I agree. If they want to put more than one piece of webbing on a spool then fine, but don't join the ends together in anyway. It just seems like an odd practice to continue on with in the face of all that has resulted from it.

... if there is a safer, more reliable method of packaging and selling webbing (i.e. as strips of defined length, rather than on spools with spliced pieces) then lawyers can argue that the manufacturer wasn’t following best possible practices and might be held liable. Or something to that effect

I missed the part where this climber was determined to be a beginner.

Don't ever trust anyone selling you anything. People should know this by now. The guy behind the counter probably doesn't know much and most of what he thinks he knows is wrong. Do your own homework.

Talked with some of my lawyer friends about this thread over the past few days, and their general consensus is that the injured woman probably has no case here.

The store that sold her the webbing can’t be held liable whether she asked for 20ft of webbing and was sold 2 10ft sections joined with a splice or not, as selling spliced webbing from spools is common practice for selling webbing. If the employee who sold her the webbing was certified by the store as an “expert” (however they would make that sort of determination), then yes, there could be potential for negligence there. But pretty much no store does that to avoid opening themselves up to these sorts of lawsuits.

The only potential opening here would be against the actual manufacturer (surprisingly to me, I didn’t think that for a second).. I don’t remember the exact wording of what my lawyer friends told me, but basically the gist is that if there is a safer, more reliable method of packaging and selling webbing (i.e. as strips of defined length, rather than on spools with spliced pieces) then lawyers can argue that the manufacturer wasn’t following best possible practices and might be held liable. Or something to that effect

The bolded statement is an assumption of fact and would no doubt be disputed vigorously in actual litigation. As a climber, I am not aware of any standardized practice of selling two spliced segments as a single length of webbing. It seems to happen from time to time, but it is far from an everyday occurrence, and I bet a lot of gear stores have a policy against it. Nor, in any event, is industry custom dispositive in negligence or product liability cases. It might influence a jury's judgments regarding the amount of fault involved, but there is enough uncertainty involved here that the case will likely be settled before it ever reaches a jury.

Its less of an assumption than every other sentence in your post that follows it. Perhaps I should have stated my comment as “selling webbing from spools which contain occasional splices is standard practice” instead of how I did. Regardless, I see your point and agree with you - that's what I had originally thought, too. I pushed my friends on the very points you brought up and they were adamant about the retailer not being liable (even though, as you mention, it would definitely be good store policy not to sell spliced webbing).

As I said, I’m not a lawyer.. I'm just passing along the cumulative legal opinion of several lawyer friends that I did talk to.

Well, I'm a law professor, and I think that any lawyer who tells you that it is clear that the retailer is not liable for the reasons you relayed should consider some remedial education (unless she has access to facts that I haven't read about this incident).

Your friends are right to the extent they suggest that product liability against the manufacturer is conceivable based on selling rolls of webbing that incorporate splices.

...seems like this is a win for the lady

There is no after-the-fact 'winning' in court that will ever change or make up for the losses she suffered on rock after failing to build an adequate anchor and inspect the webbing.

well, I finally found it: According to UIAA-102 (or EN-564):
If cordelette or webbing is offered on a spool or packaged in another way, the entire lenght is to be made of a single piece.
(original text:
Wenn Reepschnur auf einer Trommel oder anderweitig verpackt angeboten wird, muss die gesamte Länge aus einem Stück bestehen.
(P.147, Pit Schubert, "In Sicherheit in Fels und Eis III, Second Edition, 2008)

And exactly how does that help her pain and injuries?

Should the store have sold spliced webbing? Hell no.

the fact that you consider your gear breaking to be a personal fuckup is pretty much the definition of machismo.

I think the store fucked up. Same things that have already been stated. And furthermore, I can totally see a tape splice being strong enough for one to snap the webbing between ones's hands and nothing feel funny. If one wasn't used to handling webbing.

and to everyone screaming redundancy: I'd rap off of a length of brand new webbing tied around a good tree. come on, you wouldn't?

Let's say somebody bought a road bike. They'd rented a bike on vacation a few times, and were really enjoying it, so they decided to buy one (but didn't really know anything about bikes. They have some friends who are going to help out for the first couple rides in case of flats, ect). They go to the bike store, and ride some around, pick one out, and go home. Unknown to the purchaser, but known to the store employee, the front wheel wasn't on the bike all the way. It was cinched just tight enough to keep it on while being displayed in the store, but it wasn't tightened down. The employee never mentions this, just says have fun with your new bike!

Now, if the purchaser goes out and rides the bike and the wheel comes off and tosses her into traffic and she gets a serious head injury even though she had a helmet on... was the store negligent for selling her an apparently functional but not fully assembled bike? She would have noticed something was wrong if she'd inspected the wheel, but she didn't even know that wheels went on that way, so she had no reason to think she *should* inspect it. She rode it around in the store and it was fine.

Drivel does not make an excellent argument; any argument that attempts to place the blame for this accident anywhere but on the climbers is grossly misguided and simply contributes to more of these accidents occurring.

The relevant facts, as I see them, for the lawsuit* are: the spool had a warning on it. Assuming that warning was not transmitted to the customer, I think the store was negligent. The store can not assume, because it takes no pains to verify, any level of experience from people who buy webbing.

*for climbing in general, there are philosophical and best-practices debates to be had, but I think the questions in the lawsuit are narrower than that.

Again, the issues of interest and concern [to climbers here] should be the ones which took place prior to and during those roped activities - not events which are unfolding since.

Well I guess machismo is in the eye of the beholder, but you've got a pretty strange definition of it to see machismo in an admission of failure.

I don't think that they have to be mutually irreconciliable, and there's certainly no reason that only one set of issues should be of interest to climbers.

...whether or not this climber could reasonably have been expected to know what she was dealing with (spliced webbing) if no one told her that it could come that way.

"All scenarios = "I fucked up""="Everything is my fault"= "Everything is under my control."

It is delusional to think that you control everything. It is sheer penis-waving to say that if your gear breaks under the rated load, it is your own fault.

[whether or not this webbing thing counts under that category is a different point of discussion.]

I'm of the opinion that "you take responsibility for your own life" is more along the lines of, I will do the best I can and accept that I might die and one one will save me, as rock climbing is inherently dangerous," but I think it's foolish in the extreme to say that anything that might happen to one while one is rock climbing is one's own fault. Say you had one of the first batch of busted Aliens. Was that your own fault? What if somebody had died on one of those things? Would that have been the climber's fault? Would you say they'd fucked up? I get the impression that if it'd been YOU getting seriously injured on one of those Aliens, you would indeed by some twisted logic say you had fucked up. I think that's delusional and machismo-y, again in the category of pretending like you control everything. What about rockfall? If you get injured in a rockfall, is that a personal fuckup on your part? Do you control gravity?

How that applies to this debate is the question of whether or not this climber could reasonably have been expected to know what she was dealing with (spliced webbing) if no one told her that it could come that way.

I think the word fault is inadequate to describe the situation, even though some of us are using it pretty liberally. There's plenty of fault to go around in this case, but there's only one person responsible for the position the climber is in.

"All scenarios = "I fucked up""="Everything is my fault"= "Everything is under my control."

It is delusional to think that you control everything. It is sheer penis-waving to say that if your gear breaks under the rated load, it is your own fault.

Say you had one of the first batch of busted Aliens. Was that your own fault? What if somebody had died on one of those things? Would that have been the climber's fault? Would you say they'd fucked up? I get the impression that if it'd been YOU getting seriously injured on one of those Aliens, you would indeed by some twisted logic say you had fucked up. I think that's delusional and machismo-y, again in the category of pretending like you control everything. What about rockfall? If you get injured in a rockfall, is that a personal fuckup on your part? Do you control gravity?

...the question of whether or not this climber could reasonably have been expected to know what she was dealing with (spliced webbing) if no one told her that it could come that way.

driving is also a very dangerous activity.

I think in most climbing cases, it's hard to identify whether the gear is actually defective (was a cam properly placed, was it shitty rock, did the climber expose a rope to chemicals, did the rope run over a sharp edge, etc.); but if there's a clear manufacturing defect, I have no idea why we should absolve the manufacturers of paying for the costs of their defective product.

CCH was very fortunate nothing too serious happened as a result of their fucked-up aliens, but if it had (e.g., three successive aliens pulling apart causing the climber to deck), then they absolutely should have been held liable.

GO seemed to want to talk about his offhand comment about gear failure in general being a personal moral failure, and how I take issue with that.