THE HUMAN ERROR
SAFETY
BY GORDON DUPONT
Ever wonder why Safety seems to get such a bad rap? It is a very rare per- son who says, “I’m so excited to hear that we are holding a Safety meeting tonight!” Safety has the reputation for being boring, and besides — who needs it? No one does, or at least until one day the lack of knowledge bites you with a vengeance. It was not that long ago that the
odd fatality was just the price of doing business and Safety was just “common sense.” Safety training in those “good ol’ days,” was just two words I heard often — BE CAREFUL! If you slipped and fell because someone had left a patch of spilled oil on the floor, after expressing a few choice words (usually aimed at yourself), you picked yourself up and limped away hoping that no one had seen you being careless for not spotting the oil. I have more than a passing interest in the following story as I helped my young son at the time restore a Ford Pinto and painted it a bright red color of his choice. Less than a month later, a car
crossed into his lane and thanks to seat belts he was not hurt. Had that
collision occurred on the rear, there is a good chance I would no longer have a son. No amount of money can ever compensate for the loss of your only son and I have never owned a Ford since.
The late Lee Iacocca was reported to be fond of saying, “Safety doesn’t sell.” The Ford Pinto, also known as “Lee’s car,” was prone to catch fire at low speed rear end crashes. Even at low speed the gas tank would be pushed forward into four protruding bolts and rupture. A fix as cheap as $5.08 per car by putting a plastic cover over the bolts was rejected as a now
famous cost benefit analysis memo indicated that modifying all the cars would cost $137 million while payout for 180 burn deaths would only cost $12.5 million. How wrong they would be as they: a) had not factored in the many vocal burn survivors as well as b) the negative publicity that would follow. One fatal accident alone resulted in punitive damages of $125 million. While that was later reduced, the Department of Transport ordered a recall of 1.5 million Pintos to be modified to prevent fatal rear end collisions. As a result of all of the negative publicity, (even with
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DOMmagazine.com | aug 2019
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