Thursday, April 09, 2009

Beware of hanging plants

Public safety. It's a big thing, and it only gets bigger as population densities continue to grow. After all, who wants to be walking down the street with potential danger lurking around every corner and under every sign.

Of course, people have taken their search for safety to an extreme. For proof of that, all you need to do is look at some of the crazy warning labels that are placed on different items. While some of the warnings are helpful to everyone, the rest look as though they were created because some people using the devices just didn't have the common sense required when operating such tools. Why else would there be warnings on paint canisters to not drink them, or labels telling people to not cut through power lines with a chain saw?

Well, for awhile now, the United Kingdom has decided that they need to keep competing with the United States for crazy safety precautions, and they may have just pulled into a lead that cannot be eclipsed. All they had to do was have a Welsh town ban hanging flower baskets because of the danger they pose.

Sure, in some ways, that makes a lot of sense. The baskets could get caught on something, or hit people in the heads, or just cause turmoil on a really windy day. But the reason that the baskets are being banned? They might be too dangerous to water.

Um, really? So there's not any sort of devices that exist to get the water from a lower point to a higher point, possibly using the water pressure itself to propel the liquid to that higher level? Right, so a hose is out. Well, what about attaching a long handle to the hose, so that it can be raised to the level of the basket, and the water can trickle out at that rate? Apparently that won't fly, either. And don't even think of suggesting letting the baskets be watered from above, perhaps by a person on a higher floor.

Unless these baskets are being hung twenty or thirty feet in the air (in which case, sure, ban them, because it's kinda silly to put a basket of flowers that far out of people's eyesight), there should really be easy ways to go about watering them, without a risk to the people involved in such a project. Besides, it's probably not the actual act of watering that's causing the danger.

It's probably the use of ladders. That's why the warning label cautions against standing at, or near, the top step.

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