booby trapped trails??

[etlsport]

just read an article in a local paper about this.. 15 year old riding his dirtbike on a trail took a steel cable to the throat, as you would expect, he didnt make it. the people who put the cable up claimed they did it to keep people in pickups from driving down the trail to dump trash.. they had been ordered to take it down before when another kid hit it last summer, hit him in the upper chest so he made it

family of the deceased sued and won a settlement for 750k.. no criminal charges at all

[AK Falco]

The worst part about this is the ones who set these things up are never around when some one falls prey to a "trap". hard to get justice sometimes. eye for an' eye. This is just not right.

[nfpgasmask]

Yeah, and since when does a steel cable block any determined 4x4 from getting around it? Sounds like a clear case of booby trapping or at least criminal negligence!

Bart

[Riff Raff]

The biggest error was that the steel cable stretched across the road should have had bright orange/yellow/red warning flags/streamers and/or signage to indicate the barrier was in place.

It is extremely hard to see a skinny gray cable against perhaps a grey colored gravel road and when possibly viewed through the rider's dirty goggles or helmet visor-lens.

Further; any good off-road dirt biker knows to travel slow down unfamliar trails, and to first do an area recon before blindly going hell-bent down unfamiliar trails at high speed. Had an adequate pre-recon of the trail been done at a very slow pace by the dirt-biker, then perhaps the dirt-biker would have been aware of the imposing hazard beforehand.

Any type of road barrier (cable, chain, rope, etc) needs to have some sort of bright colored warning attachment and must have 3M reflective tape streamers for night travel in an effort to prevent such mishaps. I don't think it was the land owner's true intent to harm another person, but I do believe that the land owner was negligent in not having adequate warning devices in place to prevent such a tradegy from happening.