The Norm Chronicles (29 page)

Coalmining accidents elsewhere are repeatedly in the news. Forty-eight miners were killed in Pakistan in 2011. In China economic growth is driven by coal, but it is deeply buried at an average depth of 400 metres. Even according to official figures there is a high death toll: around 250,000 since 1949, around 7,000 in 2002 and 2,600 in 2009.
¹⁴
Assuming 4 million miners underground, that’s around 650 MicroMorts a year (official figures), which was about the risk in Britain in 1950.

Unofficial estimates put the current total nearer 20,000, or 5,000 MicroMorts a year.
¹⁵
This may be unsurpassed as a modern occupational risk. It is worse than Britain 150 years ago. Vast numbers of small mines are run by corrupt local officials under minimal central control. The Asian Development Bank
¹⁶
has commissioned worthy reports, but attempts to impose safety regulations or closures often lead only to the growth of illegal mines.
¹⁷

The highest-risk occupation in the UK today is commercial fishing. A recent study recorded 160 deaths in the UK between 1996 to 2005, which works out as 1,020 MicroMorts per year per fisherman.
¹⁸
Fourteen died in coastal shipwrecks, 59 drowned when their boat sank or capsized, mainly because it was unstable, overloaded or unseaworthy. About half the fatalities are solitary fishermen, not helped by a culture of shunning personal flotation devices. Perhaps unique among industries, these risks have not declined since the Second World War, although before that they were even higher: 4,600 MicroMorts per year in 1935–8, close to the unofficial risk for Chinese miners today.

Similar rates of 1,000–1,160 MicroMorts per year apply to Alaskan, Danish, French and Swedish fishing fleets, while the risks are even
higher in New Zealand (2,600). Besides commercial fishing, other high-risk UK occupations between 1996 and 2005 include dockers (280 MicroMorts per year), refuse and salvage workers (250) and agricultural machinery drivers (180).

Of course, it is not just workers who can suffer from industrial accidents – bystanders are caught up too. A famous example was the great London beer flood of 17 October 1814, when huge vats of porter burst in the Meux brewery on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road.
¹⁹
More than a million litres of strong beer – enough to fill 20,000 barrels – broke through brick walls, demolished two houses, seriously damaged the Tavistock Arms pub and poured into cellars occupied by the local poor. Nine people drowned, and the fourteen-year-old barmaid Eleanor Cooper was crushed by rubble in the Tavistock Arms. Others, of course, rushed to the scene to fill up pans and kettles. The story that one fell victim to acute alcohol poisoning could be an urban myth. In the later court case the disaster was ruled to be an act of God, and the brewery escaped responsibility.

Just over a century later this bizarre event was eclipsed by the Boston molasses disaster of 15 January 1919.
²⁰
Like a bad disaster movie, a huge tank of 8 million litres of molasses burst – equal to around three Olympic swimming pools – and a black, sweet and sticky tsunami, 3 metres high and travelling at 35 miles per hour, swept out, demolished buildings, damaged the overhead railway, drowned numerous horses, killed 21 people and injured 150 more. The United States Industrial Alcohol Company was found responsible and paid compensation.

If there’s black comedy in these stories of absurd accidents, events in Bhopal in 1984 are of a different order. Thirty tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from a tank belonging to a subsidiary of the US Union Carbide Corporation.
²¹
MIC is a gas, but heavier than air. There was no escape from nearby shanty towns. Three thousand died immediately. Recent estimates suggest a final death toll of 25,000 and half a million injuries, many permanently disabling. The court cases continue.

The victims of Bhopal illustrate the distressing long-term effects of industrial accidents and exposures. The ILO estimates that 2 million people died from diseases caused by their jobs in 2008. In the UK the
HSE estimates that in 2009 there were around 8,000 cancer deaths due to people’s previous occupations, half of them from asbestos.
²²
While deaths from pneumoconiosis caused mainly by mining are now falling – from 453 in 1974 to 149 in 2009 – deaths from asbestosis and mesothelioma (cancer caused by asbestos) are rising, and not expected to peak until 2016.

This is a chronic risk rather than an acute one. When exposure to asbestos kills, it usually does so long after the event. It would be useful to know the chronic risk faced by asbestos workers or miners in terms of lost MicroLives per day of employment. But something strange happens in this calculation. The long-term mortality of asbestos workers turns out to be only 15 per cent higher than the general population,
²³
roughly corresponding to the loss of around 2 MicroLives per day, no worse than a few cigarettes. Even more paradoxical is the finding that the mortality of 25,000 British coalminers was 13 per cent
lower
on average than men living in the same regions.
²⁴

The explanation for these findings is known as the ‘healthy worker effect’. Men would not be down the pit unless they were fit and healthy, and so, compared with average people, miners can appear to have better survival in spite of their exposure to coal-dust, because they are drawn from a healthier population. This makes it hard for epidemiologists to calculate the harm of poor working conditions except in general terms – or by counting bodies.

We’ve seen how some occupations are still risky, although not at Victorian levels. But how high must the risk be before the HSE decides that something should be done? The HSE’s philosophy is based on what is known as the ‘Tolerability of Risk’ framework, and can be nicely converted to MicroMorts.
²⁵

Potential hazards are thought of on a spectrum of increasing risk, divided into three loosely defined categories. At the top are ‘unacceptable’ risks: whatever the benefits of the activity, something must be done to protect either the workers or the public, or both. At the bottom are ‘broadly acceptable’ risks: not quite zero but considered insignificant, the sort of thing we would regard as normal in our daily lives.

In between these extremes lie the ‘tolerable’ risks: those we might be
prepared to put up with if there is sufficient benefit, such as providing valuable employment, personal convenience or keeping the infrastructure of society going: somebody has to do the dirty work. The HSE makes clear that risks should be considered tolerable only if they are carefully weighed up using the best evidence, are periodically reviewed and are kept ‘as low as reasonably practicable’, a set of criteria known as ALARP. (The HSE has other great mnemonics that are not so easy to pronounce: duties to reduce risk may be SFAIRP – ‘so far as is reasonably practicable’.) But how does anyone decide what is unacceptable, broadly acceptable or tolerable? The HSE suggests some rough rules of thumb.

First, it states that an occupational risk might be considered ‘unacceptable’ if the chance of a worker being killed is greater than 1 in 1,000 per year, or 1,000 MicroMorts per year. On this metric, the risks faced by pre-nationalisation British miners would now be considered ‘unacceptable’, and current commercial fishing is around this level. The HSE exclude ‘exceptional groups’: presumably serving in a war zone counts as exceptional, for example when the average risk faced by 9,000 servicemen and women in Afghanistan reached 47 MicroMorts a day, or around 17,000 a year in late 2009.
²⁶

For members of the public, rather than employed workers, the HSE considers a 1-in-10,000-a year-risk – that’s 100 MicroMorts a year – as generally unacceptable. At the other extreme, risks are considered broadly acceptable if they are less than 1 in a million per year – 1 MicroMort – the current estimate of the average risk of being killed by an asteroid.

Even such a minimal risk, if applied to the whole population of the UK, would mean around 50 deaths a year. This brings another curiosity. Imagine the headlines if 50 deaths happened at once. As we’ve seen when discussing railway disasters in
Chapter 15
, cold MicroMort calculations are easily trumped by ‘societal concerns’ about disasters with multiple fatalities, hazards that affect vulnerable groups such as young children, or risks imposed on people just because of where they live.

The HSE offers separate guidance that reflects this: the risk of an accident involving 50 deaths should be less than 1 in 5,000 per year.
Spread across a population of more than 10,000, it is less than 1 MicroMort a year each. From an individual perspective this might be considered ‘acceptable’, but because we don’t like disasters (although people clearly love reading about them in newspapers), huge amounts of money are spent to make tiny risks even tinier.

19
RADIATION

P
RUDENCE SCANNED THE SHELVES
of vitamins, tonics and remedies in the chemist’s shop. Pansy swung from her mother’s arm. Above them in a bundle tied by their feet, soft toys wore the label ‘I’m a sloth’.

‘What are those mummy?’

Prudence looked up.

‘Sloths.’

‘Can I have a sloth?’

‘No.’

‘What do they do, mummy?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why not?’

‘They just sit there.’

‘Please mummy?’

‘Stuffed.’

‘Pleeease?’

‘Doing nothing.’

‘Can I?’

‘Like your father.’

Prudence disapproved of soft toys. Think of the dust mites and plastic eyes. She disapproved of her husband’s inertia too. His cough, for instance.

She took from the shelf a small bottle of 37 life-giving essential vitamins, minerals and nutrients for health and vitality, including active antioxidant extracts of Korean Ginseng, and tossed it into the basket with two others of high-strength organic sunscreen.

‘It’s a cough,’ he said that evening, as they sat watching the news about an accident at a nuclear power station while Prudence ate her ten o’clock banana.

‘Can’t a man have a cough and it just be a cough?’ he said, then added, mysteriously: ‘Fires sometimes go out.’

But the story on the news was of a fire that didn’t go out. ‘Meltdown,’ they said and talked of criticality excursions, which sounded like a fatal bus ride. Why he agreed with it, in his boys-and-lasers way, she’d never know. The boffins were clueless, it wasn’t natural, and she’d rather live in a mud hut than be ‘saved’ by technology like that. Creepy stuff.

‘So you’d leave a fire burning to see if it went out?’, she said.

‘What? No. I mean …’

‘What if?
What if
? Think if we lost you.’

‘Hmmm,’ he said.

He had turned down her offer of an all-body scan for his birthday. The ultimate in preventative health-screening, peace of mind, a 3D computerised journey through your own body with a free colonoscopy and take-home DVD to share with friends.

‘Look at that,’ she said, reading the testimonials. ‘Just an ache and it was kidney cancer.’

There was a picture of tanned and attractive, smiley doctor and technician types in white coats gazing at computers – and in the background a man’s bare legs in black ankle socks sticking from a tube.

‘Tumours, cysts, haemorrhage, blockages, heart, bones – your back, for instance – infection. It’s quite comprehensive.’

‘They put you in a machine,’ he said. Cough.

‘They’re professionals.’

‘Doctors? Ha!’ Cough.

‘Well, rather one machine than a lifetime’s worry.’

‘I wasn’t worried …’ Cough.

PRUDENCE’S HUSBAND
would be irradiated by an all-body scan – for the sake of his health. Good idea, she thinks. Nuclear power is a bad idea because of the radiation, she thinks. Some contradiction, perhaps?

He, on the other hand, admires nuke boffins’ mastery of nature for the common good, but thinks that doctors who use radiation technologies are quacks. Is he any more consistent?

Yet hearing and telling stories about risk, people like to think they react in a consistent and justifiable way. Do they?

Since exposure to radiation can be measured in standard units, we know how one exposure compares with another. We know roughly how lethal they are, on average, from the good (X-rays) to the bad (radon gas in the home) to a mixture of both (a suntan). This makes radiation a handy test-case, in that people’s differing sense of risk about the same level of exposure from different sources is a clue to what personal risk is often about.

What it’s often about in the case of radiation is known – no mincing of words here – as ‘dread’. For Prudence, at one extreme, the threat of being fried or contaminated by an accident at a nuclear power plant ticks all the fear-factor boxes: it is an invisible hazard, mysterious, ill understood. It seems unnatural. It is associated with those particular nasties cancer and birth defects, provoking concern for future generations with a vague feeling of catastrophic potential. Some feel they can’t control or avoid it – it is involuntary.
*

We’ve touched on many of these in previous chapters, but separately. ‘Dread’ can arise from any one of them, or is sometimes described as a separate emotion altogether, to do with whether people have learned
from familiarity with risk to judge it calmly or with a terrified gut reaction. Either way, dread positively soars when these fear factors mix.

Dread risk is often defined as ‘disproportionate’, ‘excessive’ or ‘irrational’, words that don’t try to hide their disdain. If only people weren’t so ignorant of the technicalities. And there are differences in reaction to similar radiation risks, no question. But are these attitudes silly, and even dangerous in themselves, or does the notion of dread risk catch something the numbers miss?