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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (212787)	12/27/2012 6:43:13 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541768

If you live in the Bay Area (about 8 MM people) there is about a 68% chance (if memory serves) that eight people will have something happen that is 1 in a million. I can't say in advance what it is, but I can say that it WILL happen, day in and day out, each and every day. I've had all sorts of odd things happen in my life - coins falling out of my pocket, landing on edge and an injury which should have cost me permanent use of my thumb, but because of a freakish branching of the nerves, my motor nerves were spared. The truth is - this happens all the time. It is true for good things, neutral things and unfortunately bad things. Many years ago a car accident fell into this category. The bridge I used to travel was blocked up. In the car that was causing the backup was a woman of middle age slumped over the steering wheel - witnesses said it was as though she just let her foot off the gas and the car wandered down the road and finally stopped when she rear-ended some cars in front, the car still in gear, but further motion was blocked. The paramedics assumed that she had a heart attack and then they saw a large amount of blood on the floor. Then they thought she had been randomly shot in an incident of Road Rage, but then it turned out she had no visible wound. When the emergency services people finally were allowed to try to remove her, they literally couldn't remove her from the car. She was stuck even though there was no real damage to the car. She was a victim of a freak accident in which her car ran over a pry bar, probably after the bar had been struck literally hundreds of times without incident by other motorists before her fateful encounter. However, for her, the bar was parallel to her direction of travel, it bounced in such a way that she was impaled. We can't protect against this - there is no road safety or hazard management procedure that we could implement that would have saved her life. I've seen uncountable numbers of these in the bed of trucks, along with a jumble of extension cords, shovels, wheelbarrows, etc. We might implement a bureaucracy to ensure everything had to be secured - but this is already the law. Relative to the likelihood of a repeat incident the money spent on prevention should be applied to other things.