At 150 centimetres in stockinged feet, my refusal to climb ladders forces me to rely on the kindness of strangers (and unstrangers!) and the long kitchen tongs. My family knows if those tongs have gone missing, they need look no further than third shelf down where I will have put them after securing the book of my needs. The top shelf holds the books only needed in emergencies. The ones we kept away from the kids. The old baby books. The Latham Diaries.
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Anyhow, I write this after receiving proof that my mistrust of ladders is on solid ground. Unlike most ladders. Ladders are killing us. Or maiming us. Yet we still tread upon them as if we know what the hell we are doing. Those who work in safety are also working on a campaign for Right Rungs (OK, I made that up) but we don't know yet whether it's working. The campaign, at least in Victoria, is sadly called Ladder Safety Matters. The name's not gripping but its ideas are top rung because the campaign will save lives – Australian studies reveal ladders to be the consumer product "most often associated with DIY-related deaths and hospitalisations".
So before you decide to do a little work around the house and that work includes standing on a ladder, read this. If you want to go ahead and use a ladder even though you do not know what you are doing, wear a helmet. Even if you think you know what you are doing, wear a helmet. I'm not joking.
About 5000 people fall off ladders in Australia every single year and we only care about them if the faller happens to have presented our favourite-ever music show. Molly mate, if we'd been there at the time of your ladder accident, your collective fandom would have caught you.
The rest of the time, we'd think, sure, people fall off ladders. This is a nation of renovation and redevelopment. Occupational hazard, you'd think. But of those 5000 people, only 1000 work in an industry where ladders are a requirement. The rest are people being handy. Or trying to be.
Surely these accidents happen only in rural or regional Australia or to people with no common sense. I assumed that if I asked my friends if they'd ever had a ladder accident, I'd be mocked.
The stories were terrifying. Meet my old mate David Killick, whose sainted wife Nicole told him not to use the chainsaw while she was away. I'll let him tell the story about a tree branch brushing the roof of his shed.
"I decided to lop the branch. I set up my ladder at full extension, climbed up and wedged myself into a fork in the tree and set to work with the chainsaw. When I cut right through the branch, it sprang sideways and smashed down very hard on my foot (much hurties), knocking the ladder over as it fell the rest of the way to the ground and leaving me 15 feet up a tree with a probably broken foot, a running chainsaw, no neighbours within shouting distance and no likelihood of anyone finding me until the following Monday.
"Eventually, I tossed the chainsaw, jumped out of the tree (landing on my good foot) then drove myself to the nearest hospital 30 kilometres away."
There is not a neat set of Australian statistics, but in both NSW and Victoria there are about seven deaths a year after a fall from a ladder. Between 2010 and 2014 in NSW, falls from ladders across all ages resulted in more than 8000 hospital admissions. From 2002 to 2013 in Victoria, the number of domestic ladder falls causing major trauma doubled, according to the Victoria State Trauma Service. Between 2005 and 2010, nearly 5000 Queenslanders were admitted to hospital after falling off a ladder.
And guess who fell off the most? The very people who now have time to work around the house – those aged between 60 and 64. And far and away, it's men on those ladders.
Aleksandra Natora, a senior policy officer in injury prevention at the Victorian Department of Health, gave a compelling presentation on Ladder Safety Matters in Ballarat this week, but afterwards she told a few of us that she insists her husband wear a helmet if he wants to use a ladder.
I totally thought this was a bit of overreach (sorry). Until I spoke to another old mate, Jim Woulfe, yet another friend revealing a fall off a ladder. He asked a tradesman to come and fix his gate yet the gate still wasn't working. Jim had decided to ride his bicycle to work, strapped his helmet on ready to go and at the last minute decided to climb up a ladder to get a photo of the gate from above.
"The ground wasn't terribly firm where I'd placed the ladder, I could feel that. But I thought I could just grab the gate if I needed steadying."
He never got that far. He was about a metre and half up when the ladder fell, taking Jim with it. When he got to hospital, the doctors told him he was lucky he'd been wearing a helmet.
Moral of this story? There are people who are paid to use ladders and to do it safely. Hire them. Otherwise, wear a helmet. Looks aren't everything.
Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney. She received the Australian Injury Prevention Network's 2017 reporting fellowship.
