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Historical parallel to Virginia Tech
April 17, 2007

While I think bloggers should approach the Virginia Tech incident cautiously, there is another disaster that it brings to mind with certain parallels for our profession.

On October 21, 1966, in the town of Aberfan in South Wales, workers at a local coal mine were trying to dump mine waste from a skip car down the hillside where thousands of tons of material had already been dumped. Unfortunately, much of the town was at the bottom of the hill and slag pile. The workers lost control of the skip and it went crashing down the hill. It wiped out a house and its occupants, but worse, it unleashed an avalanche that came down around Pantglas Junior School. In minutes, 116 children and 5 teachers were killed. That represented about half the school's enrollment. Ultimately, the death toll reached 144.

The connection to Virginia Tech is that both incidents simply erased a substantial portion of the affected population. Aberfan lost much of that generation. Virginia Tech similarly lost a significantly large portion of its student body. For those of us in the control engineering business, these are our school children. While there is no clear indication yet of who the students were at Virginia Tech, there must have been many promising individuals who were working to join the ranks in our industries. While those of us away from that community feel a certain detachment from the killings, it will affect us all eventually. Our hurt is nothing compared to the suffering of the immediate community of the victim's family, friends, and classmates. Our industry needs all the good people it can get, so this is truly a loss for the entire engineering community.

All of us at Control Engineering extend our sympathies to the suffering families and Virginia Tech community.

Posted by Peter Welander on April 17, 2007 | Comments (0)