When there are overhangs of snow, ice or both hanging off roofs and gutters, we put out warning poles, which are poles or planks with bright red warning tape on, leaning diagonally up against the wall. So people will walk around the dangerous area. These are “immediate danger” markings, meant to be there until the property owner can deal with the hazard.
The father of this family was photographing their children playing inside the danger area, right underneath a second-floor overhang of snow on top of thick ice and metre-long icicles!
I explained to him that those sticks were there to keep people out of a dangerous area and he shouldn’t let his children play there. He seemed to get it, he just went “yes” and “sorry” with a German accent, but pretty good pronunciation, so I thought he understood what I was saying. I walked on and about fifty meters down the street I looked over my shoulder. And they were at it again! He saw me looking and pulled the kids back, but it was pretty obvious that he had only processed “This makes local man upset” rather than “This involves a significant risk of my children being crushed to death”
Nine times out of ten some tourist gets hurt or killed, its a German. I have no idea why, they just seem to have much less understanding that nature will kill you.
People don’t understand dangers they aren’t accustomed to. Wouldn’t he have assumed : “worst case scenario, some snow fall on my kids and they’ll be a bit wet”?
That is certainly at odds with my experience of Germans and rules. It is a stereotype but not without a crumb of truth. In the UK, traffic crossings and lights are purely advisory, even in London. I had to have the concept of “jaywalking” explained to me by an American as it made no sense.
In Germany you will be berated for not waiting for green even on an empty street.
However, the flip side of that is that kids in general are allowed much more freedom to roam and do dangerous things. I confess I don’t know how the two mindsets coexist but they do.
Seriously, people just don’t get dangers that don’t seem intuitive to them because they’ve never seen or experienced the danger themselves, e.g. tourists in national parks feeding wild elk or moose not realizing how aggressive they can be; people swimming or boating near spillways or intakes, unfamiliar with the kind of suction they can develop; pretty much anyone working with electricity who has never been trained on the hazards. Even trained and professional first responders can lose sight of the big picture hazards and do things that are manifestly unsafe, like run toward an unconscious person without assessing the scene to see if their may be toxic or asphyxiating gas.
I’ve mentioned to a few people that when sent to “country camp” (i.e. hard labor on an unregulated family farm) for a couple of summers as a child one of my tasks was to “beat down” grain in co-op concrete silos during evacuation (removal) with a broomstick in one hand and holding onto a clothesline lead in the other. People invariably compare it to the fun of playing in a ballpit or a sandbox, until I point out that standing on dozens of feet of corn or soya is basically like floating on quicksand, and during evacuation rotted volumes of grain a breeched, releasing both asphyxiating methane gas (fortunately usually in small volumes) and voids that can suck you down far enough to literally bury you, as well as releasing fine dust that is both a respiratory and flammable hazard. It’s basically the most hazardous environment you can work in short of a coal mine or burning building and to this day agricultural co-ops (which are largely exonerated from child labor laws and OSHA safety regulations) still put adolescent children in the silo during evacuation operations, which is a massive violation in the European Union. (The Europeans also require silos to be lined with food grade aluminum or stainless steel sheathing, essentially eliminating this sticking problem for the cost of a few thousand dollars per silo.)
If you never seen a hazard, you don’t know better just as a small child doesn’t understand that you shouldn’t touch hot things until they get burned a couple of times.
Speaking as an American, we aren’t all that great with such things either (in general).
Perhaps a better approach would have been to sidle up to the guy, point up at the snowy roof to draw his attention to it and casually remark “hey how heavy do you think that is? Like if it fell on someone, would it crush them?” Shrug and walk away whistling. I bet that would force the little hamster wheel in his head to get rolling while not being so confrontational.
Speaking as a Spaniard, if you did that to me I’d be left wondering what got the crazy woman. Our traditional approach would be more likely to involve grabbing the kids out of the way while describing the multitude of ancestral failings the supposed parent evidently demonstrates, perhaps accompanied by our hopes that the children will be adopted and therefore have a chance at better genetics.
There are some reasonable explanations for this sort of behavior. Perhaps, for instance, the kids have sizeable insurance policies and are generally unpleasant.
I really think that no matter where a tourist comes from, when they get to their vacation destination they just leave their brains in the hotel. I really have to assume that when they are home they know how to drive and don’t do things like suddenly swerve across three lanes of traffic because they are missing their exit, or stand in the middle of the street to take a picture, or push into lines because their kid wants X, etc etc. Tourist season here is dangerous both to the tourists and to the residents, because so many of them don’t seem to have any sense.
I am from Northern Norway. We’re having a bit of a tourist boom due to local astrophysics.
And its not so much that they did not realize the danger because they are unaccustomed to it… it is that they traveled to a hostile environment 300 kilometers above the Arctic Circle, proceeded to ignore local warning signs, and then dismissed local people warning that this is hideously dangerous for their children.
It is the sum total of it that I find pit-worthy. Foreign, quite hostile environment, ignore warning signs, ignore the concern of locals, let the kids play. I thought evolution would have fixed that by now.
I mean, if I went to the Australian outback for some reason, I don’t know whats lethal in the environment (everything? It is Australia) but I wouldn’t ignore warning signs or the advice of people living there.
And it is disproportionately Germans, who seem to possess an entirely unwarranted assumption of safety. I don’t know why. Maybe the place just looks civilized, maybe they expect official warning signs at every danger, maybe Germany is just so urbanized that they have forgotten that Mother Nature has psychotic episodes and should not be left alone with her children.
This does happen.
Around 10 years ago I took care of a young girl, 18 YO or so, who was permanently paralyzed below the waist after having her back broken from falling snow and ice.
It happened at a local ski area that has truly huge amounts of build up. Some areas are sort of marked as dangerous but not all.
There’s a similar book about deaths in the Grand Canyon. Including but not limited to live action re-creations* of walking backward with a camera to your face to get a better shot and falling off the edge.
*I’ve only ever seen that in Looney Tunes cartoons.
It seems to me whenever I’ve been somewhere you have to show some care and respect of the surrounding nature (the North sea coast here in Denmark, mountains in Norway, lakes in Sweden), the locals will tell us a few simples rules/tips. To emphasize the gravity of the situation they will then tell a sad story of some foolish tourists who did not heed these rules in such and such way, and died horribly. And the tourists in this story will inevitably be germans!