Be safe out there
On workplace safety regulations, the Green Mountain Crash, and why it's important to keep an eye on history when making rules for today
A memorial tribute to a 1910 train wreck received some notice in Iowa, as the event marked the 115th anniversary of the state's worst rail disaster. The Green Mountain crash killed 52 people when a passenger train traveling backwards derailed and wooden passenger cars were crushed by heavier steel ones.
â– Contemporary accounts of the crash were gruesome, and the death toll was awful. Yet it's still instructive, even if inter-urban passenger rail traffic is nonexistent in the state today.
â– For one thing, the coroner decided not to investigate because "it was evident that the wreck was caused by an accident". The railroad itself promised an inquiry in the immediate aftermath, but no thorough investigation of root causes was performed. Such a reaction would be unthinkable today; the NTSB looks at railroad accidents today, even if only a single fatality is involved.
â– For another, it's well worth appreciating that for however breathless the initial newspaper headlines, accidental death was a huge factor in daily life a century ago -- it remains much too significant a factor today, but it was astonishing back then. Hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of railroad workers died every year, and most years saw 25,000 to 40,000 of them injured. And those are just the workers, not even counting passengers. Today, the total number of occupational fatalities ranges between 4,500 and 5,500 among all occupations -- still too high, but strikingly fewer than the 10,000 or more annual fatal accidents that occurred a century ago, when the country was home to about a third as many people. The numerator has decreased, while the denominator has grown: That's a tremendous success story.
â– Good outcomes like increasing workplace and transportation safety should never be taken for granted. They are the complex results of many individual events, experiences, and choices. Rules and regulations governing safety behavior should always remain subject to thoughtful revision and reform, as circumstances themselves change. But the much safer world we inhabit today should be appreciated as a cumulative outcome -- one not particularly amenable to radical reform, and one in which caution should always prevail over eagerness to make changes.
