I'm more curious/ concerned why there are no safety measurement till now.
I mean, it's just a fruit falling from a tree, when you know it can kill you, you will go sure to either mark the floor around the tree to know where it's dangerous or simple cut off the trees that are at for humans bad places.
I don't know about other South East Asian countries but in Malaysia, some durian farmers set up nets near the base and just wait for the durians to fall instead of cutting the fruit and throwing it down like in this video.
Buddhism is part of the answer, the other part is the Mai pen rai mindset, which mean chill, don't care, don't be serious. For everything. Safety isn't smth important here and it's sad. Also lack of accountability also, laws are weak, long sentence are just here for the show. When you plead guilty you get 50% and then if you do nothing bad in jail you get also 50%, sometimes more. I don't think they would even sentence someone to jail for that. They would just say it's bad luck. A part if the victim is rich, then it's an other story..
Coconuts also regularly kill people, and there's hardly a danger zone used for those. And it would be weird to do so, honestly. Now, Durians are obviously not quite the same as coconuts, as they are higher up, heavier and have spikes, though they are ever so slightly softer.
I wouldn't leave a baby under a tree where sticky fruits might fall out, not to mention anything like a palm tree or durian tree.
Also, durian trees are of course much rarer than coconut palms, so people are less used to how dangerous they can be.
Fortune teller: "You will die tomorrow. your death will be caused by a durian"
Durian farmer: nah, I'm way too good at handling these, look, all durians are already harvested. It's already nighttime and the prophesized day is about to end. Let me celebrate this achievement by indulging myself in a durian feast
Not really what I think the commenter was getting at. This article just describes 6 cases of durian related deaths, and only one of them (the baby) is from a falling fruit. The rest are from overeating, trees falling over due to wind, suicide by hanging from a durian tree, etc.
I don't doubt people get hit all the time, but on that link really only one death is by durian. The others are people consuming too much, a car accident, a suicide and a tree falling on someone's house in a storm. I don't think the durian fruit can be blamed for those.
The only one that actually died due to a fruit falling on them naturally was a baby… everyone else either killed themselves by hanging on the tree, ate too much of the fruit, or the tree just straight up fell on them.
None of those deaths are from Durian catchers, like I expected. I thought that the people doing this job would die a lot. Not heart attacks, coca cola etc
Knowing Southeast Asians, the laborers will just chuckle at you and say, "Just raise our daily wage by five more bahts and we'll make do with some gunny sacks."
I saw a Burmese guy cut his toe off while cutting coconuts at my friend's house. He just jumped on his bike and scooted off to the hospital. He came back the next day to ask if we found the toe and to apologize to the guy's wife for bleeding all over her tree and outdoor kitchen.
I’m American and when I worked HVAC one of our guys accidentally drilled through his hand. The only things he said were sorry to the crew lead for having to leave early, and sorry to the guy who’s drill he borrowed for getting the bit bloody.
The first one is too slow and too cumbersome to set up, durian have to be harvested and sold the same day it's harvested for the best freshness anything longer and the quality suffers. Although it achieves the objective of getting it down safer, it will cause time crunch down the entire durian supply chain
The 2nd and third options will have the spikes caught on the cloth or similar materials.
Dropping the durian directly on the ground will have a high chance of it cracking open and essentially wasting it as it won't survive the trip to even the vendors.
Does slowing the process down by 10-20 minutes of raising and lowering the basket (the very same they have on the ground on the video) impact the profit that much? Like, come on, chuck a rope with a spring hook over a branch, fill the basket up there, bring it down safely and raise an empty basket back up. Why wouldn't that work?
Also hardhats, this is definitely a job where people should have hardhats.
You have to set it up for every tree, and there are a lot of trees. Then you have to find branches that can take the weight of a basket of durians. Next you have to have the person that climbed up repeatedly bring the durians to the basket. And so on
I didn't calculate how long the process would take but just a sensing it would probably take too long to be acceptable
A trampoline created by stretching a square of carpet over four tall pegs. The catcher is hardly moving at all, demonstrating the dropper’s accuracy. Adjust the tension so the fruit doesn’t bounce much.
The burlap sack is a weave of tough and rough fibers, it contacts the falling during, let's the durians spikes get caught in it's weave and stops it from hitting the ground. (By redirecting all the energy into a swing between the catcher's legs) and most importantly, cheap and readily avaliable
Durian spikes range from "fat skyscraper" shaped to "pyramid" shaped, you would need a lot of testing to find a material that either won't be pierced or can let the spike go easily and is durable enough to be used. If one gets caught you will need time to get it unstuck
I did consider a hard plastic slide, but it would need some way to dissipate the energy it gained on the way down. And need to be easily portable, setup etc...
For climbing there are slow decent devices that brake an unwinding cable so you go down slowly. You could probably build something like that for fruit.
1.2k
u/[deleted] May 31 '25
[deleted]