Volunteers from the army, air force, police, ambulance service, coastguard and fire and rescue services have completed a challenge that has seen them climb, walk and abseil the height of Mount Everest using a tower crane.

The event, organised by High Access Rescue Team (HART) Ltd, saw 20 volunteers undertake the challenge in aid of Help for Heroes, the charity that supports wounded servicemen and women. They were required to climb the 45m tower crane, walk 45m along the jib and then abseil 45m back to the ground.

They completed the challenge of continuously abseiling the height of 9,120m (29,921ft) in 19 hours and 38 minutes.

Donald Ritchie, from HART, said the event was beset by torrential rain that hit at 4am, but the teams carried on to ensure they reached their cumulative target. Ritchie also said some of the personnel attempting the challenge had never abseiled before and some were scared of heights.

“It took real bravery to overcome their fear but they managed,” he said. “Some of them were almost running up the tower, even after 15 or 16 ascents.”

Last month, a six-foot tower crane fell from the top of a building, hitting a car and almost killing its passengers, including an infant and the grandmother. It happened right in the heart of the Ortigas business district, along Topaz Road close to the busy Robinson’s Galleria shopping mall at around noon. That crane could have snapped out several lives in one fell swoop. It could’ve been any of us.

The only precaution was a “catchment net” to protect passing cars and passengers from falling debris, but it was obviously no match for a falling construction crane. Yet, based on what I heard over the radio, the most that the erring company offered was to pay the victims the cost of the total wreck of what used to be their car, a Mazda. That kind of an offer shows the primitive state of our tort liability laws or, to be more precise, their enforcement—and conversely, the weakness of the local consumer movement. If you encounter a similar accident in the United States, you can imagine the millions of dollars that will be offered to settle the case to fend off litigation. A measly reimbursement for a damaged car is an insult not just to the victim’s family but to the public.

I am aware that the “tort explosion” in US law is widely lamented and criticized even in its own turf. The most notorious example is the McDonald’s case, where a woman bought coffee from the drive-in window, placed that cup of coffee between her legs, spilled the coffee and was hospitalized for third degree burns. In a “runaway jury verdict,” she was awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages and $2.7 million in punitive damages, equivalent to McDonald’s gross receipts for two days of coffee sales (reduced by the court to $480,000).

The tort explosion has also led to ridiculous product warnings that warn of the obvious. Read the message etched on your side view mirror: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. (My personal favorite is the Japanese warning to motorists: “When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.”)

We have spurned the US path because we fear the “slippery slope.” Yet precisely for that reason, we are forced to put up with defective traffic lights, ill-placed and barely visible U-turn markers, falling construction cranes, or for that matter, that police car driving “counter-flow” on Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City at the height of the rush hour Thursday morning. We tolerate slippery floors where you can slip and fall even if you’re wearing a non-slip Teva; dark corridors and bus stops where students can be held up or molested; spoilt milk or fruit juice from grocery stores that failed to use proper refrigeration. If all these guys knew that they or their office will be held to answer for their negligence and stupidity, they would behave themselves.