| Killer Coconuts >> Local safety expert Peter Barss warns of falling nuts, dangerous stairwells and lax poolside security by
ANNE-MARIE REYNAUD They’re exotic, good to eat, but deadlier than sharks. They can weigh from two to four kilograms (8.8 lbs) and fall off 25-meter (80 feet) trees with the kinetic force of one metric ton. That is, with the speed of about 80 kilometres an hour. Imagine the blow. “Anyone walking or sleeping under a coconut palm is at risk,” warns Montreal injury-prevention expert Peter Barss, a former McGill prof who now teaches at the United Arab Emirates University. “The most frequent cause of hospitalization in the remote Melanesian villages I worked in were tree-related, not shark-related.” According to George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File housed at the University of Florida, coconuts kill about 150 people a year—that’s 15 times the number of deaths attributed to sharks in the year 2000. Barss believes that the death-due-to-coconut rate may be even higher than Burgess states, since many fatalities happen in remote places, where there is no proper death reporting system. Near-death nut experiences “The coconut issue is a serious problem,” says Barss, who returned to Montreal in May for a conference on safety at the Sixth Annual World Conference Injury Prevention and Control. “Some people know to be careful around trees, but safety isn’t always communicated as well as it should be. Even if there are more fatal injuries as a result of people falling out of coconut palms, falling coconuts do injure people—and sometimes lethally.” Barss worked in Papua New
Guinea as a hospital director and researcher for seven years during
the ’80s. After realizing that he had never seen coconut injuries
recorded anywhere in medical literature, he investigated, and the result
was a study published in the Journal of Trauma titled “Injuries
due to Falling Coconuts,” for which he was presented with an Ig
Nobel Award last year. (Ig Nobel Awards honour unusual achievements
in science.) Barss says he was pleased with the attention this award
brought to the injury-prevention domain. Seriously steep staircases Beyond the world of killer coconuts, Barss has other summer safety warnings for Montrealers. The first one starts right at your front door: according to Barss, Montreal staircases are a major risk factor for injury. As a McGill University professor, Barss had some of his injury-prevention students examine 10 exterior staircases on Laval, the street on which he lives. “Each of them knew right away which was my stairway because it was the only one that met the basic criteria for safety,” he says. “The building codes for houses are currently not strict enough. Building contractors have lobbied over the years to keep the stairs small because that way they don’t take up as much space and cost as much money.” As well, many Montreal stairways have uneven steps that are ideal for causing falls. “When you go up or down a staircase,” says Barss, “your mind takes a reading from the first step. If there’s suddenly a difference of an inch or two in one of the steps, you can fall—and for an elderly person that can be fatal.” Barss also cautions swimming pool owners to install self-latching, self-closing gates to prevent children from swimming unsupervised. “In Quebec we have about 50 per cent of the swimming pool drownings for little kids in Canada,” says Barss. “This is a real problem that should be a hotter issue than it is. In the places where they have good legislation, the pool drowning rates for kids have practically dropped to zero. We need a regulation and vendors need to be required to inform people about equipment and safety.” |
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