Human failure

With so many other terrible events taking place in the world, disasters which might have been front-page stories are now mere footnotes in the press and media. Thus one might almost have missed the horrific collision of an SAS airliner and a light aircraft earlier this month, at fog-bound Milan airport with the loss of 118 lives. Now the appalling accident in Switzerland’s Gotthard Tunnel, with maybe more than 128 deaths, is struggling to make the headlines.

The world is a dangerous place at the best of times, but both of these disasters could have been avoided. It is now virtually certain that the catastrophic collision at Linate airport happened because the ground radar was out of operation and had been so for some weeks. That a major international airport such as Milan’s, (which is no stranger to fog), could countenance such a failure, and, worse, not even have a backup system available, is a scandal for which the Italian authorities have yet to offer an adequate explanation.

Initially Italian aviation officials blamed pilot error. The Cessna light aircraft that had wandered into the path of a hurtling SAS jet reaching 200 mph in its takeoff run was certainly in the wrong place, but incredibly no one in the control tower was aware of this. The Scandinavian pilot had been cleared to take off.

The death toll in the St. Gotthard Tunnel would clearly have been even greater, had it not been for emergency systems which did permit many drivers to escape down a service tunnel which had adequate ventilation. When two years ago a Belgian lorry caught fire in the French Mont Blanc road tunnel, the fire was so devastating that the tunnel remains closed today. The hundreds who escaped that conflagration did so more by luck than judgement, because the safety procedures and evacuation systems were judged to be totally inadequate. But just as with Milan airport, it has to be asked how in the heart of high technology, modern Europe, such accidents can be allowed to happen. Critics argue that the operators of transalpine tunnels have long refused to undertake fundamental safety reviews, because they realize the immense expense that the implementation of proper emergency systems would involve.

One of the most basic questions is why the road surfaces in both Mont Blanc and the St. Gotthard should be paved with flammable asphalt? Additionally, in the St. Gotthard tunnel, rescuers have been hampered by a collapse in the tunnel roof. Why was the tunnel not constructed to avoid such collapses?

In 1968, it had been planned that the St. Gotthard would have had two separate tunnels which, between them, would have carried two million vehicles annually. But because of cost, only one 15 kilometer tunnel was ever dug and incredibly, this has been carrying seven million vehicles a year. With no central barrier, partly because of the difficulties of maintenance in the middle of two single lanes of virtually constant traffic, a serious accident was inevitable.

Europeans are very fond of criticizing the rest of the world for lax safety and security. It is a weakness we all share. However, this is clearly a case where they should be putting their own house in order.