Early yesterday evening I swung into St Vincent’s Hospital to find a bloke leaning on crutches and waiting for a cab. He looked around forty years old, tall and thick set with one leg in plaster and a heavily bandaged arm.
After helping him aboard I asked, “So, what happened to you, been on the grog?” “Nah, stone cold sober,” he replied, “but I should've been pissed seeing as what I done.”
That morning he’d been waiting for a country train at Central Station. “I was in the waiting room,” he explained, “and was charging up my lap top and phone. But I didn’t want to leave them to go for a smoke so I decided to stand outside the window and keep an eye on them.” This was his mistake.
Outside the window was a construction area shielded by a row of Portaloo toilets. Between the dunnies and the waiting room windows, a one metre wide space, were a series of boards covering holes in the ground. From memory these holes are normally protected by closely spaced steel bars set into the pavement.
Instead of using the door my passenger slid out the window and onto one of the boards, which gave way. “Next thing I know I’ve fallen seven metres to the street below and busted my foot and my arm. It took the police rescue squad, fire and ambulance services to get me out. And I’ve been at St Vincent’s ever since.”
It seemed unbelievable that such a safety risk was not assessed by the Rail Authority and I suggested he consult a lawyer. Indeed, I told him, he was lucky not to be dead or crippled.
Later in the shift I dropped another passenger at the same place and stopped to see how the accident could have occurred.
The large old-style railway windows, whilst around knee-high inside the waiting room, on the outside were some six foot about the ground. Therefore, to climb out the window the ‘victim’ needed to free fall the last few feet onto the board shielding the hole.
Thus his weight of around 100 kilograms was enough to smash through the cement board. And 100 kilos accelerating at 9.8 metres per second squared makes for an impact speed of...OUCH!
One doesn’t normally expect people to exit a building via the window, though it could be reasonably argued that exceptions be made for Country Link patrons (hey, that's me!).
Regardless, it is surely written into the occupational safety manual that Murphy’s Law applies to every situation and, given there are a lot of bloody idiots around, all scenarios must be anticipated.
I predict he’ll get at least fifty grand, courtesy of the taxpayer, most likely.
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