There are areas of technological safety which are almost all about people and behavior, for example road safety. Roads form a very open system; there are pedestrians, young children, old people, slow people, cyclists, animals, parked cars, broken-down cars, large users and so on. There are some technical things one can do to improve safety, but in the end there would be very, very few injurious accidents if people were to drive more slowly and pay more attention to the constraints imposed by the immediate environment. Simply enforcing speed limits and permitted blood-alcohol level on motorways (freeways and turnpikes) more rigorously in France in the 1990’s led to an almost-immediate reduction of one-third in motorway fatalities, which persisted. Technology can do some things, such as air bags and crashworthiness, as well as helping enforcement, such as by using GPS-tagged recording of road speed of individual cars to enforce limits on speed, as is being discussed in Great Britain. But measures which need enforcing are a people-behavior thing, not a technology thing, even when means of enforcement are technological.
Then there are areas of technological safety which are far more based on the technological side: operational safety of nuclear power plants, for example, in which appropriate values of physical parameters relevant for safety are more or less well-known, and technically monitored, operators play much more of a supervisory role, and dangerous incidents are far fewer.
Sports is somewhere inbetween. A certain amount of danger, and of skilled overcoming of risk, is part of many traditional sports. Downhill skiing and luge are two examples; bob less so, since I am told one ducks inside the bob when things go pear-shaped. Formula One car racing used to be like that, but manufacturers and circuit designers paid a lot of attention over the decades to not losing their most important assets, the people, and now it has spectacular crashes which are almost devoid of live-threatening injuries.
Then there are sports such as rock climbing, which in the 1980’s evolved the fashion of climbing extreme routes without protection of any sort, pioneered by, amongst others, John Bachar, who died last year in his early 50’s when he fell off a solo climb in the Eastern Sierras (the Economist had an elegant obituary, but I don’t know if it is accessible any more to non-subscribers).
In regard to safety, I would distinguish morally between activities in which an individual decides freely to undertake risk, such as Bachar and his peers who climb without protection, and organised activities in semi-controlled environments, such as downhill ski racing and luge racing. I am sure we can all think up our list of relevant distinctions, and I imagine if we look more closely we will find the spectrum from highly open to very controlled is quite dense.
Sports such as ski racing and luge take place in a far more controlled environment than road travel. The tracks are laid out, prepared, boundaries are secured and foreign objects and people kept out as far as possible. Solid objects are, usually, padded, although there seems to be still no real calculation of effectiveness, which can be accomplished to a first approximation with freshman calculus (speed is more or less known, say S; thickness of padding T = maximum distance from speed S to speed 0; deceleration may be calculated; the decelerations which may be generally withstood by a human body in various configurations are somewhat known; thereby some value of T may be derived). The social norms of safety are looked at when there is a failure, such as the death of two-time Super-G World Champion Ulrike Maier in 1994 at Garmisch-Patenkirchen. Maier lost control, and hit a solid object much too solid for her human body. She had already told TV journalists (in the clip above, in German) that she found the course too dangerous.
Now there comes the shocking death of luge racer Nodar Kumaritashvili while practicing for the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The New York Times has an “interactive graphic” (a sequence of diagrams and photographs) showing the accident. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but let us look at the configuration. Here is a curve in which racers have attained top speed (somewhere around 90mph, 145kph), and a very short distance after the curve the track boundary appears to be some 2 meters high. Here, outside and above the track, there are metal support pillars, which were unpadded at the time Kumaritashvili hit one.
It appears there have been the usual pronouncements about risky sports, competitors’ knowledge of those risks, and skill levels required to be “safe” (these latter comments manifestly missing when Ulrike Maier died in her broadly similar accident). Still, I looked at those unprotected pillars and thought: Why? I imagine many safety engineers will have a similar reaction. It doesn’t seem to me that organised sports activities of this nature apply similar standards of safety engineering as in aviation or nuclear power. Why not? More to the point, what will it take, socially, to bring the familiar technical safety engineering, including hazard analysis and mitigation, into risky professional sports?
Safety in professional sports is a many-faceted topic. The connections between brain damage and concussions have been known since the 1930’s. The U.S. National Football League has recently commissioned a study into ex-footballers who have suffered from dementia, and there are new guidelines for handling concussed players in professional (American) football. It is much more difficult to see how to protect players from each other than to see how to protect humans from solid objects.
PBL