Why people always think their job is safe

There is a show on Deep Cable called “Ice Truckers” that portrays the dangerous dull lives of men who drive big rig trucks in tundra country on a road of ice. At any time they can die if their 18-wheeler breaks through the ice and sinks, or skids out of control and crashes.

But they keep doing it, and one gets the impression that most of them think the next guy to go to that big truck stop in the sky won’t be them because they drive better than the others do.

This is an extreme example of a phenomenon we see a lot — people in dangerous jobs can lose the ability to realize how dangerous their jobs are.

In “The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe described how military test pilots, losing a brother pilot to a crash, always found a way to persuade themselves that the crash was caused by pilot error, and after that to persuade themselves that the pilot didn’t have the right stuff to be a pilot, and doomed by having inferior abilities or character flaws that made flying more dangerous for him than for the other pilots. Wolfe concluded that the pilots needed to believe this — that their jobs were safe if done properly — because otherwise how could they justify the job to their wives and children?

I think Wolfe was onto something, but I also think it’s reinforced by a more banal factor, that people in dangerous jobs become inured to the risks because they live with those jobs day after day, growing used to the risks. Each day that nothing goes wrong reinforces the feeling of safety, even if they have no wives and children demanding to know why they work in a dangerous profession.

In Washington, D.C., I knew several people who lobbied for the nuclear power industry and had worked in nuclear power plants, and all of them were utterly convinced that concerns about the safety of nuclear power were completely unfounded, even after the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, Pa., caused by inattentive workers, and even after the far worse incident at Chernobyl, on the border of Ukraine and Russia. These incidents were anamolies, these people believed, caused by resolvable training issues. Normal people realize that the sanguine attitude of nuclear power proponents, their serene confidence that nuclear power plant accidents need never happen, is an example of the attitude that causes such events.

Hawaii has a thriving agribusiness of genetically modified seed, and it’s probably pretty safe. But the people who agreed to plant windbreak trees on Molokai and then didn’t, sent a message to the rest of us that they’re too sanguine about the safety of what they do.

The oil industry is trying to leverage the oil price crisis to revisit decisions on environmentally sensitive areas where oil companies are forbidden to drill. In theory it should be possibly to drill safely on the tundra, or off the California coast. In that regard, the oil companies are right.

The problem is that oil people are so convinced that what they do is safe that they’re not always as careful as they should be. It’s hard to argue that you can drill safely on the tundra when BP allowed its Alaskan pipeline to leak vast amounts of oil.

I’d like to believe companies can do their work safely. The problem is that time and again we get shown that many don’t bother.