This time it really was an accident

IN our risk-averse culture, the idea that a dreadful accident can happen without anybody taking the blame for it is almost blasphemous. When lightning strikes a man dead, his dependents are expected to sue the manufacturers of his steel-tipped umbrella - or, failing that, the local council for not posting notices that it is unwise to shelter under trees during a thunderstorm.

For a few hours, yesterday's terrible train disaster in North Yorkshire silenced the blame-mongers who have been giving the railways such a hard time. The rail track was not at fault; nor was the GNER passenger train whose driver had no chance of avoiding the obstacle on the line; nor was the freight train which was coming the other way.

Nobody was to know a Land Rover, with a trailer bearing a broken- down car, would skid off the motorway before the start of the crash barriers.

Only the Daily Mirror today ranted at the lack of effective barriers to prevent a car hurtling off a motorway in such a fashion. The paper points the finger of blame at the Highways Agency for not insisting that guard-rails on railway bridges and their approaches should be sufficiently lengthy to prevent a heavy vehicle plunging down a railway embankment. Compensation is a different issue - it could potentially be sought from the Land Rover driver's insurers - but, meanwhile, the public at large can be made to feel that Something Could Have Been Done.

In the wake of any large-scale tragedy, it helps to salve the grief and shock of everyone involved if blame can be apportioned and people reassured that it need never happen again. It is hard when no such comfort can be offered, because it seems to mean that people died or suffered in vain. But yesterday's disaster was the equivalent of lightning striking out of a clear sky. If the Land Rover had not lost control at that precise time and place; if the months of speed restrictions on the railway line had been maintained for just three more days so that the GNER passenger train would still have been travelling at 75mph rather then 125mph; if the freight train had come the other way a few seconds later or earlier, 13 people would still be alive and some of them perhaps making the same journey south this morning.

This is the theme of Thornton Wilder's celebrated 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, tracing the lives of travellers who happened to coincide on a bridge in Peru which collapsed and killed them. It is what Thomas Hardy writes about in his poem on the convergence of the iceberg and the Titanic.

But the very idea of fate and chance, the unexpected taking control, is anathema to our culture.

EARLIER generations believed in fate because they resigned themselves to the fact that life could be unpredictable. If they had a riding accident, or gave birth to a handicapped child, or tripped on a paving stone, they accepted that providence had frowned on them - or simply that they should have been more careful. Nowadays we sue obstetricians for malpractice; we sue local councils for raised paving stones; and in parts of the United States learning to ride has become prohibitively expensive because riding stables have to carry such heavy liability insurance against being sued by beginners who fall off their horses. Meanwhile, ambulance-chasing legal firms advertise for the custom of anyone who has had an accident in the past three years.

The compensation culture has created such a risk-averse society in Britain that it comes as a shock to cross to the Continent and find oneself expected to behave like an adult - I mean in countries such as France and Italy which (whatever the EU regulations) do not put signs on doors explaining which way they open, or force primary schools to insure against children falling over in the playground, or ban firework displays, or send out scientists to check whether a sergeant-major's parade ground bellow falls within the decibel level set by the Health and Safety at Work Act.

If our attitude towards risk had existed during the early years of train travel, railways would never have got off the ground. In the first six months of 1852, 113 people were killed in rail accidents and 264 were injured.

In the first six months of 1853, 148 were killed and 191 injured. Accident investigators were at work from 1840, but that rail safety had the chance to improve was due to the philosophical attitude of accident victims like Charles Dickens, who in the terrible 1865 rail disaster outside Staplehurst, clambered out of his toppled carriage (the only first-class carriage not to have been smashed in the riverbed below) and comforted the dying, with no thought of restitution from the train company apart from a general opinion that the railways should be nationalised.

AT a time like this we should not be blaming the Highways Agency for not providing impregnable barriers on the 10,000 or more road bridges which cross railway lines, or Railtrack and the wretched train companies for not building rail carriages capable of withstanding a fully-laden freight train; (more than 3,000 people a year are killed on our roads yet no crushproof car has yet been invented). Nor should we listen to canards about the dangers of train journeys - it can safely be said that more people have been killed in the past 20 years by cars skidding across the motorway and hitting traffic going in the opposite direction than have been killed in total on the railways.

Instead, we should accept that some accidents happen which can never be either foreseen or prevented, any more than a tile blowing off your roof in a high wind.

Risk cannot be eradicated; it can only be measured, so that people can have a shrewd idea of what precautions to take. To learn to live with uncertainty is to accept that fate will sometimes supervene. If we cannot learn that, we shall end up a nation of mewling cry- babies.

Copyright 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.