Getting a grip on gritting could spare us a season of broken bones

AT 90, Dr Patricia Thomas is still tall, poised and soft-spoken. The proud holder of a PhD in organic chemistry, she plays a mean game of bridge, attends (and even takes) classes for the University of the Third Age, and lives independently in a beautiful house on the south side of Edinburgh.

She is also, incidentally, my old head-teacher. But temperatures have only to plummet before she suddenly rises, of a morning, to find herself quite imprisoned – unable to walk to the shops, reluctant even to risk the few steps across frosted paving to her fashionable little car.

‘I hate ice,’ Dr Thomas told me darkly last winter, ‘because then I can’t get out.’

For all her distinction, and decades of public service, she is as terrified of slippery pavements as any other pensioner, because in old age a bad tumble invariably means broken bones, and especially the risk of a broken hip – an accident often of life-changing impact and which few elderly women long survive.

The recent cold snap has seen A&E departments swamped with a five-fold increase in visits owing to slips on treacherous, ungritted pavements.

And you don’t have to be old to fall. In Aberdeen last week a twenty-something friend, a student from Lewis, cartwheeled spectacularly on glazed roadway and, by dawn, had been under general anaesthesia as they patched up his broken elbow.

And one evening the same week, here in Edinburgh, we had the terrifying phenomenon of frozen rain. The faint twinkle of ground-frost at your feet, come night, seems decorative – even festive. A heavy frost, crystallising parked cars and tracing rime on hedges even as your breath smokes in the Yule air, is most beautiful.

But freezing rain just hoses everything in thin, lethal – and, too often, invisible – black ice; and that particular night, last Wednesday, it took me 12 minutes to walk my two little dogs round the block we normally circle in four. Every step had to be weighed, every available handhold duly clutched, every unexpected slide (and there were several) curved carefully into a fat privet hedge or a kindly lamp-post, the leashed pooches proving unexpectedly helpful counterweights.

This has been an exceptionally cold December and many parts of Scotland, especially inland and to the north, have had icy weather for weeks.

In part, the scale of the carnage is because we are no longer used to this sort of weather. In the 1970s, weeks of hard, protracted frost – often from New Year capped with heavy snow – were the norm. Now we are ill-prepared and soft. Many of us do not have appropriate winter raiment or footwear and we are also – in our imperious times – most reluctant to change plans or cancel some excursion merely because it is freezing.

The season’s conviviality, of course, adds to the dangers and, too, very few of us know how to fall. Experienced sportsmen, cyclists and so on, instinctively go limp and loose if they slip. They tuck joints in, roll through the tumble and rarely emerge with more than minor contusions. Only the young and daft walk in treacherous conditions with both hands in their pockets.

Victims

Yet, on average, 50 people a year die in Britain from slipping on ice or snow, from young children to stately grandparents. Wintry pavements have claimed even famous victims, such as Dr Robert Atkins of fad-diet fame. In an awful Lewis tragedy last winter, a pensioner tumbled on ice outside his home, and his wife appears to have collapsed while trying to help him. By dawn, both had quietly frozen to death.

You would think, then, that when Jack Frost drops by and lingers for some days, that local authorities would make a point of keeping paving salted and ice-free.

But the position is fragmented. The very streets, even in our great cities, are only gritted – for the most part – if buses run along them.

Some councils clear pavements of snow and frost; some only clear certain pavements; some do not attend to pavements at all.

It used to be widely understood that individual householders or shopkeepers should conscientiously sweep their own patch of pavement each day, but during our last really hard winter (the protracted chill of 2010-11) word spread that if you do so you could then be held liable in law for anyone taking a tumble on it.

John McQuater, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, declared: ‘If you do nothing you cannot be liable. If you do something, you could be liable to a legal action.’

Clare Marx, past president of the British Orthopaedic Association, retorted: ‘If people want to clear pavements, they should just do it.

‘I would have thought it’s a public service and it is a shame we have ended up with a culture where if someone slips, they want to sue someone. People need a bit of grit, in both senses.’

By the time the thaw came, she and her weary associates had fixed tens of thousands of broken bones.

It is most unlikely – at least, in Scotland – that you could be taken to the cleaners for kindly de-icing your path, but it is now widely believed. And it is soon dispiriting to hack away at your own stretch of impacted snow when many other neighbours do not bother.

Indeed, a general decline in neighbourliness is a big part of the problem. Dr Thomas is a fortunate exception – she served on her local residents association for many years and is well known on her street – but, typically, the elderly, single or widowed woman in Scottish suburbia has no one watching out for her or prepared to take a few minutes to clear her path and scatter salt from the council tub at the corner.

Local authorities dread protracted wintry weather because it is something for which they can never reliably budget and it is difficult to store very large quantities of road-salt – which, after all, dissolves in rain. The Scottish Borders Council website is stark. ‘We don’t routinely presalt footpaths or pavements. We have to prioritise major roads rather than pavements to prevent the most serious accidents.

‘Gritting of pavements will only be carried out when snow or severe icy conditions are forecast. Pavements in main shopping areas and busy urban areas will be treated as a priority. We encourage householders and businesses to help themselves by clearing snow and ice from public areas near their properties.’

Are you really at risk of being sued? According to the council: ‘The prospect of a person who has cleared snow from their pavement being successfully sued by someone who has subsequently slipped on that pavement is very small.

‘The snow-clearer has a duty to ensure that they clear the pavement with reasonable care so that they do not create a new or worse risk. As long as... the resident has improved the condition of the pavement and made it safer to walk on than before it was cleared, they should not be liable if someone slips.’

Policy

But the wider picture is chaotic and absurd, and a situation where, surely, the Scottish parliament could exert some useful leadership. There should be a firm national policy on the clearing of snow and ice from footpaths, unambiguous legislation – and, of course, funding.

Only last year, jetting to the Arctic Circle Assembly in Iceland, Nicola Sturgeon and a pet MP handed over a cool £1million for yet another climate-change wheeze – or, more accurately, money to fund a junket for people to talk about climate-change wheezes – and which Finance Secretary Derek Mackay had somehow dug up from the back of Scotland’s couch.

There is far too much of this sort of high-minded grandstanding and not nearly enough practical SNP thinking about immediate realities on actual Scottish streets.

So that, come freeze or snow, our widows and grandmothers and maiden aunts can still step safely forth of a morning for their paper, a blether and some cat-food – or the rest of us can make that brisk late-night dogwalk without feeling like we’re Hannibal crossing the Alps.