Death on the Road: Going Beyond Nader and The Reader's Digest
Fallows, James
Death on the Road: Going Beyond Nader and the Reader's Digest by James Fallows “Daddy had to go up to see Grandfather Follet, ’’ their mother explained. “He says to kiss both of you for him...
...8) strengthen the structure that will absorb the energy-build stronger bomb shelters and make buildings fireproof, vaccinate against smallpox, reinforce car bodies...
...Damage will still be done to the vehicle, but any serious injury to the driver will be minimized...
...I don’t know yet,” I said nervously...
...When I hear the squeal and screech of sirens now, I don’t think of dying people for whom each second is precious, being given oxygen, gently tended by concerned ambulancemen fighting for a life...
...She can read in her magazines about world affairs and political trends, but not about violent death...
...Most Western European countries have controlled the wells of violence that spill out as murder and rape in the U. S., but they have not reduced the violence of the automobile...
...The films were designed to play on what earlier studies had identified as the strongest incentive for wearing belts, the fear not of death but of disfigurement and crippling injuries...
...Most physicians just don’t get that much exposure in their normal practice...
...At the end of the study the investigators had a conclusion of unmistakable clarity: “The campaign had no effect whatsoever on seat-belt use...
...My God he’s heavy,” they groaned and complained, as if the man who was groaning too was dead and not right there beneath them...
...What, then, is wrong with the “nut-behind-the-wheel” approach if the facts seem so irrefutable...
...Henry Huntley, former head of the division of Emergency Medical Services in the Department of Health Education, and Welfare...
...At their best, that’s what our companies are doing now...
...And why, when so much has been written about other kinds of preventable self-destruction (pollution, for example), has reporting on traffic death prevention been left to magazines like Parade and Reader’s Digest...
...One good illustration is the country’s ambulance services and hospital emergency rooms...
...A new highway just opened in the District of Columbia, the “Center Leg Freeway,” carries this and other improvements to the roadside environment a step further by installing “impact attenuators...
...Julian Waller...
...A few minutes before 10, the phone rang...
...To accept Haddon’s suggestion that most collisions were unnecessarily fatal meant rejecting the experience of three generations in which people had been killed while traveling only 20 or 30 mph...
...In 19 55 he demonstrated that, properly restrained, the human body could withstand a deceleration from 632 miles per hour to zero within 1.4 seconds, a force far more extreme than that involved in most fatal collisions...
...Why...
...The answer, once attention was untethered from seeking the simple “cause” of the problem, could include such responses as mass immunization, the construction of sewers, the testing of public food supplies...
...Each year 55,000 people are killed in traffic accidents in this country, 10,000 injured every day, two million seriously disabled in a year...
...To declare war on unnecessary death in the ditch, in the ambulance, and in the emergency department is no gamble at all...
...When...
...This is so because we need neither new inventions nor enormous investments of capital in order to save many of the people now killed by trauma...
...Newman giggled...
...We drove off with sirens and lights...
...Of the 220,000 ambulance technicians in the country, only about five per cent had, by 1970, received the 80 hours of training that the government’s Emergency Medical Services division recommends as a minimum...
...The two ambulancemen and a policeman, who had arrived on the scene before us, humped the old man awkwardly onto a special stretcher to which he could be strapped and held upright to get him down the narrow stairs...
...The woman explained that he was deaf as well...
...The figures connecting alcohol with collisions] seem to tell you that if you want to put a lot of effort into quick results-which the country wants-it should be on the driver, and I think that’s where you’ll see the emphasis...
...All the firemen have to serve one year on an ambulance some time during their first five years of service and almost all of them hate it, in spite of the extra $600 that goes with the job...
...There are many people who feel none of this romance of danger, who want mainly to protect themselves against getting killed...
...J. Finton Speller, Secretary of Health for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has said: President Nixon’s war on cancer is a gamble in two respects-ultimate success rests on the hope that we will discover scientific principles now unknown, and there is no way of guessing how many lives will eventually be saved...
...9) identify and treat the damage as soon as possible-send out a fire truck, get the crash victim to the hospital...
...But none of this should discourage us if, as Haddon recommends, we are looking for the best ways to reduce loss rather than obsessively working to eradicate the causes (which, of course, we should keep trying to understand...
...if you drink, don’t drive...
...We are complicated too by a curious respect for skills...
...Conclusion: you are wrong, you Brinegars and National Safety Council members...
...Another nine could have had a good chance of survival...
...Mallory called back to me with a loud laugh...
...They all roared with laughter and looked at me to see how I was taking it...
...The thrill was in the driving, not the saving lives...
...What can we know of the terror she feels when the phone rings, and, this time, it is her husband who is away too long...
...Dead now...
...Players at the roulette wheel, we reckon cancer and heart disease as part of the normal odds, bets we must cover...
...7) modify the contact surface-use cardboard sticks instead of wooden ones for lollipops, take the daggers off car gdles and the protruding screws from their interiors...
...The hair-raising inadequacy of the nation’s ambulance service is certainly the greatest single factor in poor emergency care...
...your husband has been in an accident...
...The old-school approach to accident prevention had changed very little since 1936, when the National Safety Council introduced its familiar slogan, “If you drive, don’t drink...
...The research is paid for by many of the nation’s largest insurance cEmpanies...
...We are doing very little about a kind of epidemic we have the power to control, while we pour our energies and resources into the research of diseases we don’t yet know how to cure or prevent...
...Two studies, one in Michigan and one in California, suggest why...
...Even the mechanical innovations, from helicopters to portable defibrillators, are often applications of devices already in use elsewhere...
...The scientific revolution has been recognized, accepted, even if its dominance is still only partial...
...Copernicus at the Wheel Meanwhile, a different group of scientists was also making discoveries that upset traditional ideas about accidental fatalities...
...They enjoyed being the center of attention, the big guys who could cope with any situation, and they threw out various medical terms which sounded impressive...
...Authorities have started to think about how to save lives and not just how to prevent accidents...
...What’s gone wrong here...
...It was askinga question, but she could not hear it clearly...
...This is the only explanation I can give for my friend the doctor...
...The announcer continues, light, the IIHS tests make .the governas the picture on the table is shown, “Terry ment’s recent decision to delay Once would still look like this if she had been standards for rupture-proo~ wearing a safety belt...
...Men like Stapp and Haddon might have succeeded by now in changing safety theory from subjective to scientific if they had been able to challenge the old school on its central premise, that drivers “cause” crashes...
...But to the loss-reduction engineers they indicate an absolutely clear-cut course of action: seat belts don’t work, so we need airbags, and better roads, and emergency care, and One-Stop Service Even after the crash and its injuries have taken place, there are ways of reducing the casualties...
...However, it has a greater significance: unlike cancer and heart disease, traffic deaths are largely preventable...
...Two years ago The Saturday Review printed Arthur Freese’s laudable article, “Trauma: One Neglected Epidemic,” and from time to time publications like The New Republic report that the Transportation Department is controlled by Detroit...
...I didn’t see one case where the use of sirens and flashing lights, the violent driving, resulted in anything but more suffering to the patient...
...Their numbers must be larger than the noise they make in the intellectual press...
...But even before that, in the first years of the century, when the first connection between alcohol and collisions was being made, what would become the standard theory of safety was developeddefect, mainly human, causes crashes, therefore defect must be eliminated...
...Is this Miz Jay Follet...
...Mallory said the man would be taken to the nearest hospital that would have him...
...something is not whole...
...After further silence, the voice said, “There’s been a slight...
...Hello...
...In that scarred face...
...Yes...
...Robert Baker, director of the trauma unit at Cook County Hospital, has estimated that for each 30 minutes that pass before the victim gets skilled medical care, the mortality rate triples...
...Now he rides bicycles and horses, eats lean, does not smoke...
...Even the warning buzzer has not made a difference...
...Twenty times a day he listens and probes, observing the signs of age as they appear in his patients’ flesh...
...to “How can we best minimize its damage...
...The woman explained quietly and efficiently that he had a history of heart trouble, diabetes, arthritis, and gout, and that he was in great pain...
...Back in the firehouse the other firemen laughed...
...That such poles have been thoroughly tested and introduced in a few areas and shown to be practical, effective, and competitive in cost,” says Haddon, “indicates that virtually any death in a pole impact at virtually any impact speed is completely unnecessary...
...White Collar Daredevils Past a certain point there are questions we cannot ask about the automobile...
...Evidence leading to this conclusion had surfaced in experiments begun during the 1940s by a Cornell researcher named Hugh De Haven...
...To be a mortician you need two years of college, two years of apprenticeship, and one year as an embalmer...
...If he is the Sisyphus of traffic safety, he is a Sisyphus with faith-someday you will understand, you witchdoctors and deniers of reason...
...Charles Frey took the records of 159 accident fatalities in Michigan and tried to determine the conditions contributing to their deaths...
...The distance these innovators have put between themselves and the old ways of thinking is somewhat too obvious when one looks at the latest official pronouncement on the subject, made by Claude Brinegar, Secretary of Transportation, last October 22: 1 don’t think we are letting up on the car, but in terms of quick payoff, we’re back hard on the driver...
...Still, the belts are credited with what reduction there has been in traffic deaths, from 56,000 to 54,700 between 1969 and 1971...
...It would be naive not to recognize how deeply the car has become part of our national psyche...
...Public enthusiasm for safety belts does not mirror their proven worth...
...That’s a total of 38, or nearly 25 per cent who died because they couldn’t get care in time...
...He strides, smiling, toward the car, skipping down the front steps and waving to his family if they are still awake...
...In general, however, the techniques and devices involved are nearly all available now, and usually at moderate cost...
...On the basis of our present knowledge, it is probably true that a dollar spent in this area [treatment of traumatic injury] would bring a greater return in the prevention of death and disability than a dollar spent in any other way,” according to Dr...
...The experts already know what needs to be done to improve the emergency system and agree that the cost would be relatively modest...
...The most graphic evidence of its failure came from IIHS researchers who looked through cars at the Department of Transportation’s own parking lot and found that a large number of drivers had de-activated their buzzers...
...The California investigation was directed by Dr...
...involve steps, presumably drastic ones, against alcoholics and the young...
...There is just time to catch fleeting glimpses of bystanders frozen in curious attitudes, hands to their ears, or the fear in their eyes, or two fingers of contempt jerked up at the men in uniform...
...He is a disciple of Paul Dudley White...
...And what better excuse-he’s driving an ambulance...
...At least a dozen other areas have established helicopter rescue programsDenver, Los Angeles, and Detroit, as well as regional programs in Maryland, Illinois, and Arizona, to name a few...
...Dawson Mills of the National Highway Traffic Agency...
...Using the term “energy damage” to define such varied occurrences as a head-on collision and the detonation of a nuclear bomb, he has composed a menu of 10 “countermeasure strategies” : 1) prevent the “marshaling” of the destructive energy-keep the nuclear bomb from being built, the baby from climbing on top of the table, the car from taking the road...
...In the minutes after an injury even small differences in rescue time can greatly alter the patient’s chances...
...When the scientific revolution was on the march before-trampling the encampments of old-guard thought about the environment or occupational safety or minority rights-it was cheered on by a rather fine-featured claque of academics, politicians, intellectuals united for the defeat of ignorance...
...Vietnam also provided a specific new technology-helicopters as rescue vehicles...
...The advent of scientific public health marked a change in the question doctors asked, from “How is this disease spread...
...No one who has looked through the government’s new plans for “driver training” programs can scoff at that statement, and especially if we have known someone killed by a drunken driver, we can no more forgive those drivers or dismiss our hatred than a woman who has been raped can forgive her at tacker...
...a woman who committed suicide by opening an elevator door, putting her head out, and pressing the button, “her head was on the top floor and the rest of her was in the basement...
...On some highways, breakaway pilings for roadside lamps and signs, instead of rigid posts designed to preserve the sign at the cost of the driver’s life, are now being installed...
...For the other kinds of accidental death, science and loss reduction have become part of common sense...
...Then he climbs into his vehicle and careens like a maniac into the night...
...We might be wise not to sneer at our well-educated morticians-they still operate almost half of the ambulances in the country, 19,000 out of a total of 44,000...
...Accidents are the third leading cause of death in the United States, and the 1971 totals indicate the disproportionate role of traffic fatalities: of the 1 15,000 people killed by all forms of accidental injury (many experts prefer the term “trauma,” since “accident” implies that the deaths were merely the result of bad luck), 55,000 died on the roads...
...Bfiuret , wthhee nd uthmem teiesst up...
...In 1971 the investigators produced six television advertisements promoting seat belt use...
...Major premise...
...Even while questioning this emotion in skydivers or motorcycle racers, they may feel their own lives somehow empty without it...
...appear in medical journals suggesting that those who died after collisions might have suffered their most severe trauma not in the car but in an ambulance or in a poorly equipped emergency room...
...We came into the main bedroom...
...But this can be carried just so far...
...Office staff were waiting at the top in great agitation, and we pushed our way through to a back room where a plain young white girl was lying on two chairs looking dazed and embarrassed...
...All that was known about this run was the word “seizure” and an address scrawled on a card by the man in the firehouse who had taken the telephone message from the central dispatchers...
...In 1970, even before the war was over, three federal departmentsDefense, HEW, and Transportationformed a cooperative, experimental program called MAST (Military Assistance to Safety and Traffic), which placed military helicopters stationed at bases in the U. S. at the disposal of hospitals and highway agencies in neighboring regions...
...Mary hurried to quiet it...
...When he was a pilot in the first World War, De Haven was puzzled by the seeming illogic of airplane injuries...
...Under Haddon’s direction the Institute has undertaken some of the most creative and influential research in the field...
...William Haddon, Jr., a physician who directed the federal government’s highway safety agencies from 1966 to 1969 and is now president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.* One of the most provocative IIHS studies indicated that people should be able to survive many of the impacts that now are fatal...
...itor the patient as he is carried in the ambulance...
...Movies like Godard’s Weekend and Joseph Losey’s Accident make us aware that the threat of sudden death may fill some need in societies where perhaps too much predictability has been imposed on the other events of life...
...I think of poor, ill, tired, drunk old men, unconscious girls, frail old people being hurled off their stretchers because the driver gets a kick out of shooting lights, stopping all the other traffic, being a law unto himself...
...Huntley estimates that even with no reduction in the number or severity of accidental injuries, improving emergency care could reduce traffic fatalities by 15 to 20 per cent, and save a total (including other accident victims) of 60,000 lives each year...
...In one of his technical papers, Haddon explained: There is no logical reason why the rank order (or priority) of loss-reduction countermeasures...
...Yes, ’’ shedaid, in a caved-in voice...
...There are ways to reduce the carnage quickly, even before we understand the behavior that lies behind it...
...There are 10 ambulances in the city...
...During the 196Os, the American space program contributed additional data on how the body endured stress, but some of the most important extensions of De Haven’s work were being done by Dr...
...The leaders of scientific revolutions in those eras had to patiently explain their cases, much as Haddon feels he must attack the superstition and attack it again...
...The War Pavs Off On the bright side, emergency care has given us that long-awaited example of something good that happened because of the Vietnam war...
...A thin, tiny, old black woman was standing with tremendous dignity and calm by the bed, where an enormously fat, pop-eyed, grayhaired man was lying in a pair of green pajamas...
...The machines and their crews are paid for in the normal military budget...
...They played the part well, but too lengthily...
...Articles began to *The IIHS story proves that “enlightened self-interest” is not purely a concept from the world of fantasy...
...Death on the Road: Going Beyond Nader and the Reader's Digest by James Fallows “Daddy had to go up to see Grandfather Follet, ’’ their mother explained...
...It turned out to be at the top of a big office block...
...The public seems not to have followed the implications of this work as easily as it understood Nader’s graphic portrayal of the Corvair going out of control and causing a crash...
...The collapsible steering gear, improved windshields, the seat belts, the shoulder harness, and perhaps ahead of us the airbags-those technological things have pretty well been explored...
...Barbers and beauticians get an average of 1,500 hours’ training,” says Dr...
...she asked again...
...The influence of age and sex is also too clear to deny...
...Scientific revolutions* often follow a period of ferment, a time when the old theories cannot explain observed phenomena, and that is what was happening in traffic safety...
...They may also share the desire to ride along the brink, to court and control danger...
...Wars are when the progress is made in emergency care,” Mills says...
...hard as a man far younger...
...Conditions were set for a classic scientific revolution, a change as fundamental and, in its own way as important, as the Copernican theory of the universe or Columbus’ challenge to the flat-world theory...
...That should not prevent us from trying to understand the behavior-especially the acculturation that breeds such anger among young males-it may reduce the dishonesty of pretending the problem doesn’t exist until we understand its roots...
...Rufus asked...
...According to Susan P. Baker of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, males aged 15 to 24 “have an exceptionally high death-toinjury rate, suggesting that a larger proportion of their injuries are severe (suggesting, in turn, that their crashes are more severe...
...This woman is hardly unique in her apprehension...
...Even the scientists most dismayed by the traditional approach to traffic safety acknowledged that the driver usually “causes” the crash...
...yes, this is she...
...Hospitals operate only 1,300, and the balance is made up by volunteers (1 1 ,OOO), commercial companies (4,7001, and police or fire departments (4,500...
...A friend or relation is allowed to travel in the back of the ambulance with the patient, but mostly the patients travel alone...
...It’s the insurers’ traditional role, Haddon says...
...Alcohol and youth are the causes-can the solutions not...
...I Love You Anyway’ Other innovations are the springy bumpers on late-model cars-intended more to eliminate the $200 bill for the two-mph collision than to prevent serious injury-and seat belts, installed first as options, then as requirements, now equipped with buzzers, and soon to be connected to an “interlock” system that will prevent the car from moving if the belts are not fastened...
...He has already been dead since way last night and I didn’t even know until I woke up...
...Strapped inside is a man 1 know, a physician, specialist in diseases of the heart...
...William Fitts of the University of Pennsylvania, editor of The Journal of Trauma, adds, “In the treatment of accidental injury, the gap between what can be done and what is being done is wider than for any other [area],” and Dr...
...By mastering the extra risks he himself creates, he demonstrates his sureness, his agility...
...It was hard for them to get used to driving without the siren, to stopping for lights and people, but they compensated with a great deal of hooting and yelling at drivers...
...What floor, buddy...
...It is equally important to remove the more grotesque hazards now built into the cars...
...You could not blame the vestigial Ptolemaists for scoffing at Copernicus, nor the Spaniards for staring at the horizon, waiting for Columbus to fall off...
...Earlier this year the IIHS test-crashed cars to see how they hold up during impact...
...Hello...
...She asked that he be taken to the hospital where his records were...
...6) insert a material barrier between the energy and the victimprovide helmets for football players, nets for acrobats, padding for cars...
...A full-face picture on her dressing table inside were charred- The best shows her as a beautiful woman...
...His head...
...Mallory said that last week on another ambulance in that district, an inexperienced ambulanceman had put a tourniquet around a man’s neck, “you guessed already, he was dead on arrival...
...Faced directly, traffic safety is actually a hopeful issue...
...The explanation may be a subtler form of blaming the victim than Haddon describes...
...what is it...
...Later, in his Cornel1 experiments, De Haven isolated at least two factors that determined whether or not a victim was seriously injured-whether the body was “cushioned” inside the vehicle, and how the impact was absorbed over time and distance (that is, whether the car decelerated from 50 mph all in one instant) or was stopped more slowly by caroming through a series of impacts...
...Those who strap them on know that those who don’t are, in some inarticulated sense, responsible for the consequences...
...It’s the latest concept in preventing personal injury,” the city’s traffic engineer, George W. Schoene, has said...
...With these few exceptions, the intellectual press has given the deaths of 55,000 people a year attention mainly in fiction, where the car is a brutal and plausible mechanism for removing characters...
...After leaving the girl at the hospital we drove back slowly to the firehouse, stopping on the way for Newman to mail a letter...
...But in most places, all you need to operate an ambulance is a driver’s license...
...She was loaded clumsily onto the stretcher while the ambulancemen took her particulars from a nervous manager...
...With collapsible steering columns, a 50-mph impact leaves 20 per cent of the drivers uninjured, 60 per cent with minor injuries, and the rest with only moderate injuries...
...A Death in the Family...
...Way, early this morning, before it was light...
...must parallel the sequence, or rank order, of causes contributing to the result of damaged people or property...
...Why don’t they face the issue...
...When Lloyds of London was insuring sailing ships it made sure to support lighthouse construction...
...Now here are findings to give us pause...
...He wanted very much to see Daddy, just as quick as Daddy could come...
...A later pioneer in this field, Dr...
...Males have more crashes than females...
...Is that right, buddy...
...Haddon’s scientific revolution, represented in the phrase “loss reduction,” may best be explained by analogy...
...We were racing through the city, shooting red lights and hooting at the drivers scrambling to get out of the way...
...Mallory asked...
...Statistically, you would be safer as a soldier getting shot in Vietnam than as a driver skidding into a crash in New Jersey, because as a soldier you could count on quick helicopter evacuation and transport to a specialized emergency center...
...There are other complications that obstruct the scient is t s’ strict logic...
...To acknowledge the gravity of the situation would be implicitly to support grave efforts for its correction, and thij we feel unwilling to do...
...The Ambulance Association of America itself makes the startling admission that each year about 25,000 people are permanently injured or disabled by untrained ambulance attendants...
...The basic scientific data indicated that under ideal conditions humans can endure forces as great as 45 g’s (45 times the force of gravity) for very short periods of time...
...take this microscope and you will see the germs...
...What capsule of unreason protects the mythology of the highways from Dr...
...Rousellot’s division is now financing emergency care projects in six states...
...Why, then, have we refused to bet on the sure thing...
...The comparisons are familiar but still striking: more of our citizens are killed on the roads in one year than died in Vietnam during a dozen years of fighting...
...Grampa Follet is very sick...
...In the factory we still hear comments about “careless workers” whenever a limb goes through the machinery, but the motives are rarely hard to detect and do not deter us from passing safety legislation...
...This figure alone tells us that a lot of people are being killed...
...Thank Hugh ~ When Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader was published in 1966, the public finally grasped what safety experts had been groping at for 20 years: the design of car and road might have more influence on crashes and on the seventy of the injuries that follow than do the drivers themselves...
...Six 1973 model cars were slammed at speeds of 30 to 40 mph into the tail ends of other new cars, which were parked...
...Her hus- estimates are that between 2,000 and band enters and suggests that they go to a 3,500 People each Year are cremated party, She asks him not to look at her inside their cars after collisions they without make-up as she turns to reveal a otherwise might have survived...
...asked Mallory, who seemed to take control of every situation...
...she told herself...
...In 29 of the cases he concluded that the victims could have not only survived the injuries, but also returned to full, normal lives-if they had received adequate emergency care...
...For quick results, nothing could go farther toward reducing violent death-not a new wave of Prohibition, not denying licenses to those under 25, not mandatory seat belts or super-safety vehiclesthan improving emergency care...
...The distinguishing factor was the quality and speed of emergency care: in the country it took longer to get to the hospital and the care was not as good...
...When the car hits the attenuator, the black cells with mushroom-like tops pop out one at a time, spraying water everywhere...
...There has, in fact, been an abundance of articles on traffic death, but nearly all of them had appeared in journals such as Good Housekeeping, and Motor Trend...
...Even those who would not honor the Junior Johnsons of the race track may take pride in controlling their own cars, feeling the same cool skill as a pilot in the cockpit or at the tiller...
...She doesn’t know if she’s squeamish...
...You been throwing up blood...
...5) separate the ehdtgy release from the potential victims-take the Bikini Islanders off their atoll and the pedestrians out of the road...
...They were just lumps of meat to be transported and talked about as if they were dead...
...But the facts wouldn’t fit this pattern...
...I sometimes expect that I will slip into decrepitude long before this older friend of mine...
...He’d crawl to the hospital first .” The Washington ambulance service is run by the fire department...
...He says to kiss both of you for him and he’ll probably see you before you’re asleep tonight...
...As Susan Baker has said of the problem of violence among young males, “The comparatively high death and injury rates noted for males suggest the role of behavioral factors, some of them probably innate...
...In all six cases the gas tank of the parked car ruptured, in one case spontaneously engulfing both vehicles in flames, and offering the potential for fire in all the others...
...He’s so heavy...
...We insulate electric wires, package poison in small, tight bottles, spend money on fire departments even while emphasizing fire prevention...
...He goes to that clinic,” she said...
...You will accept science and abandon mythology...
...Once we arrived at the address the ambulancemen forgot the speed of the drive and began to dawdle...
...It would be equally naive to expect our complicated emotions to yield to simple statements of logic...
...The Brinegars have been allowed to set the terms of the argument: we believe it when they blame the victim, but since we don’t want the victim to be punished we turn away altogether...
...The voice was a man’s, wiry and faint, a country voice...
...Even during Prohibition alcohol was a major cause of fatal crashes, and since then there has been virtually no indication that any socially acceptable anti-alcohol campaigns make a significant difference...
...Mallory misunderstood her, “Ma’am, we ain’t taking no one to no clinic appointment,” he snapped...
...they substitute the emergency runs for routine practice flights...
...Often the first priority has to be upgrading the ambulance attendants themselves,” says Dr...
...Occasionally these involve fut uristic-sounding technology-for e x am p le, rad io-teleme try, which allows a hospital-based doctor to mon...
...I have on my desk a bibliography of popular articles designed to correct the outdated ideas about pollution...
...He is as James Fallows is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The wife of my friend tne doctor lost her father in a car crash in 1930, when she was three years old...
...It is scientific, sound-and yet unsatisfactory...
...We must understand this blind spot if we hope to reduce our losses on the roads...
...The importance of Haddon’s statement is this: the two most important causes of crashes-alcohol and the hot blood of youth-are the two least possible to control...
...Yet the political-and especially intellectual-efforts to prevent what she fears are minimal...
...Uncle Ralph phoned up very late last night...
...This time it was an address in one of the better parts of the ghetto, a small detached house with a big front porch with an old rocking chair...
...There is no one to see how they get treated on the way...
...Will you please talk a little louder...
...If so, public attention might already have turned to the other strategies for reducing injury...
...If they fall off the stretcher as the van spins round a comer and the ambulanceman doesn’t catch them, a very common occurrence, there is no one to see or complain...
...Newman, another one of the ambulance attendants, grumbled loudly about his bad back...
...But at $130,000 or more apiece, the helicopters come at too high a price for many communities, especially when there are simpler and cheaper ways to improve their emergency systems...
...They began swapping horror stories from the time when they had been on ambulance duty: the doctor who got caught between an elevator and the shaft “and there was nothing left but a pile of meat to scrape off the walls...
...A more recent experiment testing the effect of the buzzer system had similar results: “The evidence presented here indicates that the buzzer-light system had no statistically significant effect on the safety-belt use rate...
...They share that sense of freedom and command that comes from guiding one’s own, private, unassailable little capsule...
...he will not permit his body to fail him...
...Many of us suspect, in raising questions about traffic safety, that we know what the answers will be...
...Stop looking at your cut finger and trying to see why it’s swollen...
...Violent death is the double-0, the number no one counts on and which turns the game in the croupier’s favor...
...NO one spoke to him...
...It’s a matter of singling out the group-the young people and the people who are excessive drinkers are clearly the ones who are causing most of the accidents...
...In cars made before 1967, those with rigid steering columns, impacts of 50 mph were fatal 50 per cent of the time and inflicted “serious injuries” on the other 50 per cent of the victims...
...Some human bodies withstood remarkable amounts of shock without permanent injury, while others were severely damaged by apparently moderate amounts of force...
...for there was a silence...
...say, ‘Honey, I love you anyway.’ ” a lot more...
...Minor premise...
...When he was younger he would play tennis, sweating in the sun each noon...
...Something in them sympathizes with the teenager who roars away from the intersection or drives madly down the highway...
...After the ride through the city it was agonizing to watch them climb down so slowly, open the back of the van, chat with the doorman, make jokes as they fumbled while pulling the stretcher out on its wheels...
...James Agee A Death in the Family A tan bullet comes hurtling down the road...
...Firemen eat all day long...
...It’s much easier to tanks, this the 976, appear wear safety belts than to hear your husband reprehensible at the very best...
...Polly Toynbee In a series of papers which stretch from the mid-sixties through the last few years, Haddon laid the groundwork for a similar approach to violent death...
...Am-bulance, am-bulance,” drawled the loudspeaker...
...Louis Rousellot of HEWS Emergency Services division...
...2) reduce the amount of energy so marshaled-build smaller bombs or firecrackers, put fewer aspirin tablets in each bottle, reduce the speed of 3) prevent the release of energykeep the bomb from dropping, the suicide from jumping, the car from crashing...
...1968, “has been found to be the -largest single factor leading to fatal crashes...
...With this list a door opens, things fall into place...
...He died last night while I was asleep and now it was, already morning...
...Still, “original sin” has a tinny ring...
...He too grows older, and, as if to erase in himself what he sees in others, he pushes himself hard...
...The threatening “wee-ow wee-ow” of the siren throws everyone on the street into confusion, sends shivers and thrills down the spine...
...There is hardly an evening when he is not called from his house to the hospital or another scene of disaster, real or imagined...
...Many people with an intellectual blind spot about death and the car feel an ambivalence about its threat of violence...
...He’s dead...
...We see how much we had ignored before and sense that even if we can’t get rid of the drunken drivers and the Corvairs, we may have a chance of surviving when they come careening into our cars...
...The patients never got spoken to on the way to the hospital-no t a comforting word or a try at conversation to take their minds off things...
...At the same moment the voice said, “A serious accident...
...Haddon’s disinfectant ? Haddon has an answer here toothe “original sin” fallacy, which makes us keep blaming the driver despite our best intentions...
...Alcohol, in the words of the authoritative government report issued in *I am borrowing here from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution, one book all non-scientists should read...
...Comparing accidental deaths in rural areas with those in the city, Waller found that the fatality rate was four times higher in the country than in the city, even though the rural crashes took place at generally lower speeds and should have left their victims with a greater chance of survival...
...Meanwhile, the investigators were observing the drivers who wore seat belts and then tracing their license numbers to determine whether they had seen the messages...
...Now, straining and impatient, she could hear, though the voice seemed still to come from a great distance...
...If only science could have shown that the cars actually did cause most accidents, that the driver was not to blame, that death hung over us like the ball at the lip of the roulette wheel and could drop as indiscriminately...
...4) modify the release-over-space of the energy-deflect the avalanche with trees and trails, let the car hit a movable barrier instead of a fixed object...
...From this, Haddon has produced graphs showing that crashes in which the victim decelerates from 50 mph to zero in less than three feet need not be fatal, if the victim is protected from the steering wheel, the windshield, and the other hazards involved in the “second collision” of driver with car...
...Except for the fires, rear-end crashes at this speed would For nine months the six messages were shown to half the households in a community supplied with cable TV...
...10) restore as much of the damage as possible after the emergency treatmentrepair the gutted building, let the broken bones knit...
...There are no permanent ambulancemen...
...A national system of emergency-room classification-one of the higher priorities-is more a matter of making intelligent use of existing resources than of greatly increasing the total supply...
...Hey, are you squeamish...
...He has been dead all night while I was asleep and now it is morning and I am awake but he is still dead and he will stay right on being dead all afternoon and all night and all tomorrow while I am asleep again and wake up again and go to sleep again...
...To a man like William Haddon-so impeccably logical that, it is said, he began wearing his now-totemic bow ties in medical school because other ties flopped down onto his patients-a statement like Brinegar’s simply reveals defective logic...
...The driver, Mallory, is enjoying himself...
...By now it is so thick I can use it for a chopping board...
...The experimenters’ own description of one of the fdms conveys their flavor: shoAw nw ionm farno nwt hoofs ea fmacierr ocra nanpoptl ybineg smeeank eis- vcaehuiscel elsi ttdleid i ncjautrcyh...
...We squeezed into the narrow elevator and shot up nine floors...
...A few lossreduction devices have already been installed in cars-steering columns, for example, designed not to puncture the aorta upon hitting the driver’s torso...
...While limited in ambition (there are just five sites and only about 2,000 patients have been transported), the program is remarkable for its cost of zero dollars...
...To know we would have to live with that half-second of certainty, the naked moment before rationality can smother alarm, the accumulated panic of 43 years reaching up to shake her roughly and turn her face towards disaster and tell her, yes, this is what you’ve feared all along, you thought that by ignoring it you could make it go away, but you see now how close it must dwell to the surface if it can escape through the smallest fissure of suspicion...
...Mallory poured the rest of his can of Coke down his long body and munched up the last of his Hershey bar...
...those ‘18 to 19 have more than anyone else...
...In each major war of this century the fatality rate among the injured has been cut roughly in half...
...J. R. Stapp, belted himself into rocket sleds to quantify the thresholds of human physiological endurance...
...Something has happened in these few areas that is not happening elsewhere...
...They are the white collar equivalents of the teenage speeder, those who manage their cars as they manage their lives, deftly and with precision...
...A psychiatrist, Norman Tabachnick, has estimated that one tenth of our traffic fatalities are suicides...
...The roots of our irrationality go too deep for us to find...
...Partly, too, as in the early days of the environmental movement, the public mistook the vulnerability introduced by human engineering for nature’s own frailty...
...Ralph Nader estimates that five per cent of all drivers wear the belts, and while other surveys produce figures in the 10 to 15 percent range, no one contends that more than a handful of drivers use the simple device that cuts fatality rates in half...
...Doubtless they point us toward our complicated attitudes about automobiles and, ultimately, the risk of death...
...It was Newman who said to me, “No ambulanceman would ever call an ambulance, He’d crawl to the hospital first...
...Why isn’t there a thick bibliography of enlightenment for the Brinegars...
...We line the airports with crash vehicles and spend more money investigating several hundred aircraft fatalities than learning more about our traffic deaths...
...Finally, automobiles almost forbid us to view them from a communal rather than an individual perspective...
...Although most people don’t wear seat belts, their presence in the car constitutes a kind of free choice...
...The situation has improved since then, but even now only two states require the 80 hours for certification...
...For years, such communicable diseases as cholera, typhoid, and polio were thought to be “caused” by defective human behavior: we were not careful enough in what we ate or what strangers we permitted to contaminate our air or water...
...Several of the IIHS studies have tried to uncover the reasons for this seemingly suicidal refusal to use seat belts...
Vol. 5 • December 1973 • No. 10
