Back when I was in school we had fire drills and it was clear that he schools were designed for rapid exit and general fire safety. The idea of practice before a fire and designing schools to be safe sounded like a good idea. There are lots of good ideas out there. What happened to trigger a translation those nominally good ideas into rules, architectural designs and behavioral changes like a fire drills?

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012875.html

Another good idea was the thought of adding a smell to common flammable gasses. What happened to make that come about?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion

Building codes, fire safety, most of the common safety laws and rules are, as they say, written in blood. People died and were maimed before anyone took the seemingly common sense good ideas seriously enough to make them shift from good ideas into laws, codes, behavior.

The problem is that humans have short memories and the burning issues of 1908 seem distant and improbable in 1958. So we forget get lax, sloppy, and we get:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_the_Angels_School_Fire

Forgetting has a very high price.


This post was inspired by and contains themes from:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/why_do_we_have_fire_drills.php

Thanks for the education, Art. Some of this I had not known before.

It's true indeed that forgetting has a high price. Although few people want a nanny state, I think it's far too easy nowadays for legislators to undo regulations and laws which they deem archaic, costly, anti-business or inconvenient without even understanding the context in which they were first put in place. For example, this legislative situation in Wisconsin is one that cries out for more substantive discussion about the historical context of what Gov. Walker is trying to do. And of course, we've already been living through a few years of what happens when you let Wall St. run amok with little regulations or oversight, just like in the run up to 1929.

Unfortunately, thoughtful, deliberate discussion seems to be a lost art nowadays. It's all about who can crash someone's press conference and shout the loudest and be the most disruptive. Don't tase me, bro!