Sparky's is a truck stop on Highway 20 just north of Rockwell City, Iowa. It's fairly new, I mean it wasn't there when we got married a zillion years ago. We've been there before.
Truck that started the fire
Rumor has it that the brakes on a semi-truck locked up and when the truck pulled in, the accumulated heat in the brakes set the tires on fire and as the truck was parked next to the building, one thing led to another and the whole place went up in smoke.
Younger son and four of his friends were on their way to Forest Park for a little Sunday-clear-your-head-exercise and Devon, the driver, smells smoke, so he starts to put his window up. Now he notices one of the switches in the door is hot, glowing red hot, so he pulls over on the entrance ramp and everyone bails out. There is small stream of smoke coming from the door, not any more than you would get from a cigarette. Two minutes later the car (a 2005 Subaru) is fully engulfed in flames. Fire trucks came and doused it with water and then a tow truck came and took it to the impound lot. The kids walked up hill into downtown and had a drink. Nobody injured, fortunately.
The Remains
A couple of years ago my wife and I were driving through Montana and we passed a pickup truck sitting by the side of the road, totally engulfed in flames. My first and only thought was that it was an old truck, probably a real beater, much abused and not well cared for. Something like that wouldn't happen to a good car, but this deal with Devon's car makes me wonder. I mean 2005 isn't that old. Now back when I was in high school 40 years ago, a 13 year old car was a miracle. Cars just didn't last that long. But now my wife's car is a 2006 and mine is a 2008 and they show no signs of needing replacement. True, there are some small things that don't work quite right, but overall they work fine.
Now that I think about it I had some kind of little Mazda hatchback when I lived in Austin back around 1980. I sold it to a friend of mine and a month later is spontaneously combusted sitting outside his apartment one night. So every once in a long while this kind of thing just happens, regardless of whether you take good care of your car or not.
I have always heard that "flying is safer than traveling by car" on a per mile basis, and I believe that is true. But what about on a per trip basis? Say I make about two car trips a day (I drive to work and then I drive home). In 40 years that could add up to 25,000 trips. I've had two accidents that were serious enough to make my car undrivable. I don't know how many airline flights I've taken, not many, maybe 100. My point is all you can do about these kinds of things is you can either decide to make the trip or not, so the odds of an accident on a per trip basis are more meaningful then on a per mile basis. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.43.33.62 (talk) 17:55, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
I got back a couple of replies. I thought this one was especially good.
Indeed; ultimately, what we choose as our denominator when we normalize statistics for comparison is purely a heuristic. Should we compare number of trips? Number of miles? Number of passengers multiplied by number of miles? Number of dollars spent? Whichever value we choose represents a heuristic model of our threat: if we count miles, that implies that (for some reason) we believe the risk is uniformly distributed over distance; if we choose number of trips, that suggests that we believe the risk is quantized - e.g., because of the adage that the riskiest part of a flight is the takeoff and landing. There is no universally correct answer.
I feel safer when I fly myself than when I fly on a commercial airline, even though accident statistics very clearly show that airline transport is safer than general aviation. This may be an illusion, but it is a real psychological effect. The process of Aeronautical Decision Making is the "systematic approach to the mental process of evaluating a given set of circumstances and determining the best course of action." It means becoming fully informed about all the pertinent objective facts of a situation. It also means to think clearly through the details, and to be aware of our own mental limitations. Finally, it means to take a reasonable course of action, based on all available data.
It is also worth emphasizing the formal distinction between probability and statistics, because this is relevant to making good decisions about outcomes.
In my short career as a (non-commercial) aviator, I've seen many mechanical failures - on the ground and in the air. Thus far, none of these interesting occurrences have resulted in a fatal accident. But from this perspective, I recognize the widespread fallacy of fixating on Gaussian distributions. The mean and median event rate for a large population has zero impact on when I will experiece an event. This is the causation-correlation fallacy. It is tragic that in the basic tiers of formal schooling, we spend so much time studying bell-curves for large populations. We ought to spend more time studying Poisson distributions and their effect on probability. Bell curves are fantastic ways for institutional regulators to study safety on the macro-scale, and do provide actionable information if your decisions can affect large numbers of events. However, I am only one individual. I do not represent 300 million air travelers; I do not actually feel effects of n-accidents-per-hundred-million. What I care about is likelihood of a single event - one single event, not n-events-per-mille - and all I care about is how that single event will affect me (and my aircraft and my passenger). Recognition, and realistic understanding, of these types of probability distributions, is more useful for me to inform my judgement than all the bell-curves in the world. My aircraft will not suffer an accident because the national average for aircraft predicts it. My aircraft will only suffer an accident if a mechanical or systems failure occurs, or if there is a fire, or if I command the aircraft to do something unsafe, or if some outside occurrence creates an unrecoverable situation. None of that is caused by nation-wide average. Quite the opposite: the nation-wide accident rate is caused by the aggregation of all of these individual events.
This perspective completely changes the way I evaluate, and reduce, my risk - whether the risk is related to automobile traffic, operating or riding in aircraft, or participating in any of the other uncertain activities of ordinary life.
Nimur (talk) 15:44, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Saturday, June 20, 2015. We have arrived in SIoux City, Iowa, after three days on the road. Yesterday afternoon we ran into a thunderstorm on highway 212 in southeastern Montana. We saw lightning bolts for about a half an hour before the rain hit, and boy did it hit hard. I've been in downpours before, but nothing this strong. At times visibility dropped to 50 yards. When my speed dropped below 35 MPH I pulled over, it seemed kind of pointless to keep driving at such a slow speed. At times the rain turned to hail. It made so much noise we were afraid windows would break and the sheet metal would be trashed. There wasn't anything we could do. There was no cover of any sort, so we pushed on when we could. Being on a motorcycle would have been brutal.
We were hoping we could get a room in Belle Fourche, so we could wait till the storm passed, but no such luck. No hotel rooms available anywhere in the area until we found one at the Best Western in Rapid City, South Dakota, for $250, which I thought was highway robbery, but when you don't plan ahead you have to take what comes.
Somewhere in central Montana yesterday we passed a pickup truck parked on the shoulder of the highway, engulfed in flames. He must have been carrying a flammable cargo. I can't imagine a truck by itself producing so much flames, heat and smoke.
This morning heading east on Interstate 90 we saw four semi-trucks with their trailers lying on their sides in the median. All four had been westbound. Evidently the storm produced some high winds as well as rain and hail. We also saw a grain silo that had been blown into the median and a bunch of highway signs that had been twisted into modern art. News reports tell us that three tornados were sighted.
Remains of semi-tractor fire on the Westbound Sunset Highway near Murray Road in Beaverton, Oregon. Nobody hurt.
It took dutiful daughter two hours to get home from work today, a drive that normally takes her half an hour. We found this pic when we went looking for a news report on the cause of the problem. I've seen the remains of vehicle fires before, but not one like this. Comes from making the cab out of fiberglass I imagine. Via TVF & R.
