A few days ago, I had a conversation with someone who had a mop of shining silver hair, bushy eyebrows and the remnants of a luxurious mustache. His eyes creased as he smiled (I can remember all of this about him, but can’t really remember who it was.) Shelving my memory for a second, lets talk about traveling. He opined that traveling these days was more dangerous than a century or 150 years ago because there weren’t this many accidents then.
I pondered about what he said for a moment and disagreed on two counts. Firstly, travel was not that frequent over a century ago. I have stories handed down from my father as to how travel entailed the preparation of a life event even though it was only a few villages away. Mental note to self: I should write about it someday.
Secondly, there were probably as many accidents involving horse carriages and wagons slipping off roads, or bullock carts stuck in flooding river waters.
Without a news feed tirelessly collating incidents from around the World and television and the web feeding you non-stop images of the accident site, no one thought that way.
I said that, but the thought has been sown in my mind. Look at the number of large accidents in the past 3 weeks.
Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crash landed in SFO
http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2013/07/06/airline-crash-san-francisco/2495099/
A few days later, we had this plane land nose-down in La Guardia Airport
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/nyregion/plane-landed-at-la-guardia-nose-gear-first.html?_r=0
Followed by this Boeing 737 that blew out its tires and crash landed in O’Hare Airport.
As if Ground Transportation wanted to prove a point and not let Aviation hog the limelight, a few days ago, two trains collided head on in Switzerland.
This comes soon after a train accident in Spain:
Are accidents more frequent or are we simply hearing of it more often after the Asiana Airlines crash landed in San Francisco airport?
PS: I don’t why I put up a morbid post today. It is the mood people, the mood 😦
Nourish-n-Cherish 