February Crashes and Burns

February 1909 was not exactly a dull month for disasters. There was the wreck of the Penguin, a New Zealand ferry that struck a rock on February 12 and took down some 75 of the 105 passengers aboard. Then on the 16th, a mine explosion at the West Stanley Colliery in Durham, England, ended the lives of 168 people. The cause was never determined. The U.S. contributed to the carnage with several train wrecks, including one near Delmar, DE that took seven lives, and another in Carbodale, IL that sent five more to their graves. Overall, though, it was far from the worst month for catastrophes here, at least according to what I can glean from the not exactly uplifting information on GenDisasters.Com.

In fact, it seems to have had its moment of courageous victory over the forces of evil, as a horrible train wreck near Whitesboro, NY (three miles west of Utica), ended with the loss of only two lives, both railroad workers. The engine of a westbound train exploded just as it was passing the passenger cars of an eastbound train, throwing the entire eastbound train from the tracks, scattering cars into a field and leaving a long trail of debris. The wreck on the redeye apparently happened before daybreak, at temperatures of 15 below. Nevertheless, uninjured passengers on the westbound train, which merely stalled, rushed to the assistance of others, as townspeople also jumped out of bed to lend a hand. In the end, not a single passenger died; the injured were rushed to hospitals by sleigh and other means. Shades of a certain emergency landing on the Hudson River almost exactly 100 years later. Maybe there is some cosmic symmetry in history after all.

Unfortunately, if there is, it's not all of the kind to jump and cheer about. There is a story that some time around the turn of the century there were only two cars in the state of Kansas, and they collided. Probably an apocryphal tale from Ripley's Believe it or Not, though repeated in popular culture often enough to make it seem real. That supposedly occurred on July 4, 1904. It now has an eerie parallel in a so-called "freak accident" in which the French nuclear-armed submarine Le Triomphant triumphantly rammed the British nuclear-armed sub H.M.S. Vanguard. The date of the sub crash was only given as "early February". The two submarines were playing hide-and-seek, the game in which these units armed with enough power to destroy much of the civilized world try to hide their whereabouts from one another's sonar. Disaster, thy name is Progress! A car wreck can injure a few people and spill some antifreeze (toxic to wildlife). Two nuclear subs can destroy an entire oceanic ecosystem with radiation leakage even if they don't accidentally discharge any nuclear-tipped flying objects and take out a city or two. Why are these things patrolling the oceans, jumping around and hiding from one another like some underwater Mario figure? As far as I can tell, were we to peer into the minds of many of our world leaders what we would find is a bunch of anxious little boys who are mentally primed to pull handles and push buttons, as if the enemies were virtual and the lives they endanger mere animations. Yet we believe we have no choice but to accept this sick state of the body politic.

The almost benign Whitesboro wreck has a less fortunate centenary sister to offset the more pleasant turnout on the Hudson, i.e., the fatal crash of Continental Flight 3407 near Buffalo, NY on February 12. What a comedown, after January's "miraculous" Hudson River landing. But actually, that miracle was no fortuitous gift of god. It depended on a plane engineered to land on water and float for a period of time, equipped with life preservers and a crew trained to react in case of an emergency water landing. It depended on a pilot who had to practice water landings in flight training until he could execute them about as confidently as a normal landing. It depended on communications between air traffic controllers and the flight crew, accurate enough (in spite of some errors) to let rescue teams know what was about to happen and where, before it actually happened. That is not to say that nothing could possibly have gone wrong - had the emergency occurred at night, or the river been laced with big chunks of floating ice, or one or another systems failed, there could have been a much worse result. But this was no miracle, just an example of how technology can be controlled even in the most adverse circumstances when enough planning and careful execution goes into it. With Continental Flight 3407, it is possible that all reasonable measures were taken to de-ice the plane, and that there was no way for the crew to do more than guess where on the plane the additional ice buildup had occurred, leading them to take the wrong corrective action when an autopilot system sent the plane into a descent. But there have been ice-related crashes before, including an awful incident in which a de-iced US Air plane spent so long on the runway at LaGuardia while waiting for takeoff in a March 1992 snowstorm that it accumulated a new, dangerous sheet of ice on the wings, resulting in a crash and 22 deaths.

Birds, ice, lightning strikes, wind shear - we know the most common causes of plane crashes, but for some reason we have not managed to eliminate them. I guess you could ask why we are spending billions of dollars engineering nuclear submarines which can destroy life on earth, when the tremendous scientific and technical efforts and financial resources required to build such things could be put to use figuring out how to build ordinary commercial planes that don't inhale birds or get coated with sheets of ice in flight. That would presuppose that we elect rational leaders, driven by a sincere belief in the good of humanity, rather than overgrown Mortal Kombat fanatics, driven by infantile aggressive impulses. Well, who knows, maybe we'll get one yet.

February did have a kind of miracle, if you like those: the case of the Turkish Airlines plane crash in Amsterdam on February 25, where the vast majority of the passengers survived even as the fuselage split in three pieces on ground contact. That is just a miracle, no way to plan or predict it but plenty to be thankful for. But everything beyond that sort of lucky turnout has to be done by us humans. That's why it is so disconcerting when it seems that everything was, and lives were lost anyway. We have collectively accumulated millions of miles of flying experience in commercial flights, yet we still cannot control every factor that might cause a catastrophe. So why are we sending nuclear submarines to play cat-and-mouse games beneath the waves? (And whatever you do, don't say "it's the French and the British, not us" - the U.S. has at least 18 nuclear-armed Ohio class subs, and possibly several others, and all our subs are driven by nuclear reactors.) Two nuke subs accidentally playing bumper cars in the world's vast oceans? One good crack-up and it won't be ordinary ice we'll be trying to lose - more like ice-nine. And that doesn't come off too easily.

Yes, Astroland may have closed but bumper cars are still going strong. On February 10 (at least someplace on earth) two satellites, a defunct Russian gizmo and an Iridium cell phone relay unit, collided in space. Another freak accident, which must have particularly freaked out users of Iridium's international cell phone service; according to a quotation from an Iridium spokesperson on MSNBC, "This satellite loss may result in very limited service disruption in the form of brief, occasional outages." As for the Russian satellite, Dasvidania! The debris now threatens the International Space Station, but NASA claims the risk is "acceptable". It will of course eventually end up on earth. Since a good part of the earth's surface is water, desert, or cemeteries, there is not much to worry about.

Or is there? Well, there's all that satellite debris hurtling around, just waiting to burn a hole in the ISS, which can then in a freak accident come crashing down over... Houston? Oh but no, say the FAA, the U.S. Strategic Command, and the Texas State Police. No, that fireball that numerous witnesses from Waco to Austin saw a few days after the Iridium collision must have been something Apollo (the Greek god, I mean) tossed in our direction for fun. (He likes to play bumper cars too.) "We still think it's possible it might be a natural phenomenon...", a spokesperson for the USSC intoned. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, means almost the same as: "It is likely, though not absolutely certain, that this is a piece of space junk burning up just short of heavily populated areas in Texas." Or, as they might say when they make the movie - "Houston, you have a problem."