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To: carranza2 who wrote (11482)	11/13/2006 2:19:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 218131

C2, to do oneself a personal injury in the BP world I inhabited in the late 1980s, one would have to a complete klutz. In the BP world everyone knew that personal safety was top priority and was harassed with loads of paperwork of Federal Government proportions to ensure safety, and of course to avoid legal liability for any injuries. That was long ago, and I am sure that things became even more obsessively safe in the 1990s. While knowing nothing whatsoever about your case, I would wager that the predominant factor in your customer's "very serious personal injury" was their personal stupidity, carelessness and negligence, and probably also failure to comply with government laws and BP training. One major personal injury issue which I have never seen addressed is the harm to brains from lead in petrol/gasoline which blew out exhaust pipes and over crops and cities. At 0.84 grams per litre, which was a common amount used, and with say 8 km per litre [a common mileage in "Yank tanks"] and say 16,000 km per year, that's 1.6 kg a year sprayed out the back [other than some which got stuck in the engine and exhaust system to poison engine and exhaust pipe workers and their families [with dust carried home on clothing]. Typical lead levels in blood back in the day were something like 15 micrograms per decilitre, with maybe 5% of children up nearer 30 micrograms per decilitre. There were IQ studies done of children in the 1970s and early 1980s and the harm from the lead in petrol was about 0.25 IQ points. cdc.gov There was also substantial harm from lead in flaking paint and many other places. The 0.25 IQ points was just from lead. The reaction I get to that number is "Oh, it's tiny, who cares, IQ varies vastly every day anyway". Which shows mathematical illiteracy and economic ignorance. One can easily get data on the financial value of IQ by looking at income levels compared with IQ. You will find a very large increase in income as you move from IQ 80 people to IQ 150 people and even more importantly, you will find vastly more valuable work being done by people in the IQ 150 range than by those in the middle of the bell curve. Those in the IQ 150 zone invent things like CDMA. Those in the less than IQ 100 zone invent new ways to flip a burger, lose luggage, or injure themselves in a safe environment. They find it hard to function in the complex modern world. They don't invent the modern world [though when they try, they invent white elephants, and mass destruction even without weapons]. But they can become good at rituals. Which is why religions, militarism and authoritarianism are popular. If you want a personal injury case to take, you should take up a class action suit against Associated Octel, their professional experts who claimed falsely that lead in petrol wasn't damaging our brains, the oil companies and the individuals who sprayed lead all over the place by driving their cars around, not to mention the negligent government people who were responsible for preventing such crimes against humanity. What's annoying is that lead didn't actually do anything valuable in engines. Sure, octane number was raised by adding lead compounds to a particular gasoline, but there were better ways such as engine design and gasoline design. I suspect that lead acted like a spark retarder, which had the effect of reducing engine performance and increasing fuel consumption, which you can imagine was a good thing for the oil companies. Lead also did harm, gooping up the oil, resulting in "gray paint" in the valve area, and building up combustion chamber deposits which required poisonous lead scavengers be added to fuel and which raised octane number requirement, which counteracted the purported benefit of the lead. I think it was one of the huge dumb things humans did in the 20th century. Shell came up with a potassium-based "Spark Aider" in 1986, and that was supposed to increase burn rate but they were so dopey they didn't simultaneously increase the octane number of the fuel they used, and it was a very hot May/June, so they got a LOT of knock [pinking] and Formula Shell was a $300 million shambles. Mqurice