Separating the 'accident' from the moron cull

WILLIAM THORSELL We used to accept high rates of mortality in car crashes on the assumption that such deaths came with the territory. Then Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed ,and the design of cars radically improved to prevent deaths and reduce injuries. Can't we do the same with skiing and the fact of avalanches? There was an aura of stoic resignation about the deaths of 14 people this winter under avalanches in British Columbia, as though awareness among skiers of the risks closed the case.

Little did we hear about new devices to reduce the potential for death when avalanches happen -- like the "airbag for people" that is winning converts on some backcountry runs.

Chris Green, a Vancouver businessman who likes to ski in the wilds, is campaigning for use of the so-called ABS system, an inflatable airbag carried in a backpack that bursts into action with the pull of a ripcord when a skier confronts a wall of snow. The body airbag apparently provides a bang of buoyancy that allows the skier to ride atop the avalanche in many cases, rather than tumble into his grave.

Mr. Green says that, in Europe, where the device has been used since 1991, the survival rate of people using the ABS system who have been caught in avalanches is 97 per cent -- a claim worth examination.

As it happens, an application has been made to Transport Canada for permission to market the device in this country (the explosive nitrogen canister in the backpack requires approval), so resignation to the fates in surviving avalanches seems quite premature.

In fact, one wonders why anyone would go skiing in the backcountry without an even simpler device that allows a person to extract air from surrounding snow through a mouthpiece attached to a kind of lung. The thing is imperfect, but, when it works, it buys up to an hour of air for rescuers to find you.

The inquiries that will be done into recent avalanche deaths will surely look at these devices and their efficacy. If they work, it will not be long before parents insist on backpack airbags, lungs and locator beacons as a condition of their children going to the backcountry, and before adult tour operators do the same.

All this challenges the definition of the word accident -- "anything occurring unexpectedly, or without known or assignable cause; a contingency."

If a plane sits on the runway for 30 minutes awaiting takeoff during a bout of freezing rain, then takes off and crashes, is the event an accident? No. It is failure. The pilot failed to de-ice the wings or cancel the takeoff in the face of known, high risks of crashing because of inadequate lift.

Was the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 an accident or a failure in the design of the "O" rings on its solid rocket booster? It depends on awareness of the risks.

When a drunk driver slams into an oncoming car, do we call the result an accident? Thirty years ago, yes. Today, it is called a crime.

The word "accident" should be reserved for events in which a highly unpredictable contingency occurs, and the result is effectively unavoidable. That would rule out drowning when a snowmobile plunges through the ice on a partially frozen lake: That is not an accident; it is a moron cull.

The same would apply to the death of a tradesman on a work site who doffed his hardhat in the sun and had his skull cracked open when a steel beam came swinging around.

"Accidents waiting to happen" don't qualify as accidents; they qualify as failures.

Of course, when it comes to young people, offers of advice, devices or even regulations to reduce the odds or consequences of accidents are often ineffective. Young people are infamously confident of their immortality. How then do we persuade them to avoid the failures so often wrongly described as accidents?

Canada's Smart Risk Foundation did an interesting piece of research several years ago that uncovered a rather obvious fact about teenagers: They fear the judgment of their peers more than they do their parents, and they fear most of all looking stupid in front of their peers. Ergo: Make the failures known as accidents look stupid, and the impulse to impress a girl by diving off a bridge into shallow waters may go away.

So we add chagrin to formal, legal penalties that govern the predictable, avoidable traumas, and we object to the resignation that greets the awful results of true accidents themselves. Must the avalanche be as deadly when it comes? No. William Thorsell is director and CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum.

Chris, This is a really excellent article. Thanks for posting it.

Barbara