The iconic photo of John Travolta from the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever” that boosted the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” to Billboard’s number one hit in February 1978/Paramount Pictures
On a day-to-day basis in Alaska, human survival sometimes still comes down to three basic factors that trace their roots back to the species’ prehistory: situational awareness, judgment and tools.
About all that has changed in modern times is a desire to foolproof the first two with improvements in the third. Safety equipment has become a defining characteristic of the mid to late 20th Century.
Over the years that followed, helmet use spread to civilian motorcycles, snowmachines, bicycles, all-terrain vehicles, light aircraft and more. And as this change was underway, improvements aimed at making automobiles safer became issues of national concern.
Activist lawyer and writer Ralph Nader became famous in 1965 after launching an attack on the Chevrolet Corvair in a book titled “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The uproar that followed led to the 1966 creation of the U.S. Department of Transportation and several agencies within which would eventually be rolled together to create what is today the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
A federal mandate requiring all new motor vehicles be fitted with seat belts followed in 1968. The fixation on equipment as the answer to safety only grew in the years that followed, Safety devices started appearing on almost anything that could be safety guarded.
Avalanche transceivers – commonly called beacons – designed to save those buried in snow first came on the market in the early 1970s. The Federal Boating Safety Act of 1971 led to a 1973 federal requirement that all watercraft had to carry personal floatation devices (PFD) onboard. The law was expanded in 2002 to require that all children under age 13 wear those PFDs except when “below decks or in an enclosed cabin.”
New Jersey in 1987 began requiring all children under age 14 wear helmets while riding bicycles. Similar requirements have been spreading across the country ever since.
And today, of course, most of the country is masked up to protect us all from the sometimes deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Did it work?
How well various safety equipment has done the job of protecting people is a topic of considerable debate, but in some areas, it is clear that there was success right up to the point that there wasn’t.
Deaths in motor vehicle accidents began to drop dramatically in the 1990s as old cars disappeared from the road, near totally replaced at last by those in which seatbelts were first required, and airbags began to come into use to provide further protection for passengers.
Since then, however, deaths have yo-yoed up and down around a 10-year average of 16 per 100,000, and they began creeping up last year as the pandemic changed life in so many ways across the country.
The pandemic is being blamed.
‘The fatality rate shows an increased trend from March to September 2020 primarily due to the impact of national COVID-19 pandemic emergency situation,” the NHTSA reported. “NHTSA is continuing to gather and finalize data on crash fatalities for 2019 and 2020 using information from police crash reports and other sources. ”
The agency’s final report is not expected until the fall of this year. It is expected to show increases in deaths in both 2019 and 2020 as more complete data becomes available.
“It is too soon to speculate on the contributing factors” that pushed deaths up in 2020, the NHTSA said, but the Insurance Information Institute is already doing so. It cited the observations of Triple-I Chief Actuary James Lynch, who concluded the increase was likely caused by faster driving on less congested roads.
This trend has been seen globally, and the simple answer to the question why would appear to be that the fewer cars there on the road, the less attention people pay to their driving and the faster they go.
In Minnesota, where traffic volumes fell by more than 60 percent when a stay-at-home issue was ordered in the spring, the state highway patrol reported citing more than twice as many drivers for extreme speed – more than 100 mph – than in 2019.
It goes without saying that no one can drive 100 mph in a traffic jam. Open roads, on the other hand, allow for higher speeds and thus demand more judgment of those motorists who decide to speed.
In this regard, the highways of the pandemic look something like the country’s ski slopes where human behavior appears to have trumped safety equipment.
The ski experience
No sooner did skiers start returning to American ski resorts this year than they started dying in what has become the standard way.
Winter Park, Colo., reported its first death of the year in mid-January after a 25-year-old skier from Massachusetts hit a fixed object. CBSN Denver reported that officials said he “was wearing a helmet but it appears he lost control, hit several trees, and suffered from ‘head and facial trauma.'”
As ski and snowboard helmets became more and more common on ski slopes in the new millennium, the problem with recreationists pushing beyond the limits of their skills and running into things became obvious in the body count. This spawned a new mantra at resorts: “wear a helmet, but act like you’re not wearing a helmet.”
The message did not appear to work too well.
Little has changed since then.
Helmets did help protect those who fell over at relatively slow speeds and hit their heads, but the researchers concluded that ” hitting a stationary object was the injury mechanism most significantly associated with severe injury” and death, and those with helmets were the most likely to ski into something at speed.
“It would be ‘silly to take away from our study that helmets don’t help,’ study lead author Dr. Eleah Porter from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center told the newspaper. “They protect against things that you can prevent with a helmet.'”
Helmets will prevent a concussion if you fall over and hit your head on hard snow on the bunny hill. They will not help much if they encourage you to ski fast and out of control until you hit a tree, a lift tower, or, sometimes, another skier at high speed.
The problem is with what has been called “risk compensation.”
Risk compensation has fueled a long-running debate over mandatory helmets in sports and recreation. Cyclists backing mandatory helmet laws cite there protective value, albet it limited, and studies showing helmeted cyclists appear to show better judgment in traffic than non-helmet users, and opponents argue that the main thing mandatory-helmet requirements do is discourage cycling in a world where the best way to make cycling safer is to get more cyclists on the road so motorists become conditioned to watching for them.
Cars and trucks are by far the greatest danger faced by cyclists. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports 1,089 people died in bicycle accidents in 2019. The NHTSA says 846 of those deaths – or 78 percent – involved collisions in traffic.
Copenhagen is generally cited as the safest place in the world to ride a bicycle because 62 percent of its residents use one for regular transportation in the city. Motorists in Denmark quickly become aware of the need to watch for cyclists on the road. Fewer than 20 percent of cyclists in Copenhagen are reported to be wearing helmets.
Researchers who looked at risk compensation in a variety of popular sport and published in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine in 2004 concluded that there are risks to trying to replace judgment with helmets and other protective gear.
“It was not our intention to offer an indictment of protective equipment in sport and recreation,” they concluded. “(But) it may indeed be the case that introducing well-intentioned countermeasures is more harmful than doing nothing.”
Researchers at the University of Vermont have since raised concerns about the side effects of mandates for face coverings in most U.S. states during the pandemic.
“Wearing masks may create a false sense of security,” they warned. “It is plausible that mandating masks could be counterproductive if the increased risk associated with an increase in contacts is larger than the decrease in risk associated with the mask itself. That is, it is possible masks may provide a false sense of security that leads to people letting their guard down and trusting the mask more than is warranted. Further research into the effectiveness of marks and behavioral responses to mask mandates is urgently needed.”
It’s those judgment and situational awareness issues again. When people take more risks – knowingly or unknowingly because they’re not paying attention – the dangers of bad outcomes rise.
Better safety tools can help, but as has been found with motor vehicles, avalanche safety gear, helmets, face coverings and more, they can only help so much.
I read that the reason people are gullible, instantly accept gossip as gospel, believe everything they’re told, is maybe because it’s written in our dna, because deep in our prehistory it was a life saver. When someone yelled, “RUN! TIGER BEHIND THAT ROCK!”, nobody stopped to ask: “Sabertooth?” or, “Are you sure about that?” –everybody scattered for their lives..
Helmets, gloves, masks are all PPE personal protective equipment. PPE, as the name states protects the person wearing it, if that person does not wear it correctly or behaves in a manner that otherwise renders the PPE useless the PPE is not to blame, the person is. As mentioned early in the article situational awareness, judgment and tools are key. Situational awareness is knowing what conditions requires the wearing of the tools or PPE. Judgment is knowing which PPE is appropriate and when it is appropriate. Sadly far too many lack situational awareness and judgment. Sadly many people think that government guidelines (whether it be the CDC or OSHA or whoever) are the end all be all benchmark instead of the bare minimum.
Down in Colorado the CAIC did an interesting study which found that 70% of skiers caught in avalanches during the 2019-2020 avalanche season had intermediate or advanced levels of formal, field-based avalanche training/experience. This raises the interesting question of whether having more training increases or decreases your chances of being caught in an avalanche. The study doesn’t answer that question but does point out that people with more training spend more time in avalanche terrain and suggests that this additional exposure may offset the application of risk-reduction strategies.
Also, pretty sure Sonny and Cher tied a yellow ribbon round an oak tree, not a poplar 😉
Tie a Yellow Ribbon was Tony Orland & Dawn. Cheers –
yes, but what kind of tree did Sonny hit?
the numbers you site in Colorado are what pretty much drove Doug Fesler out of the avalanche business here. he was for a long time a big believer in “education.” he dug out of the snow the bodies of too many of the people he’d educated. it was demoralizing.
i don’t know if the training per se changes the equation, but i have little doubt the safety gear does. if you believe the safety gear will save you it’s natural to expand your risk threshold.
Bubble wrap and staple us all down. You’ll never save us all, it’s called life. Might as well have the freedom of choice of how to live it, and what you’ll be wearing or not wearing when you go.
Good piece, Craig. It occurs to me that in today’s world it is very easy, and I believe quite common, to reach adulthood with no experience of either danger or injury. Few engage in sports or outdoor recreation. Here in Alaska probably a higher percentage of people engage in some sort of outdoor activity than in most places, but still in urban Alaska not many do. Sightseeing from a motorhome or boat or driving out to a luxuriously appointed “cabin” for a weekend or a week isn’t really an outdoor activity.
When we lived in Juneau from the time the younger kids were middle school aged on we had a boat. The first one was bit spartan but comfortable with necessary amenities and didn’t require a five gallon bucket on the step. The next one was fairly large, 30 feet, and near luxurious with all amenities. Through their high school years they rarely wanted to go out with us and if they did weren’t interested in fishing, preferring to stay below and listen to tunes and play video games. More than once I flipped the breaker on the circuit the sound system was on so we didn’t have to fight about what station to listen to. I did have to change the locks on that boat because the oldest discovered that a nice boat in a marina made for a very handy pleasure palace.
We tried to keep them in sports but only the oldest had any real interest. They lived more like we had both grown up with a lot of outdoor play but nothing like as much as I did growing up in the world where you came in when the streetlights came on or when your mother called you in for meals. Mothers back then knew how to call kids in without a cell phone; the lake we liked to play on and around was close to half a mile away from most of our houses, and we could all hear our mothers at the back door calling us home.
My stepkids were appalled the first time they ever saw me in a swim suit; I have scars as monuments to every stupid thing I ever did, and they’d never seen such a thing. My bio daughter got a greenstick fracture in her upper arm in a bicycle fall and the oldest stepson got a broken collar bone playing tackle football in the back yard against my express orders, even though I grew up doing it and lived. As I was growing up blotches of merthiolate or mecurochrome and bandages on your body were badges of honor. My kids grew up with barely any scrapes and scratches, and I don’t think any of them ever had a cut of any consequence.
I know there are lots of kids in my neighborhood; I see the long line of luxury SUVs dropping them off at school; riding the bus is so declasse, and the few who do wait at the bus stop in mommy’s warm car. I almost never see or hear a kid(s) playing outside or riding a bicycle in the neighborhood. There are a lot of wifi networks in my neighborhood, though.
I really don’t think a lot of those “experienced” 30-something skiers have much of a sense of how dangerous it can be, at least not in terms of personally felt danger and pain. Seeing some guy go ass over teakettle on TV is not the same as the guy being you, and if you do it and live, you try to never do that again. You learn by doing things wrong and learning not to do that again.
Two issues with this:
First, you’re conflating personal safety and community safety. I couldn’t give a crap if you wear a helmet, that is until you crash, end up an invalid, and expect all of us to pay for 24 hour care for the rest of your life.
Also, I worked on ski patrol this last season. >99% of injuries aren’t the life-threatening strawman examples you used. Most are at slow speeds -“catching an edge” – or in the terrain park. Helmets can make a big difference there.
Same goes for masks – it may protect you a bit, but the main goal is to get community spread down enough so the virus begins to die out. I know, a sense of community responsibility is a difficult concept for rugged Alaskans to get.
Second, in my experience the people skiing out of control frequently are the ones without helmets – the “invincible” twenty-somethings who will never die – in their minds.The whole “false sense of security” thing is a canard in my experience. And yes, I’ve been to Scandinavia – a lot. I’ve ridden bicycles there. The culture around biking and driving is completely different – the way roads are designed and the expectations on drivers to start. Pretty tough to compare that with the US “I own this road” mentality.
I’m not rugged. I do have a pretty good understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 is spreading. The virus isn’t going to “die out,” and masks might not be limiting the spread much if at all. The Vermont study, plus the epidemic explosion in Europe and the NE states where everyone is masked, argue they might actually be helping increase the spread.
I do agree helmets can make a difference in the terrain park and anywhere people land on their heads at generally low speeds. And the data would indicate helmets do rescue the number and severity of concussions, except, of course, for the non-helmeted skier who gets hit in the head by the armored head of some out-of-control twenty-something.
The data also, clearly and sadly, shows helmets have done nothing to reduce ski death rates, which were already low. If we’re going to helmet-up, there might be better places than the ski slopes to do it.
56,000 people per year die from traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). The largest block of these – 28 percent – occur in motor vehicle accidents. That’s close to 16,000 people. https://www.aboutbraininjury.org/brain-injury-statistics/
There are 40 to 50 deaths per year on the ski slopes, only some of which involve TBIs. Obviously, we could save a lot more people if we put helmets on motor vehicle drivers and passengers than on skiers.
I will accept that your experience with twenty-somethings is your experience. But the evidence would indicate the overwhelming majority of them now wear helmets because a.) helmets have become fashionable; and b.) you can get them with great, built-in sound systems.