Safety last: Cutting corners and hanging by a thread

If illusionist David Blaine had been with me that afternoon, I swear he would have had to go home to change his shorts.

What I witnessed on Jl. Rasuna Said in South Jakarta was an outrageously dangerous act, performed by either a very brave local worker or an absolute moron with no sense of personal safety.

Granted, the act was probably not as sensational as David's stunt of standing inside an ice dome for a week, exiting alive if a little bluer. But if something went wrong during my sidewalk show, the result would have been greater than a touch of frostbite or a case of pneumonia.

After the massive storm that swept our way a few weeks back, the governor of this wonderful city was thoughtful enough to organize some workers to excessively prune all the big trees, including along the aforementioned main street in Kuningan.

That was when I saw the worker clinging to a tree stump about three meters tall on the median. The man was above the ground, both of his legs clutching the base of the stump while his right hand tightly hugged the top of the stump. No ropes to secure him, no helmet, no safety jacket, not even a pair of gloves (Thankfully, he did not have on sandals, like so many road and construction workers).

He was cutting the stump with the chain saw inward, the blade of the saw humming noisily toward his chest. Struggling with the heavy machine, he switched off the chain saw when the sharp edge was about five centimeters from him, and handed down the tool to another worker on the ground, blade first.

With his bare hands, he continued trying to break the section of the stump he had almost cut off. About five people, including someone I took to be his supervisor, watched him from the ground.

Instead of cutting down the tree from the base, pruning the branches, then cutting the stem into sections, the worker did all of the work while the tree was still standing. Perhaps he did not want to cause any further traffic disturbance, and his own safety was a secondary priority to those of motorists. His supervisor obviously could care less.

As a passive bystander, I did not know whether I should laugh or cry. Is life so cheap in this country, and concern for it so lacking?

From my background in forestry, I know that planting fast- growing trees on the city's medians is already a brainless move; they create a lot of shade but their stems and branches are weak, so they cannot be considered windbreakers.

While the price of their seedlings is very cheap, one who sows them will reap broken windshields in a storm, and probably a few broken backs among poorly equipped clean-up crews.

It's not only workers' safety on the job that is given short shrift in this country. A window cleaner here, despite the risk entailed in his work, earns a fraction of the wage of his counterparts from Sydney, such as the well-dressed guy I met in a hotel lobby here. He told me he cleans the windows of skyscrapers in his home city for three months, then uses his earnings to go on an exotic vacation.

As for a local window cleaner, he could barely afford the entrance fee to Ancol Theme Park once every three months.

But we proceed on our merry, unthinking ways. It's a daily sight on the toll road to see a group of men, unprotected by any safety device, fixing gigantic street signboards, gripping for dear life to the metal poles 20 meters above a very busy street.

Is life cheaper than the seedling of a strong tree? Is life cheaper than a safety manual or a piece of strong rope?

Or, perhaps, it's an ingenious way for our decision-makers to provide spectacles of derring-do, performed by unprotected workers, to be viewed and laughed at from the new TransJakarta Busway. After all, the cost of the bus fare is still cheaper than one of David Blaine's show tickets.

-- Aida Greenbury