After seeing that Foxnews link (thanks trdprotruck). Sheesh! To us who sail that’s a pretty incriminating pattern of conduct, I wonder how much of that is true. Hopefully not much.
A tragedy? Undeniably yes. And it looks like a wonderful charity that’s done a lot of good. As members of the human race, whether we like to admit it or not, we inherently are equipped with poor decision-making skills. But let’s dispense with the emotion just for a minute and look objectively at what happened here.
One of the axioms of the causes of tragic accidents is that one mistake doesn’t lead to a catastrophe. No airplane has ever known to have crashed as a result of one mistake. Very few have crashed as a result of even two mistakes. Life tends to be extremely forgiving and I think we’ve all collected our fair share of “get out of jail free” cards for one or two lapses in judgment and emerged unscathed.
But the majority of serious accidents are the result of a cascade of many events (or “mistakes”) that, unchecked, accumulated to cause the disaster. Auto collisions (don’t you dare call them “accidents”, which implies a level of randomness which is only rarely applicable) are very similar in this respect. This tragedy is a prime example of a situation where a plethora of mistakes were made, and were allowed to build, one upon another, until finally the “ultimate cluster”
happened.
Not one or two of the events individually would likely have resulted in disaster, (life jackets off, high wind level and wave height conditions, ballast full, leaking, or not, centre board position and status, number of passengers and weight, weight and balance distribution, degree of passenger briefing and their level of experience on a boat), but as they stacked one upon the other, and the sequence was allowed to escalate, at some point the capsize and following result was inevitable.
So maybe we can look at this and can learn from it.
No, not “maybe”.
Next time you’re in a questionable situation, stop, and take stock of whether or not you’re in such a sequence, how far along you are in it, see where it might lead, and if you can reverse it. And the sooner you notice, the easier it will be to undo it. Anyone’s decision-making skills can improve.
Then we can make sure that such an incident doesn’t even come close to happening to any of us.
As an aside I must say I’ve also noticed that, while it’s got to be a terrible burden to bear for anyone responsible, directly or indirectly, for harming other people, pointing the finger at everyone else, as is being done here by the lawyer, and at this early stage, doesn’t seem to make the situation any better. I can’t see that his client would go for that. I don’t understand that part. Or, does that really work somehow?
-Brian.
