Two 16 y.o. boys stole the keys of the family car and were killed in an accident. They had no driving licences and probably were on drugs or drunk. In Israel, every road (or work) accident that ends in death is automatically investigated by the criminal police. In this case, the police has focused on the Municipality of Rishon LeZion (south of Tel Aviv) and interrogated the engineers who planned the iron bars protecting the bus station (which was demolished, see pic). The detectives also demanded the street's engineering drawings. As a consulting engineer working for municipalities and friend of city engineers, I find this development quite worrying. In the collapse of the bridge (in the Maccabiada), the engineer who did the calculations went to jail (one year, I think) although the numbers were correct. Somebody had to pay and since he had absolutely nothing to do with the accident, he didnt ran away and was cought. In the case of the building that collapsed in Jerusalem, the engineer who invented the building method (using steel wire mesh) was condemned. The technique is innovative and ingenious, it was applied successfully by many designs and of course the man had nothing to do with that
specific building.
Now the detectives are focusing on who designed and who authorized the iron barrier that "caused" the accident. Israel is full of identic structures designed to protect the people waiting for the bus against crazed Arab suicide terrorists. It started with Arabs stealing heavy trucks and tractors, and crashing them against the crowd - generally young soldiers - standing in the bus stop. Volunteer organizations started to erect these barriers. The American consulate in Tel Aviv is surrounded by similar steel barriers. I can feel in my guts the anguish of the engineers who designed the barrier and the department manager who authorized its construction. I have designed fire protection systems (with water sprinklers) and hundreds of street manholes (someone can easily fall into one of them!). Should I be worried? Should I be very worried?
6 comments:
Awful.
Anon.
Nobody is safe in Israel.
That is the trouble with liberal society, some hapless human or instituition has to take the blame. It cannot just be that bad luck or acts of God screw up the best laid plans. No, there has to be an explanation for everything. The mothers come crying and the politicians zero in on the engineers to get them out of their hair.
In this case, not the politicians but the police.
It is worse than what Ivan said because there is already a clearly responsible party - the driver of the car. But we have taken blame away from actual criminals - their actions are not evil but caused by societal conditions, blah, blah, so we must now shift it only someone else - the auto manufacturer, the person who put the posts in the road, the distiller of the alcohol, anyone but the actual responsible party. This is part of the elite leftist attitude that the people are incompetent wards of the state and only the educated elite are capable of making moral judgments and can therefore be held responsible.
K
There a number of responsible parties here, in addition to the idiot thieves - none of whom involve engineers, unless the boys parents were engineers. Apart from the parents, there is of course the traffic police, whose main deterrent effect has to do with crossing white lines, and the courts (I remember about 3-4 years ago, there was a judge who said that drunk drivers can be forgiven. With that sort of attitude no wonder the law has almost no deterrent effect in Israel).
More narrowly, the problem is that if the posts are removed, the next time an idiot drives faster than their IQ, he will hit the people sitting in the bus stop. Which engineer will they blame then...?
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