Basejumper.com - archive

The wife is down stairs watching some Mexican soup operas so I figured it was a good time to express some of my recent thoughts regarding the cause of fatalities. For the purpose of clarity I am going to refer to 1st order cause, 2nd order cause and 3rd and so on. An example of a 1st order cause would be jumper died of blunt trauma (probably the main first order cause in this sport). Then comes the 2nd order cause i.e. cliff strike due to 180, cliff strike during freefall, no pull...etc. 3rd order strike during free fall due to improper exit...4th order... improper exit due to tripping or low experience. You get the point. At some point you cut the line; otherwise you get to the beginning of the universe as being the cause of death; so we cut the line before then. Or the first cause could be the jumper free will (which by definition has no cause). We could go back and forth between precision and where to cut the line and what exactly constitute a 1st vs 2nd order cause. But generally the idea provides a good tool that is helpful when analyzing fatalities. When a fatality occurs the BASE community want to understand what went wrong. The idea is to learn from the mistake that cost a life and develop a method to mitigate the risk of that happening again in the future. But there is a trap in all of this. One tends to focus on the 2nd or 3rd order of the cause. Example, miss rigged static line, jumped in marginal wind conditions...etc. And sometimes there is a thinking that goes something like this "how could he/she be so stupid to do that? I sure would not do that". This is the trap. There is a more profound and scary truth behind a lot of the deaths that we rather not confront; that is: it can happen to me and to you. This honest thinking, I believe, leads to higher order causes that are not typically part of discussions; partly to avoid the truth that it can happen to anybody and also because higher order causes are harder to grasp. But an understanding of these would address a lot of this fatalities at an earlier stage in the cycle and would mitigate that they lead up to the 1st order cause. The idea of 1st and 2nd order causes in regards to fatality analysis is not new and is something that the cave diving community uses (where I first read it and where I am borrowing it from). I know, "BASE is dangerous and so forth..." but I am still confident that we can do better and through honest discussions in the community promote this kind of discussion to better understand higher order causes (what cause him/her to act "stupid" and prevented him/her from going "duh") and avoid preventable deaths. Anyway...I am gonna head downstairs...the wife is calling and I gotta go to sleep.

Keep it fun...but please be safe.

Ego

The ego is the number one cause of death in BASE jumping. It pushes people to accept higher risks before they are fully prepared to do so. The ego tells the new jumper that they don't really need to learn skydiving, the ego tells the new jumper to go for a technical jump because everyone else has done it, the ego craves attention so it lures the jumper to push harder for recognition from peers and their youtube fans often times getting in way over their head. The ego is what pushes jumpers to do new things but it also creates situations that put us in a more dangerous environment that can turn fatal quickly.

If jumpers can successfully control their ego then I believe deaths would go down. I think men are more susceptible to giving in to the ego than women are. Women are not as affected overall by the ego and thus will not push as hard as men and tend to fare better in the fatality statistics, especially in the wingsuit realm.