Thursday, Oct 30, 2008 at 01:33
Here's a point - about the
signage or lack thereof.
First the background "incident" that relates.
[quote]
Two children drown in WA accident
The bodies of two children have been retrieved from a four-wheel drive vehicle which was swept down a Western Australian river last night.
Eight-year-old Ashleigh Fiona Mungur and seven-year-old Jack Craig Anstey drowned, unable to escape from the vehicle as it was carried down the
Blackwood River by strong currents, about 15 kilometres south-west of
Nannup.
The girl's mother and the boy's father - a de facto couple from
Perth - were trying to cross the river at Jalbarragup to get to a relative's house nearby.
Police say they told them it took just seconds for their vehicle to fill with
water and they were unable to free the children despite their desperate efforts.
The bodies of the two children have been taken to
Perth for post mortem examination [/quote]
The thread above is essentially about a guy & child who knowingly drives across a flooded bridge when theres a
sign from the local govt roads authorty saying NOT TO.
OK - I happen to agree that shows a certain lack of respect for authority, rules and the life of his son.
What about when the boots on the other foot tho??????
What about - when the local authority FAIL to put any
signage up and close the boom gates when the rivers in full flood and two innocent kids drown as a result of an avoidable accident.
The flood washed away the depth indicator which WOULD have shown any driver that the very deceptive crossing was impassable.
It had been so missing for more than 12 nonths and the responsible local govt authority never replaced it.
Had the father tried to walk the crossing HE would have known - but he didn't and his decision not to later proved fatal to both children (as a result of child proof safety locks - even the parents couldn't get their kids out as the car was flooding).
Why do i say the Local Govt Authority and Various Govts of the day were culpable?
Becauseof budget cuts and lack of funding to maintain existing assets is why. There is a brideg right next door to the crossing, and up to a few short years before the tragedy it had spanned the river there for 100 or more years - I had driven over it in the 5 years before the tragedy...BUT successive govts FAILED to provide the funds needed to maintain a perfectly good bridge that had served the entire community
well for more than a hundred years - not a marginal
seat therefore - no funds!
As a result when it fell into disrepair - the roads board engineers condemned the bridge. Then the shire were forced to build the concrete summer crossing, adjacent to the old bridge as a stop gap interim measure to service the new subdivison they approved without requiring the developer (a shire councillor) to provide any roading or access funding (Bridge repairs $) as part of his approvals.
So we go backwards from a safe bridge to a summer use only concrete crossing with boom gates for winter (which were left open) and
signage indicating depth that wasn't maintained and all contributed to the accidental deaths.
I get cranky about this coz it is all one way.
I attended the accident described above - and at the end of the day despite culpability by the local authority AND the various Govts of the day - no one gets held accountable by the coroner, in fact they ONLY went after the "dad" for driving into the deep
water.
Yes he made a fatal mistake - BUT there were a LOT of extenuating/mitigating circumstances in the dads defense that were equally attributable to the govts of the day and their pork barrel based budget funding cuts - bad decisions by the shire & a failure to maintain the existing bridge in the first place.
The thing is - when the govt or shire screw up and someone dies - NO ONE is held ACCOUNTABLE.
Yet - we want to hang, draw and quarter the dad above who drove across a bridge coz there was a
sign saying don't do it erected by the local authority?
Shouldn't the culpability for putting peoples lives at needlessly at risk, be spread EQUALLY across ALL of our community?
Why do the media only hone in on one dumb dad who got away wit it yet totally ignore culpable govts and shires etc in the exact same circumstances EVEN when death results?.
At least I had the GONADS to say on TV news that IMHO the Shire and Govt who cut the roading budgets were equally culpable in the drowning accident!
I was and still am the ONLY one who said it publicly and everyone associated woith the tragedy KNEW I was right - yet the coroner ignored that totally- never sought ANY evidence from me at all and found NO ONE culpable!
Like I said - there are double standards at play here, and I'm afraid as long as the culpable people in this double fatality case above aren't held to account - then this reported action against the father who DID get thru without injury or death to his child, is the victim of a witch hunt, nothing less.
EQUAL Justice for all, or justice for non!
Justice is not served & is in fact unjust, when it is one sided in its administration!
Shalom
AnswerID:
332577