The Hindenburg, Safety, and Fear
NPR had a short bit on the Hindenburg this morning because the 70-year anniversary of the famous disaster is coming up on Sunday. Everyone knows the Hindenburg was a giant zeppelin that crashed and burned prompting radio announcer Herbert Morrison to declare "Oh, the humanity!"
But there are a few things I learned from the report. First of all, I hadn't realized how big the Hindenburg was. It was 804 feet long. That's more than 3 Boeing 747s end to end and only 78 feet shorter than the Titanic. Second, it was faster than I thought with a top speed of 84 mph. Most interesting, however, was this fact. During the famous Hindenburg disaster not a single passenger who remained in the cabin was killed. The casualties were largely those passengers who jumped out of the craft in fear of the flames, but because hydrogen, which is lighter than air, was the fuel for the fire it burned above the cabin without harming the crew or passengers who stayed there.
This is remarkable chiefly because it is so contrary to public opinion about the disaster, and it provides a good demonstration of the way fear overwhelms logic when it comes to safety. As a system's engineer I was taught that risk can be quantified, but safety can not. Risk is simply the probability of an adverse outcome times the severity of an adverse outcome. Safety, however, is the degree of risk that we are comfortable with, and it doesn't proceed straight from the numbers associated with risk.
If people were rationale, we'd react to the Hindenburg by noting things like the fact that even when it exploded and crashed no one on board in the crew/passenger cabins was hurt. And the only reason it could explode was because a US embargo on Germany at the time forced them to use hydrogen instead of helium. And yet the real reaction was to utterly eliminate the zeppelin as a mode of transportation. Why? Because when the Hindenburg went down the cameras were rolling and all the flame was scary. The reaction was not based on risk, but on safety.
The same principle applies from fear of lightning strikes and shark attacks to asbestos. Fear is a reaction that is not tied directly to risk. Perhaps this is unavoidable - an element of the human condition - but surely we should at least be cognizant of it. If we are aware of the way in which fear can be irrational, perhaps we could compensate for it. Which would be nice. I'd love to travel in a zeppelin one day.
2 comments:
I really thought you were going to finish the paragraph with terrorism. So I'll do it for you. I feel for the 3000 people that died from 9/11. I also feel for the people of the 43,000 auto deaths per year. I recently went on a flight with my mom and she was absolutely terrified. But never worries when she hops in the car. I wish people knew where their risk factors were. Our media and government is doing a poor job of warning us of the things that are actually dangerous.
I'm with you on the Zeppelin ride. Sign me up. But I want to dock at the Empire State building like it was designed!
I saw a documentary about the Hindenburg within the past year, which explained that tragedy occured not so much by the type of fuel, but rather the extremely flammable materiel that was used to construct the "body" of the aircraft.
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