March 1st, 2011
Less than 5% of police officers in England and Wales carry guns. Hardly any guns are ever shot, and cases of fatal shootings by police are infinitely fewer. There are only 7,000 firearms officers in the UK out of a force of 140,000. Police officers with guns are rarely seen.To the Americans, or perhaps the French, having a nation policed with men and woman armed with only a baton may seem incredulous.
Which make the police shooting in Chamonix last week seem all the more bizarre. Three men from Lyon were disturbed whilst in the process of robbing a chalet in Chamonix. They fled the scene and the owner’s daughter called the police.
The robbers ignored police instructions to stop and forced their way through a police barricade near the golf course in Les Tines. The police opened fire and shot two bullets into the driver’s side of the vehicle.
Photo courtesy of the Dauphine Libre
All very exciting, I’m sure. But was it really reasonable force by the police? There is only one road that runs out of the valley to Switzerland, and that has a boarder crossing. Surely it couldn’t have been too difficult to follow the vehicle, police helicopters had been deployed, until the car was either stopped at the border or another road block could be set up.
In the UK the police were found not without fault in the shooting of an armed but deranged lawyer, but he was armed. And looking at the bullet holes in the vehicle in Chamonix it certainly doesn’t look like the police were firing warning shots.
So if you see a road block in Chamonix the best advice is to slow down and stop.
Posted in Chamonix | Comments Off
February 25th, 2011
Should you or should you not wear a ski helmet when skiing?
Dr Gerhard Ruedl from the Department of Sport Science at the University of Innsbruck says that there is evidence that ski helmets protect against head injury, and that one way to increase the use of helmets would be to make them included with ski hire. And, following some highly publicised deaths the issue has got a lot of press recently.
A recent study concluded that general head injury was reduced by 35% when helmets were worn, and this number increased to 59% for children under the age of 13.
Image via Wikipedia
But would wearing helmets actually make skiing safer? The issue needs to be looked a from the view point of how we, humans, deal with risk. Their are certain cases where changes are made, ostensibly, to make people safer, which in fact don’t.
With the advent of ABS braking – an innovation that greatly improves a cars breaking ability – you would expect to find that you would have safer drievrs. This wasn’t the case. Supplying drivers with ABS actually made them worse drivers: breaking harder, driving faster, tailgating other cars more often. So the introduction of ABS didn’t reduce the rate of accidents. So what happened? Drivers were consuming the extra risk reduction, they could now drive faster and more dangerously for the same risk as before. This type of risk homeostasis doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen often enugh that it should be consideerd.
So where does this fit in with ski helmets? Ski helmets may provide a fasle sense of security, resulting in faster skiing and riskier behaviour which in itself could lead to more accidents.
Overall the authors believed that the evidence points to helmets having a protective effect and that we should increase the use of helmets. But then that’s what they thought about ABS. Food for thought…
Posted in Skiing | Comments Off
February 21st, 2011
You’ve just got back from your ski holiday. You’ve got another year to wait until your next trip. Depression begins to set in.
The time for worry has past. With an Alpinesofa you can have the thrill and joy of skiing whilst sitting at home watching Eastenders.
What are you wating for?
Posted in Random Musings, Skiing | Comments Off
February 18th, 2011
The Farmhouse has recently been featured in Images Magazine. Probably not a title too widely read outside of the Alps. It’s about Alpine interior design and is in Italian and French, so a fairly niche market about aline accommodation.
Nevertheless The Farmhouse did make it.
Posted in Chalet 1802, Chamonix | Comments Off
February 12th, 2011
If only someone had sat us down before we started Chalet 1802 and got us to write a business plan – how different things might be…
Certainly launching a top end chalet in the midst of a recession was an interesting move, and the vagaries of the pound against the euro certainly adds a frisson of excitement. However, the worst aspect of the ski industry has to be being held hostage to the weather.
30 days without snow! It certainly feels like some kind of a record. Not one little cloud, not a drop of rain. Nothing. Nadda. Absolute zilch.
There has been no real snowfall since the 11th of January and temperatures of nearly 20 degrees celsius. The French weather service is calling it one of the worst seasons in 40 years with snow depths at only 25% of their normal level. And if temperatures stay as warm as they have been then the snow canons can’t be used – they require the temperature to be below -4.
The fantastic early season snowfall seems like a distant memory with many lower lying resorts either closing or running at reduced capacity. However, this has helped the higher resorts, such as Chamonix, which has been holding up remarkably well and has seen turnover increase by 15% as people head higher.
There’s a snow dance being held in Chamonix this Friday so hopefully things will improve.
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