Blue Mountains National Pass contractor death – coroner’s findings kept secret

Tragically, just before midday smoko on Wednesday 29th November 2017, three contractors with the NSW NPWS (Parks Service) were suddenly struck by a boulder fall from some 10 metres above them. They were repairing a cliff section along the historic National Pass in the Blue Mountains National Park at Wentworth Falls.

These were the boulders.

At the time of the rockfall, around 11:40am, bushwalker Mike Burgess said he heard a “big explosion” on the National Pass track below him.

“I heard this massive — it sounded like dynamite going off — but I knew it wouldn’t be dynamite, it would be a big slab.  We heard all the blooming rocks smash down through the bush … right after that I heard a bloke scream. I’d say there were some pretty bad injuries down there.”

Fifteen ambulance resources were dispatched to the scene, including three NSW Ambulance and Toll Rescue Helicopters, Special Operations Team Paramedics and a road medical team.  Due to the rather inaccessible location of the landslide it took rescuers 45 minutes to reach the scene.

By 3:25pm that afternoon, a NSW Ambulance spokesman reported that its Special Operations Team Paramedics team had confirmed that one patient had been “confirmed deceased and two other patients trapped (under the boulder(s), at least one of them with serious, significant injuries.”

One of the patients was winched from the scene suffering multiple fractures and was currently being transported by helicopter to Westmead Hospital in a serious condition. The other patient remains on scene a stable condition, awaiting extrication by helicopter.

By 4.15pm that afternoon, a spokeswoman for the Parks Service (government department Office of the Environment and Heritage) issued a sad public statement:

“Work to make the track safe was underway by experienced contractors.

A 36-year-old man has died and two other men are in hospital after being caught in a landslide while working on a rockfall hazard on a closed Blue Mountains walking track.

One of the injured men called emergency services just before midday after a walking track collapsed in the national park at Wentworth Falls. The walking trail was about 100 metres from the top of the mountain and 100 metres down to the valley. Emergency crews believe there was a rock slip about 10 metres above the track.  The injured men, aged 26 and 27, have both been airlifted to Westmead Hospital. One man has serious injuries with multiple fractures to both legs and the other has fractures all over his body. NPWS will be assisting NSW Police and Safework NSW with their enquiries into this matter.  The men are workers, not tourists.”

As if it matters whether they were tourists or not?

Parks Service Blue Mountains director David Crust told media at the scene that he men were contractors for the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) working on an “identified rockfall hazard”.  The men were “making safe” a walk that has been closed for three months. “They were treating and identifying a rock fall”.

According to the National Parks website, the National Pass walking track had been closed since 31st August 2017 “due to a very dangerous, unstable section of rock above the walking track”.

But were any geotechnical engineers engaged prior by Park Service to risk assess the site and apply rockfall mitigation measures and Australian Works Health and Safety standards before the maintenance men started work?  Who knows?

Later reports were that the dead man was David (Dave) Gliddon, a local, well-respected rock climber, canyoner and bushwalker.

He was killed by the boulder and his body could not be recovered until the follow day.  Two of his colleagues who have not been named were also badly injured with pelvic injuries who subsequently lost one of his legs..and the media reported “we fear more bad news to come.”

Mr Gliddon’s body was cut free from a large boulder but he tragically died at the scene. His body was retrieved by helicopter about 1.20pm the following day.

The National Pass Track site was declared a crime scene and a police report was prepared for the coroner.  However, the NSW State Coroner’s findings were never made public.  Why?

Was something incriminating contained within those findings that Parks Service didn’t want to be made public?

What were the findings of Safework NSW?  They were neither made public.  Did the three affected families get a copy of the findings?

So why the government secrecy?

The Parks Service outsources its hiking track repair dirty work to contractors because it lacks internal skilled resources and revenue due to repeated funding cuts from the New South Wales Government.

Did working as contractors for the Parks Service in a heightened risky environment, mean that they had access to workers compensation and life insurance benefits?

If so, why did Dave Gliddon’s friends and the Springwood Bushwalking Club feel compelled at the time to encourage its members to donate to The Dave Gliddon Fund, which had been set up on the gofundme website: https://www.gofundme.com/the-dave-gliddon-fund?  It is since defunct:

Dave Gliddon was a family man who has left behind two children.  What of his two colleagues now permanently disabled?  How has the Parks Service cared for these contractors (and their dependants) doing the custodial task of Parks Service?

What has Parks Service since done to lift its safety standards?

When will National Pass be safely restored and then safely re-opened to the public?

National Pass Track repair remains closed and in the too hard basket of Parks service more two years later.

 

David Gliddon was working on making the track safe for the Parks Service when he was killed in the course of his job.

He was a Katoomba local born in Katoomba Hospital in 1981, so a Mountains native.  Since a kid his passion was for the great outdoors, and became an avid rock abseiler, climber, canyoner, rope access technician, rigger, adventurer.  He held the highest qualification for rope access work and always insisting on safety first.

His friends labelled him a “hero”.   A memorial plaque has been installed for the late David Gliddon on a footbridge along nearby Charles Darwin Walk in Wentworth Falls which he helped construct.  It simply reads: “David Gliddon Memorial.”

 

But Charles Darwin Walk has remained closed by local council since torrential rains during the East Coast Low of February 2020 – a year ago and still unrepaired.

 

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Postscript:

 

As at 2 May 2024:

Now approaching 7 years following the tragic death of Dave Gliddon on Wednesday 29th November 2017 at his place of work, we can still find no public report online about the Coroner’s findings for Dave Gliddon.  So, seems it’s not happening.

So the media’s default trailing one-liner back then at the time that “a report will be prepared for the coroner” was not just a meaningless ‘story’ closure.  It has became a media bandied clichéd phrase.

This phrase when used suggests to the public, and in this case to an interested Outdoor Recreation profession, that there will is to be a proper follow up independent coronial investigation (inquest) into Mr Gliddon’s death, and also indicates that the coroner’s findings will in due course be communicated to the deceased’s next of kin, and thereafter made available to the general public.

Didn’t happen.  None of it it seems.

So, once again upon another tragic death in the Blue Mountains outdoors, no sharing of what how why of the accident and so denying industry review of how can we learn from and mitigate such tragic events in the future so we all learn from Mr Gliddon’s death?

Would he and his family and loved ones want that at least?

Except more silence of a repeating tragic death in the Blue Mountains great outdoors.

Authorities still subsist in a 19th Century mentality that ‘shit happens’.

This means that there is no co-ordinated effort to improve the safety of Outdoor Recreation profession.

Parks Service outsourced track maintenance contractors and the general public have been denied independent explanation by the authorities about the cause(s) of this death (and we don’t forget the serious injuries sustained by his two colleagues – one losing a leg – so permanently disabled).

History is so set to repeat, sadly yet again.

What life insurance coverage did the Parks Service extend to Dave Gliddon and his crew in their high risk contract on National Pass?  Give that friends set up a GoFundMe online funding appeal for his family sounds like bugger all. How does that compare to Parks Service’s safe highrised headoffice base of CEO David Crust?   $2 million perhaps?

He gets out of the office every so often to attend ribbon cutting ceremonies join the usual suspects.

The Big Picture

 

Our beautiful Blue Mountains region in which we live and work in the great outdoors may well be in the  Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.  But it sure as hell ain’t led and managed by world’s best practice by the delegated custodial agency responsible to ‘manage’ the seven ‘national’ parks (NP) and a conservation reserve within.

These being:

1. Blue Mountains NP
2. Wollemi NP
3. Yengo NP
4. Nattai NP
5. Kanangra-Boyd NP
6. Gardens of Stone NP
7. Thirlmere Lakes NP, and
8. Jenolan Karst Conservation Reserve

 

Government at all three levels (local, state and national) is continually failing to honour its stated duty of care to properly resource, manage and protect this rare and intrinsically valuable natural region.

If the governments of the day truly cared about properly delivering of their responsible for this world heritage, Parks Service would be duly resourced with sufficient permanent public funding under an Australian national charter that would see such track maintenance work undertaken by permanent teams of staff of the Parks Service, not to desperately resort to engaging private contractors on a temporary basis like Dave Gliddon with his small crew.

All care and no responsibility eh?, CEO David Crust.

We note that the Parks Service in 2014 under Barry O’Farrell’s NSW Liberal Government initiated the forcibly eviction of public servants from its long held state headquarters at 43 Bridge Street, Hurstville north to the new Sydney urban epicentre of the Parramatta hub.

Many other department copped the same orders from Macquarie Street.  More of this developer-tied corruption deals in future other articles.

In our Tour Director’s eyes, the 2000 world heritage listing facilitated by then NSW Environment Minister Bob Debus MP back in 2000 was not to protect the stated values of Eucalypt diversity and the like to UNESCO to recognise the value of the ecology itself in its own right.

Rather, more cynically, the world heritage nomination rationale was anthropocentric and politically motivated, driven purely to secure substantial land area protection upstream of Warragamba Dam simply to secure protection for an expanded drinking water catchment to underpin an exponentially expanding populous ideal for a Greater Sydney megalopolis.

Current development trends across western Sydney confirm this theory.

The Parks Service over the years remains continually underfunded, because repeated rotating NSW governments confine Parks Service to represent token custodianship of world heritage for an environmental ‘greenwashing‘ agenda.

Charles Darwin Walk update

Four years later, some of it has been remediated and re-opened.

Since Blue Mountains Council is responsible for this track in its community land here, when one searches Google for “Charles Darwin Walk BMCC” one finds this search lead result:

But now when you the link, it’s been trashed by Blue Mountains Council to being a dead link, thus:

 

Not helpful.

We instead find that for visitors to update themselves on the current status of hiking tracks in the Blue Mountains that are situated on the raised plateau of the escarpment (typically controlled by Blue Mountains Council not by the Parks Service), to instead more reliably visit Trip Advisor’s search results.

That says everything about governmental interest in Blue Mountains tourism, eh? – to rely on the report of visitors, not by the local authorities!