- Digger
- Northern UK
- 18 Jul 2005
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4,743
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Yes it's called the "Numpty factor", it has also been displayed when a certain city in California was flattened by an earthquake and foolishly the people decided to re build the city in exactly the same location plum on the centre of the San Andreas fault line!! . The same Numpty factor however cannot be used to describe the Japanese islands as they have no alternative areas to build upon. California has lost many properties due to bush fires.
The Numpty Factor scale goes from zero to 20, zero being very sensible and twenty being the work of a total Numpty. Many town planners and local councillors have given ridiculous permissions for building in all sorts of stupid places, this means that on balance the odds of a local councillor in the UK being above ten on the Numpty factor scale is about 95%. In the particular location where i live we are blessed with many miles of underground redundant coal mine shafts and vent shafts, accurate records of their exact locations are kept by the NCB as is their obligation, local officers responsible for planning permissions are (or should be) well aware of the location of these potentially lethal underground chasms, however several years ago in these parts hereabouts, some residents of an area called Hard Platts awoke one morning to find their lovely new garages and motor cars, were all down at the bottom of the collapsed mineshaft they had stupidly built their garages on.
So whilst we can draw comparison with building on flood plains in the UK (a very common occurence) and building residences in fire zones in Australia (where they have a massive surplus of building land), the Numpty Factor is also used to explain building on massive well know well documented big massive hard to miss fault lines, and of course the same term is used when people agree to build dwellings over ancient but well mapped coal mine shafts, that are abundant beneath lancashires rolling countryside.
digger 
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