ESPN’s report on the Tennessee drag car incident has a very troubling quote:

Amateur video of the crash, broadcast on WMC-TV in Memphis, showed the car’s engine revving loudly before the vehicle sped down the highway. After a few hundred feet, the smoking car skidded off the road and into the crowd.

“It’s been a safe event until this year,” Police Chief Neal Burks said Monday.

With all due respect to the Chief, it has not been a safe event until this year. Rather, it has been an event without incident. The two conditions are vastly different and should never be confused when calculating risk.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say it is a pet peeve of mine to find managers who say they have a safe environment when what they really mean is they are unaware of any incidents. Being lucky is definitely not the same thing as studying data and preparing for predictable outcomes.

I wonder what the Chief would say if he pulled someone over for a safety violation (e.g. speeding, no seatbelt, drunk driving, etc.) and that person said “I have been safe so far”.

The crash occurred at a Cars for Kids charity show, which has been an annual event in this small town 80 miles east of Memphis for 18 years. The drivers always do crowd-pleasing burnouts — spinning the tires to make them heat up and smoke — at the end of the parade.

[…]

Cars for Kids holds several events throughout the nation and raises close to $200,000 annually for charities that help children in need, according to its Web site.

The charity was formed in 1990, two years after founder Larry Price’s son, Chad, suffered a severe head injury in a bicycle accident. Price promised that if his son was saved from lifelong injuries, he would spend the rest of his life raising funds for disabled children, according to the Web site.

So here is an interesting question: Would the crowds come and pay admission if there was less risk (to the driver, the environment, or themselves)? Seems to me there is some questionable judgment and sad irony in using high-risk activities to raise funds to pay for injuries from risky activities. Then again, maybe I’m a bit more sensitive than most to the risks of “burning” tires or “burnouts” for show.

Tires are not made of rubber, they are complex chemical mixtures that will release thousands of chemicals in mixtures that will create new ones, the health hazards of this are unknown. As a cancer researcher I know that mixtures of chemicals in low doses are cancer causing in humans, even if the individual chemical is not.

Would you like some asthma with those fries?