Californian ski helmet law thrown out by Governor

Recent seasons have seen much publicity surrounding ski area injuries both in North America and Australia/New Zealand, and the effectiveness of wearing ski helmets. Some resorts, such as Vail (Colorado), now require their piste and off-piste ski patrols to wear helmets when on the snow.

There were strong indications that a bill (SB880) before the California state leigislators, to require helmets be worn by under eighteen year old skiers and snowboarders, may succeed. However, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed the second part of the measures, which required the California’s ski resorts to prepare annual safety plans.

Schwarzenegger believed that the resorts would have been put under an unnecessary financial and logistical pressures, particularly without any certainty that the move would bring about a reduction in ski injuries and fatalities. As Professor Jasper Shealy stated in the paper ‘Do Helmets Reduce Fatalities or Merely Alter the Patterns of Death?’ (American Society for Testing and Materials journal): “The results indicate that the use of a helmet will indeed influence the primary cause of death, but perhaps not the ultimate outcome.”

image: vail resort