Using Close Call Assessments to Make Climbing SAFER

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It’s our last video of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Month Series. But don’t worry; we’ll be adding to the series every May.

If you saw last week’s video, we were talking about how I think about risk - based on being brought up in the household of a nuclear engineer - given the preponderance of low accident incident rates but sometimes extremely high consequences. In the history of nuclear power plants across the world, there have been three meltdowns: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. I don’t bring this up to argue nuclear power’s safety. Meltdowns are, indeed, very high consequence. My point is that these are rare events. Since, as according to our last video, I think of risk as the result of probability multiplied by consequence, we could still come to the conclusion that nuclear power plants are very risky. What we can’t argue is that the probability of meltdown is high. How many moments of operation have existed to give way to these three incidents?

What I want to underscore is the analogy to climbing. Just in the United States, it is estimated that there are between 6 to 11 million climbers (depending upon the estimate you look up). Even if we assume that every climber climbed only once - a decidedly and ridiculously conservative assumption - that is an awful lot of climbs to result in the roughly 200 reported climbing accidents that happen in the US every year. Even if we assume that there are ten-times the number of accidents as get reported, that would still be about .02% of climbs result in accidents (still holding to our ridiculous assumption that every US climber only climbed once).

Here, the point is that a very small fraction of a percent of climbs result in accidents.

Again, like with reactor meltdowns, I won’t argue that the consequences of climbing accidents don’t make the risks relatively high (still assuming probabilities multiplied by consequences). But we have a parallel realty: low probability events that are so consequential we are compelled to spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid these negative events.

It’s the low-probability, mathematical reality combined with our understandable self-preservation compulsion, that makes analyzing our close calls so important. In the video, I make a passing comment about needing to make the sample size of our assessments bigger. Well, obviously, we don’t want more accidents; so, we need to consider a broader range of incidents in order to get the number of learning opportunities to be greater. Close calls winder the scope of our analysis and inquiry so that we have a larger sample of cases.

This, of course, leads to the grey area of defining a close call. This seems pretty subjective; what I might feel was an event that was “close” to becoming an accident might be very different than what you think. And while a philosophical exercise in creating a definition might be fun (if you are an odd person, like myself), we don’t need to look too far past the practical solution: ask. Ask our climbing teammates. Did you experience something on the climb that you would characterize as a “close call”? That’s probably enough to get us started.

From there, you can follow the video to get an example of how we might perform our close call assessment and thus create more opportunities for learning and self-improvement.