Gordon Graham here again with another iteration of my “Risky Ramblings” contribution to Paul and Ted’s website. Nothing too deep but just some thoughts on the discipline of risk management and how it may apply to your job as a fire service professional. And today’s focus is on the Treaty of Versailles. Actually, it is not, but I want to talk about unintended consequences; and I cannot think of a better way to get started.

In high school, I had a professor in my German class (yes, that is correct — four years of German and, my, was that a wise move. I use the language almost ... never; but I am digressing. His name was Mr. Moorlach. I learned a lot from this guy — not a lot of German — but a lot of other things. This man (like so many of the teachers at St. Ignatius in San Francisco) was extremely smart. He allowed us to have one 3"x5” card for any test, and we could write anything on this card and use it as a “cheat sheet.” And I can recall all of the hours I spent with a really fine point pen making this “cheat sheet” that almost required a magnifying glass to read it. He was examining my “cheat sheet” once and told me that if I used the time spent on building the “cheat sheet” actually studying for the test, I would not need the “cheat sheet.” My guess is he was right.

Anyhow, Mr. Moorlach introduced me to the phrase “unintended consequences.” The Treaty of Versailles, written circa 1919 and designed to punish the Germans for WWI, had the “unintended consequence” of starting WWII. Now I don’t want to get into all the details on this on a firefighter website, but you can read the Wikipedia piece on this treaty and make your own conclusion. Mr. Moorlach posited that the allies wanted to punish Germany for WWI, and, in doing so, they actually started WWII. This was not the goal of the treaty; it was a consequence that was unintended, he said.

As long as we are in that point in history, let me talk briefly about “Prohibition.” The intent was to prohibit the sales of alcohol, but the result was unexpected.  Many people who study these things say that the Mafia got very strong because of “Prohibition,” and that certainly was not the intent of this law. It was an unintended consequence. And as long as I am rambling ... did the initiation of the “War on Drugs” in 1968 help build and strengthen the violent street gangs that plague so many cities today?

I could ramble on and on re “UCs” and tell you about the rabbits that were introduced to Australia and New Zealand for purposes of “sport” and how they quickly became a major pest with major consequences and how that was not the goal of the people who brought the rabbits “down under.” But let’s skip fifty or so years and get up to your and my personal experiences.

For those of you who grew up in the ' 50’s and ' 60’s and even the ' 70’s, do you remember ever hearing about kids dying in hot cars because their parents forgot to take them out of the car? I never heard of this stuff. And now this seems to be an annual event: how many kids do we lose every year in this scenario? What is going on today that was not going on thirty years ago?

Airbags! That’s right — airbags. One of the UC’s of this Supplemental Restraint System is the needless death of so many infants and kids. You will remember that if you went driving with Dad in the ' 50’s (as I did in his Green 1951 Plymouth Cranbrook), Dad would put you in the right front seat; and you were very obvious, then, sitting right next to Dad. And when he got out of the car, you crawled across the seat and got out with him. And then came the airbags in the early ' 80’s, and we quickly learned that these bags came out with such force that they occasionally killed the kid in the right front seat. So the recommendation was that kids get buckled into a child seat in the rear. You can now hear this train coming: the kid would fall asleep locked into the car seat and Dad (or Mom) would get out of the car and forget about the kid and lock the doors, and you know the rest of the story. Sure, you can blame it on the electric windows and the car seats, but why is the kid in the backseat? The UC of the airbags (and we are still living with this) was the neglect of kids forgotten in backseat child restraint systems..

Or how about the DWI sweeps that more and more police departments are doing. Show me a community that focuses on DWI enforcement on a regular basis,  and I will show you a high number of pedestrian fatalities. Drunks get drunk, but they are not all stupid. Some will choose to walk to their drinking establishment of choice rather than drive, and, remember, they are drunk and wander out into traffic ... and there you have it. 

Along the same lines is the “anti- smoking” fervor that is sweeping America. Drunks (the stupid ones) are driving to bars farther away (out of city) so they can smoke and drink (and those two things seem to go together), and, you guessed it, they then can’t walk because they are far away; and they drive ... and now you have the crash.

Don’t want to talk about drunks anymore? Here are a couple of quick ones for you to consider. Did the covert U.S. support of the Mujahadeen or Mujahideen (and I have no clue how to spell that, but you will remember the “freedom fighters" in Afghanistan in the '80’s that we were equipping with Stinger missiles to shoot down the Russian helicopters) end up creating the Taliban? Does increasing the minimum wage actually benefit entry level workers, or does it cause more unemployment because small business owners cannot afford the wage increase and lay off people to make up the difference?

How about the whole biofuel craze? Seemed like a great idea five years ago — look at the benefits. We can get away from the Middle Eastern oil. We will help our farmers out. It will help the environment. Nothing but good is going to come from this. Well, five years later, we now know that there was a UC — the number of people around the world who will die from starvation is increasing dramatically because there is no more “surplus” corn from the U.S. It is being burned up as a fuel now.

And my favorite is the UC involving the Prius. Great idea wasn’t it — a hybrid that gets excellent mileage etc., etc., etc. And the UC is the increase in pedestrian fatalities involving “blind” people. The sight- impaired in our society are heavily dependent on sound to determine if there are approaching vehicles. But the Prius, while operating on battery power around town, is “silent”; and if you think I am blowing smoke about this issue, Google “blind people getting run over by Toyota Prius cars” and see what you get.

So why am I wasting your time with this? Remember the name of my little corner on this website — “Risky Ramblings”: some thoughts (or ramblings) about the discipline of risk management that I want you to be aware of. And here is a summation of my ramblings thus far:

“In every decision you make, there is always the potential for unintended consequences.”

And to be fair, sometimes these UC’s are beneficial. The DMZ between North and South Korea has become home for a lot of unique flowers and animals because no one goes anywhere near the place. And the minefields laid during the Falklands War have become great bird sanctuaries. And the WWII ships sunk off the coasts of various countries have become beautiful coral reefs. And if you really want to get controversial, pick up Freakanomics by Steven Levitt, where he talks about the murder rate in New York City dropping dramatically from the ' 70’s rate in excess of a thousand a year to less that one-third of that in the '90’s. He proposes that this reduction in the murder rate was an “unintended consequence” of Roe vs. Wade. His position (and please do not send me your hate mail — direct it to him) is that an entire generation of future murderers (throw away kids who have no parental attention and are sucked into gangs) was aborted 16 to 20 years earlier. And he draws a link to Romania that almost at the same time “outlawed” abortion, and twenty years later crime was out of control. And again, please do not send me your hate mail.

My point on this RR (those are the initials of Risky Ramblings — pretty clever, huh!) is that when you are making a decision, always consider the “unintended consequences.” The easiest way to do this is to avoid making decisions in a vacuum. If you have the time to do so, run your thinking past a “diverse” group of people and get their input. And by diverse, I am not just thinking about “protected classes” but also people with different backgrounds, different experiences and perhaps a different way of thinking. Perhaps they will bring something to your attention that you had not thought of.

And speaking of your profession, I have talked to old firefighters who have told me this: “Gordie, in the old days, your ears would tell you when to get out of a burning building.” And not being in your profession, my response was: “You mean you could hear something that was telling you to get out of the building?”  And their response was: “Oh, no, Gordie. Your ears got so hot you had to leave the building.” 

Now I have never been inside a burning building — and my guess is you have — so I do not have that personal experience. And we don’t want you to get your ears burned, so what did we do? We give you “ear protection” to prevent the ears from getting singed (or worse).  I am not taking a position on this because I am out of my league here, but I have talked to a lot of people in your profession who look at the number of firefighters dying in burning buildings; and they have told me that it might be an UC of the ear protection. Cooler ears may encourage you to stay in the building longer or perhaps go in a bit farther. 

Anyhow, I have rambled enough here. Suffice it to say that there is always the potential for unintended consequences each and every time you make a decision. So please just put this thought in the back of your heads, and the next time you are thinking about doing something — or not doing something — always ask yourself, “What are the 'unintended consequences' that may occur if I choose a given course of action."

That is it for now. I am killing time at the airport waiting for a “red-eye” back east and trust me, I have considered the UC’s involved in this activity.

Until next time, thanks for visiting my corner, and thanks for your support of Fire Nuggets. Thanks also for all your great work. Please be safe.

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