Who Clears Your Road?

Abstract

Our house is about five miles from the nearest grocery store. The first four and a half miles are along country roads, and on a typical drive we see more wild animals than cars and trucks. Deer, turkey, skunks, possums, squirrels, mink, raccoons, muskrats, rabbits and buzzards are common. Unfortunately, many of these animals are not well trained in traffic avoidance and the bodies strewn along the side of the road demonstrate the abundance of wildlife in the fields and forests. When the animal is large, someone will stop to remove the carcass from the highway. Similar clean up is required when a tree falls onto the road or large rocks slides from a hill side. I’ve seen strangers cooperate to drag a dead deer from the road or debris from the street. I’ve seen large logs cut using personally owned chain saws and the log sections or rocks loaded into trucks and hauled to the dump. When the road is blocked, groups of individuals cooperate to become ‘‘a road clearing community’’ but when a small animal dies along the roadway, the cleaning is left for the buzzards. The pathway to success occasionally passes through remote sections of highway that contain a variety of animals, trees and large rocks that, on occasions, may become obstacles in the path. Some of the obstacles are too insignificant to damage our vehicle thus we pay little attention to the animal, the stick or other small debris in the road. We drive over the dead squirrel, mink or chipmunk. We leave sticks in the road and small rocks along our career path. One of the fundamental causes of failure is defects in materials. By driving over and ignoring the minor obstacles we begin to accept small defects that can become initiation sites for fatigue cracks, pot holes or other career limiting problems. The small obstacles may include procrastination, rushing to a conclusion and failure to discuss the assumptions associated with a recommendation. We generally try to avoid the larger obstacles, especially the skunks, and may even swerve to avoid hitting them even when they are dead. The skunks and other medium sized animals that lie along the failure analysis highway include prejudging the results, reporting only the data that support an early, client pleasing conclusion and failure to recognize when the required analyses lie outside our areas of expertise. Left unattended, the dead skunks along our highways attract buzzards and other unattractive clients who are reaching for a specific conclusion rather than for the truth. Encounters with large animals, big trees and boulders are easy to recognize, but unfortunately, are often hard to avoid and may need immediate attention. These encounters can damage our vehicles, require effort to repair and minimize our progress along the highway. Reaching the wrong conclusion, providing an inadequate report and giving a poor deposition are large animals that many of us have encountered. These encounters should lead to self examination, improved work habits and an increased tendency to discuss our work with other experts in the field. I’ve seen very confident drivers in very expensive cars, cars that had all the bells and whistles, encounter a deer primarily because the grass beside the highway was too high and hid the deer from view until it stepped directly in front of the vehicle. Brakes squeal, tires skid, glass shatters and fenders and doors need to be replaced. The driver reacted as best he could but... The faster you drive along the highway the harder it becomes to avoid the large animal encounter. It is harder to stop for a fallen tree when M. R. Louthan (&) Box 623, Radford, VA 24142, USA e-mail: macfran61louthan@yahoo.com