Almost hit by hammer once wrote:
It's all very good about safety and all but why don't the throwers take a few seconds to look if there's someone on the track (or field) that might get hit by a rogue throw before actually doing it?
Twice I had hammers land less than 10 yds away while doing reps!
Human error - they'll never be perfect. You need to factor into account throwers being distracted or forgetting or whatever, even if it's 0.1% of all throws. I don't think there should be ANY throws going on inside or even adjacent to the track. Put shot, disc, jav, and hammer somewhere AWAY from the track and put up HIGH safety netting. Plenty of facilities have 30' tall netting for stray pop flies at baseball fields to protect the parking lot, why can't you do the same for track?
I also agree that in this day and age there is no reason for people to be out in the throwing area trying to rush up to mark a landing ASAP. That's what happened at Cornell - official, very experienced, misjudged the trajectory of a shotput and it clobbered him in the head and killed him.