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