I'm not sure about my attitude to this. I generally hate lawsuits over every little thing that wrong in somebody's life. Lawyers are a leech on society. And I definately don't want lawsuits to affect our free access to crags.

However I can completely understand somebody's anger over the alien issue. Especially if an alien failure pernamently injured you where you'll may never climb again and will face permanent dissability.

CCH has consistantly responded very slowly and poorly to quality issues that customers have had. In my eyes they were negligent.

That said I'd hate to see costs go up our trusted brands affected by things like this.

Lawyers are a leech on society.

Well...this is the game we choose to play in & no matter were you climb or the equipment you buy there is always a warning like,"Climbing is dangerous ,allways back up your equipment,competent instruction is recommended and so on...."you climb at your own risk !
Seems pretty straight forward to me , hey but what would I know ? I have been climbing since 1972 ! Rope gives,tools break, rock falls apart, hunters mistake you for game and so on!

Until you need one.

I want to know who sued, my money is on that kid who had a "ground fall" at the Red... there is a thread about the fall and the failed alien cam

Well...this is the game we choose to play in & no matter were you climb or the equipment you buy there is always a warning like,"Climbing is dangerous ,allways back up your equipment,competent instruction is recommended and so on...."you climb at your own risk !
Seems pretty straight forward to me , hey but what would I know ? I have been climbing since 1972 ! Rope gives,tools break, rock falls apart, hunters mistake you for game and so on!

So if you bought a rope new from a reputable manufacturer and it broke under body weight load without any sharp edges you would have an issue!??

This kind of behavior is the reason our "freedoms" have been eroded away in this country. People are no longer willing to take responsibility for their own actions, and we all pay with our way of life.

Climbing is an inherently dangerous endeavour, and that understanding by its participants is what keeps it alive. Unfortunately, when people decide that they're entitled to be compensated for getting hurt while conciously putting themselves in danger, it makes news and costs everyone money, whether they end up collecting or not. This is why personal injury attorneys are everywhere. These situations play themselves out daily and when the dust settles, the only ones getting rich are the attorneys. The rest of us pay for this stuff, whether it's through increased prices for goods or increased insurance premiums.

So CCH recognizes that they may have an issue with cam failure. They issue a recall. That's what any responsible business does. Are they negligent because some cams allegedly failed? It depends on so many things that it's not worth getting into, but what about the climber's negligence?

If I'm at my limit, and I have one piece of gear between myself and sweet release, I have a choice as a leader to make. If I choose to go commando and blow the move, the gear may fail, the rock may fail, my retarded ass may have put my beloved alien in wrong... the list goes on and on. I made the choice to knowingly climb above gear that could potentially fail. That's my responsibility and it should end there, even if I'm now relearning how to eat with a spoon at the age of 28 due to the choice I made.

If litigation like this is supported by any member of the climbing community, we're letting the outsiders in. We're opening ourselves up to overpriced gear, area closures, and the common bickering and bullshit that we generally have to put up with from all of the other idiots we go to the mountains to get away from.

I'll be god damned if I'm gonna have to carry personal liability insurance to belay my friends, or get signed waivers if someone is going to climb on my rope and fall on my green alien. Some asshole may try to sue the owner of (insert your favorite crag here). Where the fuck are you going this weekend? The gym?

If you can't take responsibility for your own actions and the consequences of doing something that is "inherently dangerous", and you can't accept the fact that lightning can and will strike, no matter how "safe" you feel, then go find another sport, like golf. Don't ruin climbing for me.

If you can't take responsibility for your own actions

Herein lies the problem. I'd be the last to sue but.....If I properly place an alien but deck because the cam fell apart, they SHOULD be sued. I paid good money for a device that they CERTIFY will hold a certain load, it sure better!

Climbing is dangerous enough without having to wonder if your gear is going to spontaneously fall apart under minimal loads. We use good judgment to keep ourselves safe, but the underlying assumption is that our gear WILL perform as the manufacturer claims.

There is no guarantee that any of your gear will hold when you fall on it. The guarantees you do have are thus:

- The manufacturer has applied the quality control standards they say they have applied
- The manufacturer has done everything they have said to ensure that your gear does hold

Third, and this is more speculation, I'd guess that that firm already has one client in hand, and are looking for more people injured in alien failure accidents, so that they can get a class action going and get the fees from everyone as part of a settlemenet award.

Wrong. They certify as much as humanly possible, which under 3-sigma means about 99.6% of their product. FWIW, I don't believe CCH uses a 3Sig system.

And if the haven't really done everything they claimed to do...?

We're not talking about a failure to meet 3 sigma limits here....we're talking about pieces failing at a small fraction of their stated rating. If a cam is rated for 10 kn but fails at 9.5kn, such is life. It should NEVER fail at 1 or 2kn, EVER! Crunch the numbers, if their process is "in control", that failure should NEVER happen, period. Yet is has several times. They should be making toasters, not life saving devices, if their knowledge of manufacturing processes is this poor.

Wrong. They certify as much as humanly possible, which under 3-sigma means about 99.6% of their product. FWIW, I don't believe CCH uses a 3Sig system.

There is no guarantee that any of your gear will hold when you fall on it.

No, no...
They are still leaches even if you need one.

Wrong. They certify as much as humanly possible, which under 3-sigma means about 99.6% of their product. FWIW, I don't believe CCH uses a 3Sig system.

There is no guarantee that any of your gear will hold when you fall on it. The guarantees you do have are thus:

- The manufacturer has applied the quality control standards they say they have applied
- The manufacturer has done everything they have said to ensure that your gear does hold

Neither of these guarantees that your gear won't rip out or break during a fall. All it tells you is that the vast majority of the time, the gear doesn't do that. In other words, the odds are stacked in your favor.

If you think the case is otherwise, you've misinterpreted the risks you are assuming when climbing and need to rethink them.

John Long has always been very clear about this, and it's why I point people to his books: Your primary safety system in climbing is your acumen and judgment. Your backup safety system is the gear. If you're relying on the gear, you're relying upon a non-redundant safety system - jumping out of the plane with only your backup parachute, so to speak.


People need to realize this:

Every time you go climbing, EVERY TIME, NO EXCEPTIONS, you may die. You may not come back. You may never see your wife, girlfriend, dog, child, or favorite booty call again. Each climber has to decide what that means for themself. For my part, I'd rather die climbing, however remote the chances, than live without climbing.

You haven't done much in the way of statistics I take it?

You're trying to think in absolute terms on one hand, and then relative terms on the other hand. If you crunch the numbers, eventually it is a mathematical certainty that a cam will get through quality control and be primed to fail at 1 - 2kN.

You haven't done much in the way of statistics I take it?

...You're trying to think in absolute terms on one hand, and then relative terms on the other hand. If you crunch the numbers, eventually it is a mathematical certainty that a cam will get through quality control and be primed to fail at 1 - 2kN...

Yall make noises like Yvon Chouinard never got sued and had to divest himself of Black Diamond or risk losing his empire.

But other than that yall damn sure make a lot of knowledgable noises! Very impressive.

DMT

4. CCH seems to has manufactured faulty equipment and deserved to be sued. Imagine if Ford was selling cars that are sometimes welded properly, sometimes not welded.

...which is why it should be drilled in to every aspiring leaders head that one should never climb with a single piece of gear between themselves and ground-strike. PERIOD.

Just FYI: When posting on a public internet forum, nothing will make you look more stupid than accusing someone else of something that you yourself are guilty of.

Dynosore is right. Under reasonable assumptions, no cam rated to 10 kN should ever fail at 1 or 2 kN.

Assume a cam with a 3-sigma rating of 10 kN has a normal distribution and a standard deviation of 0.5 kN. The mean strength of the cam is thus 11.5 kN, and 2 kN would be 19 standard deviations below the mean. The stat software on my computer puts the probability of -19 standard deviations to be on the order of 1 in 10^80. To put 10^80 in perspective, it is about 10 times greater than typical scientific estimates of the number of atoms in the Universe. Thus, 1 in 10^80 would be an event so rare that we would expect it never to occur in human history.

Jay

As Jay has already pointed out, you are completely wrong. For one thing, most gear testing (as at Black Diamond) is done at 50% of rated strength. So, it's fairly clear that a 10kN rated piece of gear that has been tested to 5kN, will never ever fail at 1 - 2kN. If you are claiming that the 50% strength testing itself has weakened the piece to that extent, the odds are far better that you will die from a meteor impact.

Curt

I'm going to try repeating this one more time, and hopefully it will sink in for some people:

- Climbing is not safe, and will never be guaranteed safe.
- Gear is not guaranteed not to fail.
- No one is making you climb. Accept the risk or get out of the game. Make your choice.

Just because the risk is higher in certain activities or jobs doesn't mean you should cope with improperly constructed equipment that fails well below its rated strength. By that argument, a manufacturer of bullet-proof vests shouldn't be liable if a vest fails below its rating. A vest isn't designed to stop everything, and no one would claim getting shot at is a good idea, but such a product in good condition should function properly. I would think putting false reliance upon it is worse than not having it at all.

Climbing isn't safe, but it's a reasonable expectation that well-maintained gear properly used will perform as designed. From what I've seen, CCH hasn't lived up to that expectation. Do you disagree?

My personal observation is that I've heard more about CCH failures than other brands, but that's all it has been - hearing about things. Anecdotal evidence on the web. We don't have any info on how the gear was used, what forces it was exposed to, storage, history, etc...

The reports posted here represent something of a little bit higher quality than "hearing about things". I'm More leary about antecdotal evidence than most (goes with my work). However, for antecdotal reports on the web, we have remarkably complete reports in many of the cases, chalk full of many of the relavent details you are asking for. Some were even tests undertaken using pretty controlled conditions (for your average rock climber). The souder's crack thread had photos of the cam stuck in the placement, and the Indian creek thread had pictures of the guy falling. In many cases the forces can be verified as much as can be reasonably expected. What is presented here goes a little farther than hearsay.

....And what exactly makes you think I haven't spent a fair amount of time around statistical math?

I'm actually rather happy that Jay and yourself misinterpreted my comments (or didn't take the time to read them thoroughly...

If you crunch the numbers, eventually it is a mathematical certainty that a cam will get through quality control and be primed to fail at 1 - 2kN.

If you crunch the numbers, it WILL happen to SOMEONE, guaranteed.

The odds of even good leeches getting anything out of them is, I suspect, pretty damn slim, however. The cash and stash are probably all well beyond the scope of an audit. I'd be amazed if insurance was current, or that there is much in the way of easy equity or assets to go after beyond a few old machine tools (and a new test rig). In the end they'll probably just shut them down and have little else to show for their effort.

Well, I read your original post twice before replying, and was pretty perplexed by it; and now I have read it again, and am still pretty perplexed. Either we really do disagree, or you have not explained yourself very well.

Let's look again at the claims in your original post:


That depends on what you mean by "eventually." If by "eventually" you mean eventually in finite time, then, no, it will not eventually happen. Human beings will have ceased to exist eons before enough cams could ever be manufactured so that it might be possible for one to fail at -19 standard deviations (SD).

We noted that the probability of a -19 SD event is about 1 / 10^80. Now, the Big Bang is estimated to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. Now, even if 1 billion cams were produced every second since the Big Bang until now, "only" about 10^25 cams will have been produced. This is still 55 orders of magnitude less than the number of cams needed for us to expect to produce a single cam that would fail at -19 SD. So, since even on a cosmologic time scale, "eventually" no cam could fail at such a low load, it is certain that on a human time scale, no cam could fail.

Well, I just did crunch them, and we saw that no, it will never happen to someone, guaranteed.

Conclusion: Under realistic assumptions, it is statistically impossible for a cam belonging to a population purported to have a 3-sigma breaking strength of 10 kN to break at 2 kN under normal use.

Jay

We noted that the probability of a -19 SD event is about 1 / 10^80. Now, the Big Bang is estimated to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. Now, even if 1 billion cams were produced every second since the Big Bang until now, "only" about 10^25 cams will have been produced. This is still 55 orders of magnitude less than the number of cams needed for us to expect to produce a single cam that would fail at -19 SD. So, since even on a cosmologic time scale, "eventually" no cam could fail at such a low load, it is certain that on a human time scale, no cam could fail.


Well, I just did crunch them, and we saw that no, it will never happen to someone, guaranteed.

Conclusion: Under realistic assumptions, it is statistically impossible for a cam belonging to a population purported to have a 3-sigma breaking strength of 10 kN to break at 2 kN under normal use.

Jay

Hmm, because it is stats means no absolute should be used. the fact that the probabilty of a cam belonging to a population which has a 3signam breaking strength or 10 kN +/- 1.5kn failing a -19SD is absurdly low does not say it has not yet occured or it won't occur in our lifetime. it just extremely unlikely to happen.

Remember getting double 6 with 2 dices is 1/36 probability. You can roll the dices 36 times and have them come up , on the first roll on the last roll , or at any other time (and even multiples times) or even not at all

Hmm, because it is stats means no absolute should be used. the fact that the probabilty of a cam belonging to a population which has a 3signam breaking strength or 10 kN +/- 1.5kn failing a -19SD is absurdly low does not say it has not yet occured or it won't occur in our lifetime. it just extremely unlikely to happen.

Jay-

I've only taken one stats class, but here's a question for you.

In a 3 or 6 sigma rating test... isn't that .00001 (or whatever number it ends up being) supposed to be the failure for a perfectly manufacturered cam in a batch of x perfectly manufactured cams?

No, please consider the magnitude of the number, which I have related to both the age of the Universe and the number of atoms in the Universe. This probability is incomprehensibly small. It is so small that we can say with virtual certainty that no event with that probability will occur on Earth during our lifetime.

Jay

Virtual certainty is a different thing from certainty last time I checked...

It's really splitting hairs.

You got somethin better to do on the internet?

Until you need one.

I think we were discussing the relative merits of an action against CCH, as opposed to whether or not anyone can sue anyone else for any reason whatsoever. Clearly, the latter is well established.

Curt

yeckcir wrote:

«I'll be god damned if I'm gonna have to carry personal liability insurance to belay my friends, or get signed waivers if someone is going to climb on my rope and fall on my green alien.»

I have a personal-liability, umbrella policy on top of my home and car insurance that does indeed cover me if I’m sued by somebody who was climbing with me or beneath me or whatever. A climbing partner might not sue you, but one of their relatives might if the partner was injured or killed. The main point of the umbrella policy was to provide extra protection in general. It so happens that it covers climbing (which is nice).

Gratias et valete bene!
RobertusPunctumPacificus

This is more or less what I was getting at with my "Why not the 1st or 7th cam" comment in my previous post.

Jay may argue that pure numbers not applied is pointless, and I'd agree with him there, but the pure math simply states that eventually, a cam failure exists.

Run for the...er, away from the hills!

While it is unfortunate that legal action may be taken against CCH (and without a doubt against the retailers who happen to sell the cams in question), it would appear a case against CHH would be premised on failures of cams during normal use and lack of proper Quality Control.

For all means of sanity... what is the probability that more than one of these cam failures will happen AFTER they have been tensile tested to 2/3 of their stated strength?! 1x10^-19 is a freaking small number... but having that occur twice within a year?! Wake up and smell the coffee.

You got somethin better to do on the internet?

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

To keep the lawyers, beuroucrats, fat public out of climbing we have to stop this bullshit. I don't care if johnny pull-hard can't walk for the rest of his life because he tried some death route and relied on a single peice of gear (if a ground fall meant a 2 million dollar payday ill start snapping mini wires tomorow), I would rather him take responsibility that climbing is dangerous than open the door for rats and finks who dont give a FUCK about climbing to shut our crags down, wal-mart our gear companies, make us sign wavers, and shut down every option so that we spend weekends in the gym, the only place left for our money to get into their pockets.



It absolutely infuriates me that such idiotic things happen. You place your life in the hands of once peice of gear, you could die. PERIOD. The fucking rock could break off, THATS WHY CLIMBING IS REDUNDANT!


I can't wait to see this shitstain go down the tubes and peter off into nothing, with the world still unknown to what most of us do. In the meanwhile i will be DAMNED if i ever climb on an Alien. The reprocussion of broken gear is in the form of product awareness and public scrutiny, not some punk getting a payday at our expense.



that sounded angry. I'm really a nice guy and like long walks on the beach and holding hands

To keep the lawyers, beuroucrats, fat public out of climbing we have to stop this bullshit. ...

...further misinformed and misleading ranting, not worth considering...

If you have no clue about what you are talking about, please confine such "stuff" to conservative talk shows or other venues where ignorance is prized.

None of the scenarios you propose have any relationship to -- or would result from -- the situation at hand.

If you have no clue about what you are talking about, please confine such "stuff" to conservative talk shows or other venues where ignorance is prized.

None of the scenarios you [or "yeckcir"] propose have any relationship to -- or would result from -- the situation at hand.

would it not benefit the climbing community to have CCH forced to make quality goods that aren't going to hurt climbers?
If the companies gear becomes a much higher quality product because of the lawsuit, or if faulty equipment is no longer sold, I'll consider myself a dickhead because I as sure as hell have benefited from a product that could have killed me becoming an actual life saving device.
In that regard, anyone who trad climbs is a dickhead, and anyone who knows of someone who trad climbs is a dickhead because all those involved with climbing would benefit from a better product.

Again i would refer you to earlier posts -- CCH posted a recall, and I can only assume that the break has happened to recalled aliens.

This is more or less what I was getting at with my "Why not the 1st or 7th cam" comment in my previous post.

Jay may argue that pure numbers not applied is pointless, and I'd agree with him there, but the pure math simply states that eventually, a cam failure exists.

Run for the...er, away from the hills!

I may be wrong on the specifics, but I think you know where I'm going with this.

However I don't know why I am arguing this because a normal distribution is NOT a good distribution for this sort of discussion. For starters it has infinite tails which obviously would behave well as breaking strength have a minimum of 0.