Incidents and Accidents

In the division of public health called injury control, it is forbidden -- Forbidden! ever to use the word "accident." Injuries result from chains of events which can be analyzed, and interventions devised to stop them.

Your genial host is a bit eccentric. I live in the city, but I heat mainly with wood. I have a woodlot in deepest, darkest Connecticut but come the end of February, I never seem to have laid in quite enough to get me through the winter. A couple of weeks ago, a solid oak pallet appeared in the schoolyard across the street, just inside the fence. It sat there, apparently abandoned. Three days ago we got about four inches of snow, but you could still see its outline.

I figured, what the heck, obviously nobody wants this thing so I'll break it up for firewood. Plus, hey, I'm doing them a favor and cleaning up their trash, right? At 10:00 pm, I went across the street and picked up the edge of the pallet. Next thing I knew, I was standing at the bottom of a pit, looking up at a rectangle of moonlit sky two feet above my head. It happened so fast I had no awareness of falling. Suddenly, I was just there. After a few moments contemplating my bizarre end, frozen to death in an 8 foot deep pit belonging to the Boston Public Schools, I discovered a ladder built into a wall. I rejoined the world of humanity, pulled the pallet back over the hole, and went home to await the existential revelation and spiritual enlightenment that was bound to come.

So far it hasn't, but coming home from work the next evening I saw the schoolyard full of kids having a snowball fight, and I got to thinking how easy it would be for one of them to slip, dislodge the pallet, and go down to a much harder landing than I enjoyed. Or, they could just have gotten curious and, well, I already knew the rest.

I'm not interested in parsing how culpable I was in my own near-death experience, but I think a jury would have found the School Department more than 50% responsible if someone had been injured or killed. That particular location had always been just a part of the lawn. There must have been a roof to the vault, a foot under the grass. For some reason they had opened it and then just left it in that condition, with no warning sign.

The relevant problem here is that the major means we have to discourage dangerous idiocy is the civil liability system, and it isn't really designed for that purpose, it's designed to compensate injured parties. Lawyers always follow the money, i.e. they go after the deep pockets. In this case it was likely a contractor of some kind who opened the pit, but the school system would likely be a co-defendant in any suit. It's unclear whether the right people, the ones who should have been thinking harder, would be the ones who got the dope slap in this situation. Punitive damages can be added to an award in order to deter people from acting negligently. The Republicans don't like punitive damages and they're trying to limit them, and they are proposing various other strategies to advantage defendants in liability suits.

From a public health point of view, its is true that such after-the-fact feedback is not a very efficient way to encourage other people to be more careful in the future -- people who may never even hear about a specific incident and are unlikely to think about it very hard or recognize that it applies to them. Since tort reform is a major crusade of the people currently in power, we need to ask. Are there problems with the system? Can it be improved? Is the problem really that too many people are winning "frivolous" lawsuits, or that damage awards are excessive? Or should we affirm the importance of civil liability in making us all safer? (And yes, we should all try to be careful for our own sakes as well.)