The accident at O’Hare International Airport in March

ALAN writes:

The sinking of the ferry with a 26-year-old woman at the helm prompted the memory of these incidents:

1. Chicago, March 2014:  “Brittney,” age 25 and with two months’ experience operating trains, dozes off at the controls of a passenger train arriving at the airport station, thus permitting it to crash into the platform and escalator, injuring more than 30 passengers and causing millions of dollars in damage. [ Read about it here.]

2. Washington, D.C., June 2009:  Passenger train collision kills nine people and injures more than 70;  train operator is 42-year-old woman with seven months’ experience operating trains.   “Were standards lowered to hire her?”, asked Lawrence Auster.  [“D.C. commuter train crash, seven dead.”]

3.  Boston, May 2009:  Trolley crashes into another trolley, injuring 50 passengers and causing millions of dollars in damages.  The driver of the first trolley, age 24 and a “transgendered person” (whatever that is), had been ticketed three times previously for speeding and was sending a text message just before the crash.  [Discussed by Lawrence Auster here:  “The Boston Trolley Accident– Just Another Day in Liberal America”]

4.  Los Angeles, Sept. 2008:  Metrolink passenger train slams into freight train, killing the engineer of the Metrolink train and more than 20 passengers.  The engineer, Robert Sanchez, age 46, was queer and was sending text messages to teenage boy fans of his while operating his train.  [ E. Michael Jones, “Strangers on a Train,” Culture Wars, June 2009, here.]

5.  St. Louis, June 1997:  A bus driver drives her bus into a bus shelter, killing four people and injuring four others.  Two died instantly, two others later that day.  Driver, age 31, was a driver-in-training accompanied by a (woman) instructor.  An inspection afterward found nothing wrong with the bus.  Same question Lawrence Auster asked:  Were standards lowered to hire her?  Was she an AA hire?  Did she step on the accelerator while thinking she was stepping on the brake because the two women were engaged in chit-chat at that moment?   [ “4 Killed As Bi-State Bus Slams Into Shelter at Metrolink Station”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 12, 1997.  Also here.]

What episodes like these illustrate is how agreeably modern Americans will stand on their head in order to prove that up is down, nonsense is good sense, stupidity is wisdom, self-immolation is virtue, and fantasies trump reality.   Have there ever been people stupider than this on land or sea?

— Comments —

Bert Perry writes:

Speaking as a quality engineer by trade, it’s worth noting that you can have some pretty incompetent people at the controls if the controls do not allow the operator to do something incredibly stupid like “run the El train up the escalator”—a situation easily prevented by the highly technical solution of “not putting the escalator at the end of the tracks”.  Competent railroad companies and agencies have used this solution for a “mere” century or so.

Or, put differently, any incompetence by America’s transit agencies in hiring and firing train and bus drivers pales before their incompetence in managing any number of other parts of their business, which may explain in part why the most lethal form of transportation (in terms of deaths per passenger-mile) is rail.  It’s scary to suggest that in these terms, I cannot figure out whether your data are statistically significant—there are simply so many deaths attributable to rail transit.

Please follow and like us: