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The eruption didn't kill that person, gung-ho working practices and the lack of strictly adhering to something like OSHA killed that person. He was working aro
by avar 3y ago
The eruption didn't kill that person, gung-ho working practices and the lack of strictly adhering to something like OSHA killed that person.
He was working around a newly opened fissure without being clipped into something like a safety harness, which I daresay is standard practice in most of the rest of Europe and the US in similar circumstances.
The soil shifted, or he fell. In either case someone directly or indirectly working as a contractor for the government died as a result of unsafe and obviously dangerous work practices.
The government then went into overdrive to push the narrative that these fissures were so dangerous in general that they had to evacuate the town immediately.
That can also be true, but the immediate cause is needless and dangerous expediency.
In the end they fell into shit and came out smelling like roses, because the eruption happened to start a few days later.
The issue of that easily preventable death was quickly forgotten by most (but e.g. [1], in Icelandic, raises so some of the same concerns).
The evacuation order at the time had nothing to to with an imminent eruption, just the supposed general danger to the public from shifting soil and fissures.
Some other eruption in the area was expected eventually, but that it happened so fast came as a surprise.
1. https://heimildin.is/grein/20601/ https://heimildin.is/grein/20601/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wolverine876 3y ago> The eruption didn't kill that person, gung-ho working practices and the lack of strictly adhering to something like OSHA killed that person. The eruption killed them, however it's phrased. I'm aware of the semantic arguments, but it's a mistake to apply them to reality and I'm not going to engage with them with a person dead and more threatened, including the person who posted above! > the immediate cause is needless and dangerous expediency Why should we believe that and not the government?
- avar 3y ago> The eruption killed them There wasn't any eruption at the time. There was ongoing seismic shifting and land uplift, that's why the fissures were forming. It happened to erupt shortly afterwards, but the way these things go that's just happenstance. The geology service did not suspect an imminent eruption at the time of the evacuation. In retrospect it was good that the town was evacuated at the time, and probably the previous evacuation shouldn't have been lifted. I'm just noting the chronology and what was stated and known at the time. > I'm not going to engage with them with a person dead. Well, you'd feel right at home in Iceland, but personally I wish it had more of the US's attitude of mandatory and critical root cause investigations when workplace deaths occur. > Why should we believe that and not the government? I think the facts speak for themselves. Up-thread I linked to an article by a local professor of volcanology basically agreeing with what I'm saying here. It's in Icelandic, but Google Translate does a decent job of it if you're interested.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoYou seem to be making quite a weak argument here: that the government made up a threat that just happened to be real.
- avar 3y agoThe stated argument for evacuating the town was that due to ongoing seismic shifts. New fissures were opening regularly, and that these presented an unacceptable danger to public safety. I'm pointing out that it's at best a very convenient omission that the evacuation wasn't happening due to that scenario. Nobody randomly fell into a fissure by accident. That person and others were being directed to work adjacent to and in these fissures. It's an on-the-clock workplace accident due to grossly inadequate safety practices. We're not talking about some obscure inconsequential OSHA rule here. A lot of things have to go systemically wrong to have someone working alone at an unsecured edge without a teather.