E.R.G

Anatomy of an Accident

“It just happened”.

“I don’t know – it just broke”.

“The next thing I knew, the car veered in front of me and I couldn’t stop in time”.

“It wasn’t my fault. The ball just hit the window”.

What really is fault? What is “no-fault insurance”? Can we really predict an accident? Insurance companies do that to set rates. However, they use information gained from examining a large sample of past behaviors. Some things make this an impossible task. One of the foremost is the unpredictability of people; regular people go about their regular day and their thought processes are regular enough to them. Nevertheless, their intentions are seldom, if ever, evident to others around them (especially in traffic!). How do people view risk? Do they consider risk is part of the decision tree they use regularly?

Regular everyday life is often more dangerous than in some professions. Think about kids on skateboards doing rail slides on public staircases or jumps down the stairs; surfing elevator cars; riding on top of subway trains; street racing – well, you get the idea (check YouTube for more ridiculous antics). Young people rarely care or think about the consequences of their actions having anything other than the favorable outcome they seem to picture in their minds. Fewer accidents happen on racetracks – why? This same kind of randomness and unpredictability is killing and injuring emergency responders and citizens regularly.

Our society and way of life have many hazards associated with them. Think of your own home. People are very creative in assembling things so that they work; just to get a job completed. We are all subject to behavior-related risk. Our decision-making, under normal circumstances, is done in the face of many natural-occurring or human-made technological hazards; hazards that we have even named as Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive (CBRNE). We think things out rationally (under normal circumstances) but decide emotionally (see “Jim Camp: The Power of ‘No’; Robert T. Clemen, Terence Reilly: Making Hard Decisions).

Decisions made in real time with no previous planning or a very sketchy model will have a high risk to them, especially when we ignore the hazards that are nearby. Think of a person who is performing stunts only with the knowledge that they gain from watching television; no prior training; average physical ability; a lot of peer pressure egging them on to not be a coward and go ahead and do it; and the excitement of the moment. Some people just like being in front of the camera. These decisions do not involve thinking about the consequences of a failure to complete the stunts; no, this person is only driven by a vision of success and the emotions or excitement as they attempt to trick.

Therefore, only when the person is there in midair, or bouncing off the railing that they hope to slide down, losing their grip on the wall that they decided to jump onto or the structure fails underneath them do they understand the dangers of not having the training muscle or the experience perform the stunt.

Choices that we make at every moment set the conditions for the next choice; actions that we initiate create the initial set of conditions that generate an effect on the next choice/action that we have to deal with. In the face of randomness and probability, we write the “script” for the act to follow the one we are completing.

Think of Shakespeare writing a play – as it is being acted out. Would this writing survive the scrutiny of his peers at that time? He completes one scene; sends the players out to present it to the audience, with no rehearsal; and sits back stage furiously writing to complete the next scene. Every decision we make at every juncture of a situation will affect the outcome to some degree. Taken alone, this certainly adds uncertainty to a task. Add in all of the other surrounding factors and the decisions that others are making simultaneously, based on the evidence they have and the path they have in mind and the “stage” is set for the “play” to have an unexpected outcome, fair or foul.

Every person sets up an environment based on his or her own idea of comfort. We manipulate and change the environment to suit our vision. This, for homeowners, translates into modifying building plans on the fly without suitable review; reroofing a house and leaving the old roof underneath the new one; installing solar panels on a truss-built roof; performing their own wiring changes and upgrades without a proper permit; etc. Who takes the time to consider what effects their changes will have on emergency operations in their home? Who seriously thinks that their home will ever be subject to emergency interventions?

However, what does this have to do with hazards, risks, and decisions?

Remember the initial discussion that any “object” actually is stored energy. As such, it can be classified as a “hazard”. What is a hazard? A hazard is any form of stored energy that has the ability to do harm if it escapes its container or changes form suddenly. People coming in contact, or being near “something” [near stored energy] may possibly be hurt. Maybe this energy will change its form and damage something nearby. Sometimes that energy will go on to transfer to something that is near. The greater the amount of energy stored, the greater the possibility of the harm if it is disturbed. The greater the possibility of it harming what is nearby.

This “possibility of harm” is known as risk. Our decisions to do anything bring us into contact with these different forms of energy, sometimes resulting in our act causing damage or the energy to break free and the energy then causes damage. We call these occurrences “accidents”. However, this is where “choice” and decisions come in. Athletes and others who must perform and decide accurately under pressure (drivers; doctors; police; firefighters; soldiers; public leaders; etc.) would do well to constantly hone their craft under calm conditions and therefore be capable when any time arises needing their measured, accurate response.

As an aside, this also explains why people seem to have such different stories of events that have occurred, even when many people see the same event; why investigations try to find similar details from many persons to establish as “facts”.

Decisions and Activities

We have constructed many hazards in our high technology world. Structures – staircases, elevators, tall buildings, fast vehicles of all types, skateboards, bicycles, athletic events, and “extreme sports” in places are not meant to compete; skydiving, scuba diving, free diving with no air supply; climbing - the list is very, very long.

Think about, we perform the sports – we go to some the most hazardous places in the environment (natural) and some the most hazardous places we have constructed. Staircase railings were never built for skateboard or ski sliding. There are many YouTube videos of “athletes” falling off them.

Think of transportation. Automobiles were initially designed and built to move people around the world. Now the race them on tracks; illegally race down streets; have regular bouts of road rage; Heavy traffic is a hazard. The chances of a collision between two vehicles where more vehicles are clustered is affiliated at the best of times. Now let us consider the frantic decision-making of millions of drivers, all trying to get somewhere and be there on time, and the chances the risk of any two or more of these decisions made by people bringing them into violent contact are very high. There is a law of physics, which loosely stated, is that no two objects can occupy the same point in space at the same time.