When a combination of exceptional circumstances and a ‘well-meant’ but, in the end, ‘ill-advised intervention’ resulted in unimaginable grief
What happened?
Please note this case study is more than 500 words.
Ten Tors is an annual weekend challenging hike in early May, on Dartmoor. It is organised by the British Army, started in 1960, and brings together teams of six young people aged between 14 and 20, with the 2,400 young participants hiking to checkpoints on ten specified tors, covering distances of 35, 45 or 55 miles. Entrants are schools, colleges, scout groups and cadet squadrons from the south west.
In early March 2007, a 14 year-old schoolgirl from Edgehill College in Bideford, North Devon, was training for the event, trekking the route. The girl’s group was assigned a teacher from her college designated the ‘team manager’. All team managers undergo compulsory training, run by the Army and the Dartmoor Rescue Group, which involves trekking the route themselves.
There had been heavy rain, causing rivers and streams on Dartmoor to swell much higher than their normal levels. The girl’s group came to Walla Brook in north-east Dartmoor, which had swollen to approximately five times its normal size. The group believed they had to cross because the alternative route would add at least four miles to the trek. The team manager, who was not with them, had advised that the group should not try to cross the stream, and should wait for an adult to accompany them, but a scoutmaster who was in the area was concerned that the group needed to keep moving due to the risk of exposure to the cold. He contacted the team manager on a mobile phone, then tried to lead them across the stream. The scoutmaster has since died.
A member of the group got into difficulties crossing the stream. She removed her rucksack and passed it to the girl. The girl was the last member of the group, and was throwing the rucksack across, but she slipped and fell into the water. She was knocked unconscious and swept downstream.
She was located twenty minutes later, 150m downstream, by a Royal Navy search and rescue helicopter and airlifted to a hospital in Plymouth, where she died in the early hours of the next morning. The cause of death was later established as cardiac arrest as a result of drowning.
The CPS reported that there was insufficient evidence to press charges. In 2012, the girl’s mother sued Edgehill College and the teacher leading the expedition (team manager) for negligence, claiming £350,000.
Legal Outcome
At the inquest, the coroner gave several recommendations for future activities of a similar nature. Among the recommendations were suggestions that both participants and the adult team leaders should receive better training.
The High Court judgement found that the teacher had given clear instructions that the group should not attempt to cross Walla Brook but should instead go round it. It found that the intervention of a passerby (the scoutmaster), who suggested that the group could cross the brook, had meant that the school could not be held responsible for the accident. It said that the failure of two teachers to meet up with the group as planned was not incompetence. The judge therefore rejected the claim.
The responsibility lay with a scoutmaster, who had met the youngsters on the moor and tried to help them by directing them across the brook. The judge concluded the accident was the consequence of this ‘well-meant but ill-advised’ intervention.
In 2013, the girl’s mother also lost her appeal for damages against the school.
What can we learn from what happened?
This case rests on a combination of exceptional circumstances (the challenge faced by the event, the weather leading up to the event causing the stream to swell, and the conditions on the day causing the students to be at risk of hypothermia), and to what degree the outcome was foreseeable.
The judges in both cases agreed that the teacher, acting as team manager, could not have foreseen the outcome, and had done everything reasonable to stop the group from crossing the stream. The scoutmaster took a different view, a view that in the end held sway, and led to the girl’s death, but even he could not have reasonably foreseen that the girl would not just fall, but would be knocked unconscious, and would be swept away to her death.
While the event is meant to be challenging and a test of resilience and fitness, this outcome should never have happened and was preventable. It was, however, a combination of exceptional circumstances and unforeseen consequences, and in law nobody was to blame. Except potentially the scoutmaster, but we will now never hear his side of this tragic story.
The event still continues every year, there is now a statue in the girl’s former school commemorating her. And her mother has written a book about her death and her story of loss and survival.
Source of Information
BBC News Online
Wikipedia and Ten Tors website for additional detail about the event
A Testament of Grief by Jennifer Wilkin Shaw