Parking Live

“A Little Intervention Can Save a Life”: Parking Safety in the Built Environment

• Modaxo • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Show Notes:

In this episode of Parking Live, hosts Jade Neville and Matt Darst sit down with Russell Simmons—one of the most respected voices in car park/garage design and construction. As founder of Stripe Consulting and CEO of Ballast Nedam UK, Russell has spent his career improving safety and raising standards across the built environment.

From mitigating fire risks in aging structures to designing around opportunities for self-harm, Russell shares how thoughtful engineering and operational measures can literally save lives. He also discusses the challenges of balancing cost, regulation, and innovation in a sector where safety is often underfunded and misunderstood.

This episode offers practical insights for designers, operators, and policymakers alike—and highlights why car parks deserve the same attention to safety and design as other public infrastructure.

⚠️ Content Warning:

This episode includes discussions of suicide, self-harm, and references to tragic events such as Grenfell. Please listen with care.


🔹 Credits 

Parking Live is a production of Modaxo, passionate about moving the world’s people.


Hosts & Producers — Jade Neville and Matt Darst

Executive Producer — Julie Gates

Producer & Editor — Chris O’Keeffe

Associate Producer — Cyndi Raskin

Recording Engineer & Editor — Patrick Emile

Brand Design — Tina Olagundoye


🔹 Disclaimer (standard)

The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Modaxo Inc., its affiliates or subsidiaries, or any entities they represent. This production belongs to Modaxo and may contain information subject to trademark, copyright, or other intellectual-property rights and restrictions. This production provides general information and should not be relied on as legal advice or opinion. Modaxo specifically disclaims all warranties, express or implied, and will not be liable for any losses, claims, or damages arising from the use of this presentation, from any material contained in it, or from any action or decision taken in response to it.

Today we're joined by Russell Simmons, one of the most respected voices in car park design and construction. Russell is the founder of Stripe Consulting and currently serves as CEO of Ballast Nedam UK, where he's grown the parking division from the ground up. He is also longtime chair of the British Parking Association Parking Structures Group, and leads national initiatives focused on suicide prevention and fire safety in car parks. He's an award-winning leader, a chartered construction manager, and someone who's spent his career turning overlooked spaces into safer ones. So my first question's a bit about origin story, so getting to know a bit about how you got here. So Russell, you've been at the center of car park design and safety conversations for over a decade. What first drew you to this specific corner of the built environment? Yeah, I think most people say they kind of get into parking accidentally. And I suppose I was no different in that respect because originally I was focused on being in the insurance sector so like, looking within built environment, but looking at existing buildings with problems, you know, insured loss problems, and then working out how to fix them and bring them back to life. That was something I was really interested in doing. And then that led to being involved in a local authority car park where they were trying to prolong the servicable life of it. It was, it'd been condemned more or less, and they were trying to eek more life out of it and I was involved in team trying work out how to do that. And I found really, really interesting and rewarding, 'cause we were trying find these areas of how to fix problems and deliver value and not, you know, not result in the local authority having to spend millions of pounds on a new building. And we were successful at it. And so it was really, really rewarding in that sense. We managed to save this building and to help the town out in terms of like all of the trades that go on there, the retailers, et cetera, the people that live there visit there. So that was really rewarding and I thought, this is really good. If I could do, if I could make this, you know, if I could make this a job outta this then that would be great, I'd have loads of fun doing it. So we held an open day for local authorities to come and visit and see what we'd done at this town carpark. And from that we, we got sort of three or four councils that were interested in listening to us as to how we'd done it and how we could perhaps replicate it and what we'd done for them. And we were able to do that. And we just haven't stopped since really, it's just kept going for 16 odd years or something. So that's how it really started. It kind of started by accident and then you know, I didn't necessarily go through school thinking, oh, hopefully one day I'll get into parking, you know, and I'll be able to look at car parks forever, you know, but it just kind of happened and it was extremely rewarding. It's part of the public realm and part of the, you know, public infrastructure. So your, you direct, if you do a good job with a car park from a built in environment point of view, then people's lives are kind of impacted positively, or if you get it wrong negatively. So, although it's parking and people do look down at it sometimes, especially in my world of, you know, architecture and engineering, it's really important and it can be a make or break for a town or a city or whatever. And then we just sort of rolled, rolled that out really in terms of expanding to include architecture. I'm not an architect. I'm a chartered construction manager and I'm a chartered building engineer, but I'm not an architect. I wouldn't profess to be. But, we provide architectural services here and we expanded the company to include those kind of services and electrical engineering services and mechanical engineering services, that sort of stuff. And now provide a kind of turnkey one-stop shop, multidisciplinary survey and design practice for that core subject. So, yeah, by accident is the answer. Russell, it seems like a lot of what you're doing is designing to change behavior. That's a big shift, right? From the traditional electrical and mechanical engineering to kind of move into that space. Could you describe that a little bit for us? When you're involved in something and you want to be considered very good at that, and you want to, you know, you want to be a kind of natural choice for a service provision within a space, then of course it's natural I think that you want to pull the market up as well. You wanna pull standards up with you. And this has a lot to do with the British Parking Association, actually, and the people I've met there because the BPAs background is all, or for me at least, has always been about improving standards and improving the market and just not just maintaining, not just sort of leveling off, but improving and increasing standards. So everything, everything i was involved in and was touching at the BPA was all about how do we improve this? How do we mitigate that? How do we, you know, drive standards up and that sort of thing. And so it became kind of part and parcel of what we do here is just try and look for opportunities to improve things. And in our world, that means improving the built environment. So things like, for example, reducing the chance of people harming themselves in car parks. Car parks became, you know, have become a bit of a target for those intent on hurting themselves or thinking they want to hurt themselves to go to a car park. And that's a real shame 'cause I'm in the business of dealing with car parks from a sort of maintenance point of view and from a design point of view. So I don't want to be part of that. I don't want to be part of enabling people to hurt themselves. So I want to actually reduce that chance. So you start looking into, well, how can we do that? And one of the ways we can do it is by utilizing the BPA and its contacts. And the other professional associations I'm involved in, the Institution of Structural engineers, Civil Engineers, Association of Building Engineers, all these people and just, you know, using those as conduits if you like, or enablers to try and bring about positive change and bring about improvement in the way we do things. The other part of that probably is the people that I've associated with over the years. There's a chap called Chris Waples, who is the guy that originally got me into sort of working groups and sort of special interest groups. And he is, in my opinion, the kind of model professional. You know, building professional, construction professional in so much as a lot of what he does is about general good and about general improvement and not about, you know, serving your own practice or serving your own situation. It's about creating a better environment for everybody and improving the standards regardless of commercial gain or otherwise. So he's a real role model for me, frankly, as to how you can conduct yourself and how you can commit yourself to tasks which don't necessarily instantly result in personal gain, you know? So yeah, I'm very fortunate to have been around a lot of very, very, what I would call, you know, excellent professionals and how they conduct themselves and how they carry out their business. And Chris is a good example of that. Russell, we touched on, you touched on suicide prevention there, so if I could go into a little bit more about that subject and you also chair, the suicide prevention group within the BPA, and that's not something that many people associate with parking infrastructure. Can you share a bit about the role design plays in harm prevention? I really like the opportunity to talk about this, so thanks very much for enabling me to do so, and I talk about it as often as I can. As I said earlier, the car parks can be associated with facilitating people wanting to hurt themselves, and it's just when it's your building type and it's your specialism. As with colleagues who specialize in rail, for example as well, I know that there's a lot of really good people doing amazing work there. When your building type, your specialism is associated, potentially associated with a negative, then you know, the natural urge is, I think to mitigate that and to improve it. We get quite close to operators, people who operate car parks. They're often our clients and or certainly people that we work, you know, they're certainly stakeholders in what we do as people who are employed to improve park car parks or design them from new, and when they are facing operational challenges or they are facing operational situations where they become aware that people are there trying to hurt themselves, then of course, it enters our radar as built environment people. So we then start looking at, well, how can we mitigate that? And the working group that I'm, that I do chair on this subject, it's gone way beyond certainly just built environment in terms of physical barriers, for example, fencing and all the rest of it. We then start to look at operational measures that you can take to mitigate. And it's opened up, it's opened my eyes up to a whole, you know, a whole sort of array of things that you can do to mitigate that risk and to help people out when they really need it. And what's become clear to me is a little bit of intervention, a little bit of, the introduction of some space and time for people to slightly consider whether or not they really need to go to that extent of trying to hurt themselves. Can be enough to prevent that from happening and then enable that person to get proper help and then they go on and live, you know, very fulfilling lives for them and those around them. So it's incredible when you think about it, that putting a fence up or putting a camera up or having a member of staff on site or some lighting or some planting or, you know, landscaping could actually save somebody's life and, you know, the impact that, and save the impact, the negative impact that that one incident might have to hundreds of people as well. Bearing in mind the impact that these incidents do have on people, not just directly, but indirectly as well. So, yeah, it's a really active group. It's really well attended by a whole range of people, operators, designers, contractors, every kind of aspect really, of the parking industry. Have you Russell, seen the industry change as a result of some of this work? Specifically, I'm wondering if the UK building codes have caught up to some of the suggestions that you're making in the field or whether there's specific BPA guidance about that, and how you improve upon the safety challenges in car parks. It just strikes me as we're talking that it seems like some of the lessons could even be maybe taken and applied to other modes of transportation, like bridges or mass transit stations. Yeah, definitely. So there's a lot of work being done in the rail industry I know, and this is some excellent work being done there by sort of colleagues that specialize in that sector. For us, the sort of British standard or should we say, the approved documents, which, really are a set of documents, which state how you can adhere to your legal obligation when designing buildings haven't really, in my opinion, caught up with the current situation, which is the, a barrier that is 1.1 meters high isn't necessarily enough to safeguard people within the car park. And so that is potentially in conflict, in my opinion, with statute, which is that you've got an obligation in the UK. I'm not sure what it's like elsewhere in the world, but in the UK you've got an obligation at point of law to look after people in the car park, whether they be there lawfully or otherwise. So if somebody happens to be in your car park, even if they're not really supposed to be there, you do still have a duty of care to look after 'em. They shouldn't really run the risk of being able to get hurt, you know, disproportionately. So if you are sort of 10 stories up, in an area where vulnerable people might be, you know, say for example, in a, near a hospital with a mental health care unit, for example, there would be lots of vulnerable people in that area. If you've then got a building that's very high and it only has an edge protection barrier of 1100 millimeters, that's possibly not gonna be enough. It's entirely plausible to think that might not be enough. And yet technically that is compliant with the approved documents. So the advice that we wrote about in the Institution of Structural Engineers recommendations last year on car park design it talks about taking a risk-based approach. And this is also the advice that the British Parking Association have adopted correctly in my opinion. And I was obviously part of that group that suggested we adopt those recommendations all about risk-based approach. So you look at each circumstance individually and you work out what the risk is and you work out what the mitigation might be, and then you design accordingly. So I think good design always, you know, considers specific circumstances and doesn't just go to a book, picks a number and applies the number. I think good design should look at the circumstance, user group, the exposure and how, you know, what the reality is in terms of risk exposure, and then how to mitigate that through a whole range of methods. It isn't just a case of putting up higher barriers around the car park. Could be, but it isn't necessarily just that. There could be a load of operational measures as well. Physical intervention, staff, cameras, geofencing and things like that where, you know, where you can have AI actually driving via camera systems. You can have AI enabled software driving alerts to raise, you know, concern about unusual activity, et cetera. All these kind of things can be done. So to answer your question, I don't think the law, so to speak, or the regulations are sufficient in terms of saying how high a barrier should be. But when you look at the Occupiers Liability Act, it does talk about the fact that you have an obligation to make sure that people are safe. And in my opinion, that is absolutely right. Designers and operators should really focus on that obligation and ensuring they meet that. And in my opinion, that should be via risk assessed approach so that all things are considered and the design is then correctly put in place. And you have to work with good designers who understand the methods available to them and understand which ones have to be adopted and how they've adopted. But simply just going to the minimum requirement in order to tick a box for building regulations is, doesn't go far enough in my opinion. It is certainly not a one size fits all approach in that sense. It has to be looked at in an individual basis, 'cause every one of these structures are gonna be different in their own ways. They're gonna have different pressures around them in terms of society as well is gonna be, everything's gonna have a change in landscape. So yeah, it's so important that that level of detail has gone into, and that risk assessment approach and risk based approach is going to be the, is the way forward. When it, when you're looking at something like designing car parks and structures, for sure. That's exactly what we did when we changed how often you should be looking at a building structurally as well. We changed that to a risk-based approach some years ago via the Institution of Civil Engineers and their recommendations when we were involved in rewriting that. We went from prescribed years, and we changed that to being risk-based. So you look at the situation, you look at the building type, you look at the condition, you look at the degradation, and then you set out your stall in terms of how often you need to be checking things. Much like, you know, when cars used to be. Every year you must have it serviced. And then it went to variable interval servicing. So, you know, the car was clever enough to work out the where and the kind of quality of life it had. If it was being bashed about the place, it might decide that it needs to be serviced sooner rather than, you know, if it was being looked after and driven very carefully and smoothly, it might have a longer interval between services. And it's exactly the same with buildings. Need to look at it case by case and on a risk-based approach, as you say. You've led conversations about fire risk in parking structures, especially with the rise of EVs. What's the biggest misconceptions you see in how fire safety is approached in legacy builds? So, I'm involved in a working group. We are looking at fire risk in car parks. We don't necessarily state that it's just about electric vehicles, but of course that is part of it, because there are more electric vehicles around and we don't, in my opinion, know enough about them in order to fully understand what the risk is. We, my view on this is that it isn't necessarily more risk, and I sort of keep away from saying electric vehicles are riskier than anything else. But I do state and suggest that the risk is different and that when you have a building that was designed to store things or if you have a container that was designed to store things and you change the things that you are storing in the container, then it follows, you know, simple logic that you should reconsider whether that container is capable of storing the things that you're putting in it. So a lot of the buildings, certainly in the UK, there was a boom, you know, for multi story car parks in the sort of sixties and seventies. And back then they were generally speaking, designed to contain petrol cars. And petrol cars were a bit smaller and they're a bit lighter, and petrol had a certain way of behaving in a fire. And then the biggest change really was diesel came along, and you know, diesel became not just used in lorries, but it became used in everyday cars and all of a sudden lots and lots of cars were diesel powered. And that burns very differently in a fire. It reacts very differently. It can also has more chance of flowing, being oil-based. It can flow and you can have fire moving around a car park as opposed to sort of whether it exploded or whatever. So it just, it just acts differently. Is it more risky? Probably not, but it's definitely a different risk. It acts differently. Plastic started being used a lot more on cars since the sixties and seventies. Is it more risk? Maybe, but it's certainly different. Cars became bigger, heavier. So again, the risk profile's changing. All of a sudden electric vehicles come along. So we've got batteries now, and this is not even considering charging them in a carpark, but certainly having a lithium ion, a big lithium ion battery in a car park different to having a petrol powered car from the sixties in a car park. It's just different. So the principle requirements of the approved documents, et cetera, are that, you know, you need to be able to get people out of a building and not create a hazard for those in the building or around the building. So you don't want the car park to collapse on. Itself or on something else, if that's gonna be putting anybody's life at risk, it's all about preservation of life. So, misconceptions in that space. I think people think electric vehicles are super dangerous if they're in a car park or some people do. I don't think that's necessarily true at all. Some people think that charging electric cars in car parks is really dangerous. I don't necessarily think that's entirely true. I think that these things can be, the change in risk can be dealt with and accommodated and mitigated. And certainly some work we did fairly recently with the EPA European Parking Association was we produced a toolbox on how to introduce, and that was electric vehicle charging admittedly, but how you could introduce charging infrastructure in existing buildings, whilst mitigating any potential changing risk. And there was, you know, there's a whole range of things available to you, to the designer, to the operator, how to mitigate any change in risk by introducing EV charging infrastructure. So there, there are ways of doing it. Again, the key is to assess the risk, understand, acknowledge the risk, and then mitigate it correctly using all the tools that you can in an efficient way. And that goes with anything. It's not just fire, that goes with absolutely anything. As we've already talked about structure and, you know, suicide prevention as well. Same sort of thing. So I think bottom line is we don't necessarily say that electric vehicles going into existing car parks is a no-no. But we do say that modern cars, not just electric, but modern cars do pose a different risk profile to car parks than cars of decades gone by. They're larger, heavier, they burn in a different way, especially if they do have batteries in them, they burn in a different way. And you need to be aware of that and you need to accommodate that when you are doing your fire risk assessment. At the BPA, we acknowledge the fact that we did a bit of research locally and we found that a lot of people don't have up to date fire risk assessments in place. And getting a fire risk assessment in place that is done by somebody who is competent to do that and understands and acknowledges the risk profile that we've just talked about is really the key task. So, yeah, I would always tell everybody, make sure your fire risk assessment is up to and it is comprehensive and it is completed by somebody who should be completing it. And we have released a guidance note on how to go about procuring virus assessments and how often you should do that, et cetera. So I would encourage anybody to obtain that document and read it, you know, whilst, before, or during when they are procuring a fire risk assessment. And once you've done the assessment, read all of the recommendations and the mitigations that needed to be done and put them in place. Are there any emerging materials or design adaptations that you're seeing as being maybe the newest, best way of addressing this changing risk profile, as you noted? Yeah, there's lots. I mean, this has happened super fast, by the way. You know, we as a construction industry, certainly in the UK, we're not the fastest, you know, of adapting to things. So, electric vehicle introduction has been really quick and it takes a long time to update infrastructure. You know, a car park can take, you know, three years to plan and build. So when you look at how quickly electric vehicles have come out, you you can't really keep up with it. Not realistically. It does take time to work through, unfortunately, that's just the way it is. However, there are lots of really clever things going on at the moment in terms of fire risk mitigation, including whether or not they're proved to be appropriate or effective, but things like fire separation, curtains, fire suppression blankets, misting systems as opposed to full sprinkler systems. A misting based system to keep temperature down and to keep the area possible so that it can be evacuated. And it doesn't necessarily pose as much a risk to the structural, yeah, structure in terms of structural collapse, et cetera. Early alert systems, so early detection and raising an alarm much quicker, maybe through much cleverer CCTV or sensor-based systems as opposed to a more traditional break glass or heat detection type system. So there's a lot going on in terms of coming up with products and solutions that will mitigate these potential risks. It just takes time to catch up because it's just been so quick. The rollout of electric vehicles into the UK and I'm sure international, parking infrastructure's been so quick that there's gonna be this lag where, you know, solutions have to catch up with the issue. In terms of the overall safety in car park, so we're looking at things like we are considering fire, we're considering suicide prevention. when it comes to regulation and funding, do you think, do you think safety in parking structures gets enough attention or is it still a bit of an invisible issue? I don't think it gets enough attention. Unfortunately, the way these buildings are often funded is, cost is important and the cost of construction really features in every design team meeting. You know, the impact on a design decision for the project is talked about an awful lot. And so making a building as risk free as possible or as you know, as safe as possible, isn't necessarily objective. The objective is often building a building to budget that meets minimum requirements, which is a shame because designers like us want to, you know, do a fantastic job. But of course it's not our money that we're spending. And our clients often put us under pressure to not necessarily build exemplar projects or build cutting edge, sort of boundary pushing buildings It's often we need to adhere to minimum standards to make the building as financially viable as possible. That gets in the way. But you've gotta be, you know, we've gotta be real about it and say, well, how many, uh, pension funds out there really want to invest more money than they need to, to get returns to make a building a bit safer. The onus is partly on us as designers to encourage 'em to do that and to Use worked examples, why investing in safety is a good, a good thing to do and it'll create a better building, which will ultimately bring better returns possibly. So yeah, I mean one of the ways we've attacked this in the past is by discussing things with the insurance sector.'Cause they're very fast to move and they understand about risk reduction and risk exposure and certainly that seems to be a much more straightforward process versus legislation or, you know, changing the law in terms of minimum requirements. In some situations, it might be an insurance company actually drives the need as opposed to it being a legal requirement So, yeah, I think more can be done. I'm always trying to do it. I'm trying to encourage other people to help me do it as well. A lot of people do help me do it. There's a lot of other people out there pushing for this as well. The professional bodies, which are all driven by their members and steering groups. So yeah, it's ongoing all the time. And construction, you know, built environment is a changing landscape. You know, you think you've perfected it and then someone brings out something different, so you have to adapt and change. And so it's never ending. You're just constantly trying to understand the risks and design, or enable people to design appropriate ways to mitigate the risks so that the public can go about their lives in a safe as safer way as they reasonably can. The cost of building car parks, maintaining car parks, keeping going for longer is obviously quite a large factor. You and I would be familiar, the UK listeners would be familiar with Grenfell and what happened there in terms of cladding and the risk of that poste to fire spreading and being able to put it out. Is there a risk that that could emulate in the parking world as well? When we are trying to say face to put a facelift on a old car-, a concrete, car park structure. Are we looking at the type of cladding that is being used for these situations, or are we not that far ahead yet? Yeah, we've been looking at the type of cladding we use on these buildings, you know, forever. Grenfell was obviously a unbelievably horrific, you know, tragedy. But, it doesn't really translate into the car park world. Generally speaking, cladding on car parks is there for aesthetical purposes and not to insulate the building firmly. So, it is, you know fortunately, in all the car parks I've been involved in, whether they've already been built or we've been designing them, there isn't a similar type of risk profile to a residential building, which has a thermal insulation cladding panel, fixed to it. So we, yeah, as designers, we do carefully think about what cladding we're putting on the buildings. There is a requirement to increase the structural capability of a building if the ventilation of a building is lower than a certain figure. So we carefully calculate that to ensure that the ventilation, you know, is all as it should be. And we'd also consider through fire engineering, et cetera, the potential for fire spread and for the cladding itself to catch fire in the first place. That's all really considered. I mean, the biggest change since Grenfell, which is welcomed really is associated with a Building Safety Act, which has changed the way we go about obtaining Building Control sign-off. It used to be that Building Control inspectors would almost be used as a checking engineer and if they approved, if they approved a material use for a design then that was deemed by the client team to be fine, acceptable, that's okay. Building Control signed it off, we are good. Whereas nowadays, and I'm sort of simplifying this process an awful lot but since the building Safety Act changes have come in the onus is very, very much on the design team to own the design, design it accordingly, and to prove to Building Control Department that it does comply with building control standards and building regulation standards. Good news. Definitely good news. If you had a magic wand and could implement one immediate change to improve safety across car parks in the UK or globally, what would it be? Whoa. I could be specific or I could be, uh, I could be general. Maybe I should be may, maybe. Uh, well, there we go. But I would say that everybody in charge of these buildings responsible, which is specified by law, you can be identified as the person responsible for these buildings. I would, my magic wand would result in those people becoming aware of the recommendations that are already out there and how to mitigate and combat the risks that they face, because there's an awful lot of really good work done by loads of really clever professionals to produce literature recommendations, which is already out there. So the difficult bit really is us connecting the really robust, decent recommendations, which are produced by, as I say, excellent professionals who are very knowledgeable and know what they're up to, connecting that resource and that knowledge to the people in a position making decisions on how to look after these buildings. If we were able to connect those two things and they were to adhere to the recommendations, then I think the world would be a much safer place and we would have far fewer, you know, far fewer sort of out of control situations. You're never gonna get to a world where you're risk free. That's never, that's just not practical. Doesn't happen. It's, you know, perfection is not, is never for sale and perfection is not obtainable really. But you're looking to reduce risk as far as you reasonably can. And, there's a lot of ways that you can do that. And I would say that not many weeks go by that I'm not walking around a car park where I think something could be done here quite reasonably, in accordance with existing recommendations and industry guidance, which is already out there, which would make this building safer and better. So yeah, probably a bit of a general answer to that. But I would say putting, yeah, giving people responsible for these buildings, the knowledge that is already out there, connecting those two dots, and I think that would, that'd be a huge improvement then. Would you mind after we've finished this recording to share whatever resources you've got and we can link it to the podcast when we release it to try and get it as far out as we possibly can?'cause I'm sure there's stuff that our US listeners can learn from as well. Other work you're doing. You are the magic wand. Jade. Hold on. Yay. I've been called worse. I've definitely been called worse. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Fantastic. Great. Matt, do you have any other questions for Russell? No, no. Russell, thank you so much. This has really been enlightening and I appreciate it. Yeah. It's been said. Is there anything else, Russell, that you wanna use this platform to highlight in terms of car park safety and with the built environment? No, other than what I just said, really, that, you know, I would encourage everybody the information is out there and there's, I say there's some excellent professionals out there doing a lot of work to research and produce literature and guidance on, on how to deal with risk associated with fire, edge protection, you know, other operational risks, and the recommendations are all out there, you know, utilization of risk assessments, utilization of life care plans, which are a sort of dynamic way of ensuring that the asset and the car park is maintained and safe for use. All of that stuff is out there. So I would encourage anybody who's either involved in managing one of these facilities or building one of these facilities or works for somebody who manages them, you know, raise the question and suggest, you know, are we doing all that we should be doing? Could be doing with regard to reducing risk here? Are we in a position of knowledge? Do we understand the building, how it's working, its risks, in order for us to adequately mitigate those risks? And if you know, that is the culture that will lead to an increased amount of safety and reduced number of out of control issues occurring. So yeah, that's what I would encourage everyone to do, for sure. And if, yeah, I think you know, enabling me to have this conversation with you is really appreciated. And, if somebody hears it and does something positive about it, then fantastic. You know, we've achieved something. So it's great. So I appreciate the time. No. Great. No, thanks for, thanks for being on the podcast, Russell. We really appreciate it and your expertise and your knowledge as Matt said earlier, definitely under, under sung, from yourself in terms of the impact you're having on this industry. So, thank you. Thank you for everything you do, and thank you for being on the podcast as well. We really appreciate it. It's very much appreciated. Thank you, Jade. Thank you, Matthew. No worries.

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Jade Neville

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Matt Darst

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