Safety forum

[Toutsi 1957]

Hi folks. I am a newcomer in the Airstream adventure. I just retired from the industry (petroleum, heavy construction, aerospace and high technology). In all those industries safety has been put in front of anything else including profit resulting in much safer working places and less accident. May I suggest that we add a forum specifically on Safety and having this forum clearly shown on the front page of the Air Forums. This forum should not only be a new forum but must become the more important. I am seeing to many combinations of vehicles and RV improperly loaded, overloaded, which are two different issues and not having the minimum safety equipment, worn tires, burn lights, ect. I just want to say that being safe will make us enjoying our AS longer and at the end will result in saving money. I am very interested at participating in this forum. Thanks for your suggestions.

[FCStreamer]

I like this idea a lot.

[GenXair]

Great idea!

[Belegedhel]

If you want to participate in some heated safety discussions just tune into every thread that starts out with "what is the best tow vehicle?" You'll soon see that opinions about what is safe can vary dramatically, and that the passion of these conversations usually ends in moderator intervention.

But welcome to the forums--I am sure you will have some valuable insights.

[Protagonist]

I was a collateral-duty safety coordinator for the US Army Corps of Engineers for about two-thirds of my career, a charter member of the USACE fall protection working group, and was involved in accident investigation for two fatalities as well as several lesser accidents. USACE has a comprehensive Safety and Health Requirements Manual that is even plagiarized by OSHA for their safety standards— I was one of many authors and editors of the 2013 edition.

So I'm all in favor of a safety-related sub-forum. But the idea runs afoul of one distinct drawback— while the construction industry has extensive written safety standards and it's not too difficult to determine whether one is in compliance with those standards (aside from matters of interpretation and conflicting standards written by different agencies), the same is not true of recreational vehicle owners and users. "Safe" is a very relative term without written standards to follow.

You'll find that there are a lot of opinions along the lines of, "I've been doing it this way since before you were born, sonny, and never had a problem," even though what they've been doing has been inherently unsafe, and only dumb luck has kept them from having an accident up to now.

You'll also find that there are a lot of opinions along the lines of, "I've been doing it this way since before you were born, sonny, and never had a problem," when what they've been doing actually have been best practices for performing those tasks safely.

And you'll find plenty of people somewhere in between.

But what you won't find is any safety topic where everyone is in agreement that there is one best practice that everyone should follow.