William Rockefeller was the engineer who operated the Metro-North Railroad train at 83 mph around the Spuyten Dyvel curve, in the Bronx. The general speed limit is 70 mph, and the speed limit going into the curve is 30 mph. The train derailed, killing four passengers and injuring many more, some very seriously. Rockefeller told investigators that he had become “dazed,” whatever that means in the absence of some “dazing” event. Matt Flegenheimer & William K. Rashbaum, “Train Engineer Was Dazed Before Crash, Lawyer Says” (Dec. 3, 2013 ). George Orwell would have appreciated the slippery and soul-less use of the passive voice. Who did the dazing?
Jeffrey P. Chartier, Rockefeller’s lawyer, described his client as suffering from “highway hypnosis.” Chartier, testifying for his client, claimed that Rockefeller had lost concentration only momentarily, and that he was “extremely remorseful.” Metro-North trains are pretty substantial trains, not the sort that can accelerate momentarily from 30 to 82 mph.
Rockefeller is a member of the Association of Commuter Rail Employees, and so, of course, his union representative, Anthony Bottalico, had to weigh in on the issue. Bottalico casually mentioned that Rockefeller had described himself as having nodded off before the derailment. When pressed, Bottaclico realized his error in acknowledging responsibility, and he quickly changed up:
“People use the word ‘zoned out,’ ‘nod,’ ‘fell asleep,’ … I’m not a sleep expert.”
Bottalico’s indiscretion, in speaking to the media about a pending investigation (and trying to spin the facts to exculpate the union engineer) led the safety board to remove the union as a party to the investigation.
The search for responsibility is part of our human condition. Legal categories often drive the search. In occupational exposure cases, employers have tort immunity by virtue of workman’s compensation immunity. The Depression-era bargain between labor and management on workplace injuries pushes our legal system, and the litigation industry, to place responsibility on remote vendors of products and raw materials to the workplace, despite their lack of control over the dissemination of information on the job. In most so-called sophisticated intermediary cases, the accident or injury would not have occurred at all had the employer and the employees done their respective jobs with respect to providing a safe workplace.
In the Spuyten Duyvil crash, Rockefeller’s lawyer and rail safety pundits suggest that automatic systems might have prevented the derailment. The hard fact remains, however, that Rockefeller was the most important link in the causal chain. He was the “least expensive” means to avoid the disaster because it was his job and his responsibility to do so. Had Rockefeller simply done his job, four people killed in the crash would be alive today. And many more would not be crippled and in pain.
In today’s New York Times, Joe Nocera muses about how Long Island Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, was diagnosed with lung cancer. McCarthy, who is 69 years old, was a life-long cigarette smoker, yet in her court filings she refers to her lung cancer as her asbestos disease. Joe Nocera, “The Asbestos Scam” N.Y. Times (Dec. 3, 2013). We live in a free country (well, sort of free) and people should be free to deceive themselves and indulge their superstitions. But surely we can draw the line at deceiving others with such nonsense. McCarthy was never an asbestos insulator or an asbestos-exposed tradesperson. McCarthy’s lawyer, supposedly told The New York Post that “it has been conclusively proven that cigarette smoking and asbestos exposure act synergistically to cause lung cancer.”
Nocera points out that in fact it has not. Even Selikoff himself, who did so much to perpetuate a theory of multiplicative, synergistic reactivity, wrote that his insulator cohort synergistic risk estimates could not be extrapolated to other exposures (such as the evanescent household exposures alleged by Congresswoman McCarthy):
“These particular figures apply to the particular groups of asbestos workers in this study. The net synergistic effect would not have been the same if their smoking habits had been different; and it probably would have been different if their lapsed time from first exposure to asbestos dust had been different or if the amount of asbestos dust they had inhaled had been different.”
Selikoff, et al., “Asbestos Exposure, Cigarette Smoking and Death Rates,” 330 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. at 487 (1979). Despite Selikoff’s atypical care, his colleagues who carried the Mt. Sinai banner into courtrooms all around this country, glibly ignored his qualification. See also “Irving Selikoff and the Right to Peaceful Dissembling.” Of course, when Selikoff’s heirs updated his insulator study, they did not find evidence of interaction even for insulators who lacked sufficiently heavy exposure to cause asbestosis. Steve Markowitz, Stephen Levin, Albert Miller, and Alfredo Morabia, “Asbestos, Asbestosis, Smoking and Lung Cancer: New Findings from the North American Insulator Cohort,” Am. J. Respir. & Critical Care Med. (2013). See “The Mt. Sinai Catechism” (June 7, 2013). I doubt that these qualifications will find their way into the reporting of The New York Post.
Ultimately, Irving Selikoff and his heirs helped create a litigation industry that has placed responsibility for asbestos disease on vendors, not employers, and completely out of proportion to any realistic appraisal of traditional tort law. Rockefeller and McCarthy, and Selikoff (and the litigation industry he helped to start) all illustrate the misallocation of responsibility for avoidable human suffering. Denialism is where you find it.
