Don't take life for granted

A deputy fire chief in our small town, who is also the former first selectman and is obviously very widely known here -- a town with more cows than people -- was at the firehouse last week with his backhoe. I need to be fairly circumspect here and not say more than the family has made public or is generally known. He was planning to dig a trench for a new waters supply line.

For some reason, he started the machine while he was standing on the ground. This should be impossible -- that kind of equipment has a switch that won't allow it to start if there's nobody in the operator's seat. Evidently for some reason it had been disabled. I don't know why -- I own a backhoe and I can't think of any reason why I would want to start it from the ground, and I'm happy for any and all safety features. Anyway the machine moved forward (which also shouldn't happen even if it starts) and ran him over. He's been in the hospital for the past week in critical condition. I'm guessing if he hadn't been at the firehouse with the ambulance crew right there the outcome would have been even worse.

So this got me thinking, as I often do, about human nature. Workers who are instructed to wear safety equipment -- gloves, eye protection, face shields -- often stop wearing it after a while. When I was a youth I once worked in a factory where a procedure included dipping radiator elements into a bath of molten tin. One guy stopped wearing his face shield and you know what happened -- somehow there was water on the coil and tin exploded. I worked in another factory where they used hydraulic shears to cut blocks of paper. The machines require the operator to put both hands on widely separated buttons before bringing the shear down with a pedal, but the guys would put weights on the buttons. 

I could go on but you get the idea. Familiarity with dangerous tasks makes the danger recede from our consciousness. I've done this 100 times and nothing bad has happened, and I'm sick of this minor inconvenience so to heck with it. In the case of the backhoe it wasn't even an inconvenience -- he still would have had to get up on the machine. What's the point of starting it first except because you can, because you were clever enough to bypass the safety switch? 

So, slow down, think, don't do anything foolish. Somehow evolution made us careless.