Zero tolerance

The great Icelandic volcanic ash fiasco perfectly illustrates the results of the zero tolerance approach.
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The reason more than 250,000 travellers were stranded and the entire European industrial base faced with the economic equivalent of a stroke is that the civil aviation authorities had what they proudly termed a zero-tolerance approach to the flying of aircraft in any areas that might be affected by volcanic ash.
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It didn’t matter whether the ash was dense or patchy, thick or thin: zero tolerance meant what it said.
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This policy appears to have been based on two incidents: one involving a British Airways flight over Indonesia in 1982 and one a KLM flight over Alaska seven years later.
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The two planes suffered sudden engine failure while flying through dense clouds of volcanic ash.

They both landed safely, after the pilots descended to a lower altitude and restarted their engines, but the experience for both crew and passengers was clearly not one they would wish to repeat.
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It was only several days after the entire northern European airspace was shut down in the wake of the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, however, that the aero-engine industry carried out the experiments that one would have thought ought to have preceded the original imposition of a zero-tolerance policy towards volcanic ash (Icelandic or otherwise).
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The result of those trial flights demonstrated empirically that in the concentrations of ash that were actually being encountered in the northern European airspace, no damage to engines occurred or could be detected.
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Result: complete abandonment of the zero-tolerance policy so forcefully iterated a week earlier, and a welcome return to rational risk assessment
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If there’s one favourite expression of politicians that should be consigned to the polemical dustbin, it is “zero tolerance”.
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This phrase (which emanated from America) either is mere rhetoric designed to exaggerate the determination of lawmakers to keep us all safe, or, if seriously applied, results in bizarre distortions of the public interest.
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Take, for example, our unfortunate hill farmers, who 24 years after the radiation plumes from the Chernobyl nuclear accident scattered caesium over 131,000 acres of north Wales are still barred from selling us the meat from their sheep.
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This is a lesson not lost on the succeeding new Labour governments, which saw how the Tories were annihilated by the media for daring to question the scaremongering of a few scientists, and vowed that they would never suffer the same fate.
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As one minister put it to me: The trouble is that none of the present generation of political leaders feels confident in offering a personal judgment on any matter seen to relate to science.
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What’s worse is that the scientists who get the most traction in the media are those offering the most horrifying predictions of imminent doom and disaster
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On this account, those largely to blame for the culture of fear are tabloid newspapers — the means by which scientists who aspire to a high public profile can achieve this ambition (just so long as they are prepared to indulge in some unprofessional exaggeration).
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There is some truth in that — but the present government has also engaged in spontaneous actions that show a grossly disproportionate response to public fear, and that were quite unnecessary, even as a ludicrously expensive form of media management.
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For example, the decision that anyone involved in working with children should go through a Criminal Records Bureau check has not just had dire consequences for the voluntary sector; it would not even have prevented the murders in Soham to which this grotesque overreaction was the political antidote.
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When it comes to the deaths of children, few governments feel able to resist the urge to pander to the popular rage, even if they know that on any rational basis of risk assessment what they are doing is out of all proportion to the facts.
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The phrase “zero tolerance”, is from across the Atlantic.
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This is the idea that there is no such thing as an accident — a concept that is heaven on earth for litigators.
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On the basis of the so-called precautionary principle governments are expected to remove all possibility of risk from the field of human conduct.
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It was something akin to this sort of thinking that caused the British Medical Journal to state in 2001 that it would no longer use the word “accident” because even earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions were predictable events against which we could, and should, take precautions.
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We have just seen what happens when the authorities do have a fully fledged “precautionary” volcano safety policy.
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 It does not survive the first encounter with reality.
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The media carry a great deal of blame for the hysterical response of the public to everyday events.
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There is a catalogue of media scares MMR vaccine, mobile phone technology, BSE, Avian and Swine flu etc. NOTHING is 'safe', we are all going to die, some sooner, some later.
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There is NOTHING that can be done to eliminate this conclusion to life.
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The sooner we all get back to understanding that a good life is down to eating a good diet, having interests, exercising, having friends and family and just getting on with it instead of moaning and trying to blame someone for every event that displeases us the better we will all be
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D. Lawson