Idiot

As someone who used to do risk assessment and management for a living and taught the process to others, I find this cack bordering on the idiotic.

You are writing the risk assessment for a new petrol station. You want to dig a big hole in the ground in the middle of town, put in some tanks and fill them up with an enormous amount of highly flammable fuel.

Then you’re proposing to attach a really powerful pump and invite in random members of the public.

They’ll arrive in vehicles with hot engines. You’ll hand them the really powerful pump that sprays the highly flammable liquid.

Without any supervision they’ll use it to transfer large quantities of the highly flammable liquid into their hot vehicle, they’ll pay you and drive off.

Are you OK to sign off on that? Do you think Health and Safety will give it the green light?

My point is that fuelling cars with petrol and diesel is dangerous, which is why we do it at specially-designed centralised refuelling points.

This sums up perfectly the modern attitude to health and safety. If we had this moronic attitude in the past, nothing would have been achieved. No motorised vehicles, no powered flight and so on. What this moron fails to appreciate is that filling up with fuel is relatively low risk – millions of people do it every day across the globe and how many conflagrations are there? Exactly. Failing to sign off on this would merely demonstrate just how timid and risk averse we have become as a society. Those who went before and just got on and did it, got it right. Done properly the risk is minimal and the evidence supports this – including filling up with a Jerry can away from a designated fuelling point.

Idiot.

15 Comments

  1. Ooh! we can’t get on that ship and explore the world, it is too dangerous.
    Only by staying at home under the bed covers will be safe.

  2. “My point is that fuelling cars with petrol and diesel is dangerous,…”

    Self evidently it isn’t. I’ve done it every week for the last 45 years and never witnessed a single mishap of any kind.

    “…which is why we do it at specially-designed centralised refuelling points.”

    Isn’t that what you just described in your opening paragraph, while strongly implying that it was a bad idea?

    • Bear in mind, we can buy petrol or diesel in containers and fill the vehicle away from the petrol station and it’s carried out perfectly safely all over the world. Real world experience tells us that the article writer is objectively wrong.

  3. I suspect the general risk aversion in modern culture is now to two main causes, first the growth in litigation after accidents (thanks USA!), and second the decline in religious belief- specifically an afterlife. If you think this life is all there is, you’ll be a lot more careful about ending it.

  4. Fire? You think deliberately creating fire is a good idea? In a cave? Have you seen what lightning does to trees?

  5. As an addendum to all of this, the HSE tends to get frustrated at being blamed for this kind of risk averse nonsense. I don’t know if they still do, but they used to produce a calendar with H&S myths to debunk the claims that the kind of idiotic nonsense being spouted in the BBC article is nothing to do with them. Risk isn’t something we can eliminate – we assess it and manage it.

    • The HSE is innocent of most of the accusations, what drives the hysterically risk-averse culture is insurance companies feeling the effect of no-win-no-fee lawyers making mountains out of molehills, so they make sure every possible box is ticked up-front by enforcing over-caution.
      The real answer to stopping all this nonsense is to stop the no-win-no-fee system – but that ain’t going to happen anytime soon because Parliament is stuffed with lawyers who will not become turkeys voting for an early Christmas.

  6. This is, of course, nothing to do with the safety or otherwise of filling up with petrol. This moron is one of the ‘electric cars are wonderful, lets force everyone to buy one’ mob, so lets make up crap about how dangerous a filling station (in use for over a century now) is for the bovine public. Make enough of the sheep fearful by elf n savedee and you can forget any local stations, what use your pristine petrol car or bike if the only fuel source is fifty miles away on an industrial estate and you need a special raining course to use it?

    • And note that this idiot isn’t concerned about the health and safety of the child labour mining the raw materials necessary for the batteries for his wonderful “green” electric vehicles.

  7. Hanover had a really bad electric bus fire.
    Wattsupwiththat reported it yesterday. Nobody else has mentioned it.
    Wonder why?

  8. Also, liquid petrol is not flammable — the vapour is (very broadly: it’s chemically more complex than that). Which is why we store and pump it under pressure, to minimise the vapour.

    DK

    • You remind me here of a friend some decades ago who, having this very discussion, decided to prove that liquid petrol would not ignite. He poured some onto the tarmac and place a lighted match into the liquid. It failed to occur to him that it was vaporising as he poured it out. As you can imagine, much laughter ensued.

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