My belief carries on despite the fact that I keep making mistakes and having accidents: bumping a car in front of me at a roundabout, crushing a bumper against a forecourt wall. Looking forward, I hope that I will not make mistakes, but I have no reason to conclude that
I will never crash again.
In other words, I have had training, and lots of experience of good practice and bad. I feel
that I am qualified to judge the performance of other drivers, and I do. Frequently.
I suspect that the same thing happens in the crane community when there is an accident. Expertise yields confidence. So that those people looking at the remarkable footage of the tower crane collapse in Croydon, London (see www.sitbonzo.com/crane/) will draw their own conclusions about what was going on. Maybe they are right, and maybe not.
My point is that we cannot break out of our own beliefs when we judge things that happen.
But there are ways of trying to do so. There are standardised ways of finding out the answers to questions you think you know, from people you have never met.
This is the purpose of our survey on crane accidents this month. Please fill it out.
Your data will help us develop a report, and you will have helped some crane guy who you have never met. If my comments have managed to convince him to fill it out as well, then you’ll benefit too. I’ll make you a deal: if you fill it out, next time, you can drive.
