best use of the Incident Forum
Absolutely, and I have looked at the list many times. It is a useful tool and it’s humbling, especially considering a large number of the people on there had a pretty good idea what they were doing. My point is, unless it’s some kind of unforeseen technical problem in common use, it doesn’t matter if people find out about it 24 hours after the incident or 24 days.
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Re: [mfnren] the best use of the Incident Forum
Maybe that’s because unlike face humpers, climbers must pass a selection process of skill, physical strength and stamina, and FORTHOUGHT. How much thought went into Harding’s party’s first ascent of the Captain? How much goes into another round at the PMB or the GC tower? Walk up, jump off…usually everything works out. You’re only really tested every now and then. Climbers have their stuff together. That goes for PG pilots too. They’re organized and responsible for their actions. How many things have face humpers effed up for themselves? Pretty much everything. Whoo hoo. Par-tea. Put another sticker on that...
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Re: [stinkydragon] the best use of the Incident Forum
Unfortunately, I very much agree with you...

I posted the link in hopes that it might disperse into the BASE population and maybe someone will learn something.

Pretty hopeless overall, at least looking at the drivel commonly found here.
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Re: [stinkydragon] the best use of the Incident Forum
stinkydragon wrote:
Despite what was said by Warrped, there are subject matter experts in the areas of equipment malfunction and failure.

huh?

subject matter experts and authoritative reports are NOT the same thing. if the experts do not get a chance to visit the site, see the gear, etc., they may miss incredibly valuable evidence. thus experts may just provide a more educated version of your "rumors."

in the US, the NTSB investigates aviation accidents. the FAA then acts on the results (sometimes in the cumulative sense). the NTSB folks are trained investigators. BUT an FAA official recently told me not to trust all their reports pertaining to General Aviation. they may do all inquiry via the phone and come to wrong conclusions.

if you can't trust trained investigators, who have access to subject matter experts, why put so much faith in other subject matter experts? why be so reluctant to think for yourself? do you value other people's judgment more than your own? are you confident experts are beyond mistakes?
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Re: [mfnren] the best use of the Incident Forum
mfnren wrote:
Contrary to what has been said by some jumpers. Other sports do compose fatality and incident lists.
The American alpine club for instance. Here's there publication.
http://www.americanalpineclub.org/...ericanmountaineering
They have been compiling stats since 1951. Maybe we can learn from them about how to present and compile information?

since there is no American base club, it might be a poor comparison.

feel free to step up and attempt to organize one!
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Re: [wwarped] the best use of the Incident Forum
Every accident involving a fatality always has a chain of events leading up to the demise of the individual. Some fatalities involve circumstanses that relate directly to the character or personality of the person or persons involved. Often times these facts are known before the actual details of the fatility become available. An example being someone who always has a need to push the envelope, or the guy who is having great sex with the clueless chick with no BASE experience who he has decided to show the ropes to. These details are often posted before the details of the actual accident, & are often taken as offensive by people involved or friends of the deceased. I think if people feel compelled to argue these points they should choose to do so in a personal message. There are few fatalities where people did everything right, & stupid mistakes or overzealous attitudes are often links in the chain leading up to an accident & need to be posted...
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Re: [wwarped] the best use of the Incident Forum
Ummm, it wasn't a comparison.
It was an example of how another similar group reports incidents. I thought we, as a group might be able to learn something from them and apply it here...