Road accidents becoming no 1 killer

Fascinating piece in the Economist of Jan 25 on road accidents. At present, they kill about 1.3 million people a year – not far short of the number who lose their lives to tuberculosis, but the World Health Organisation expects the total to reach nearly 2 million by 2030, well outstripping tb deaths and catching up with AIDS as a killer.

The biggest increase is expected in the poorest countries, with deaths almost tripling. One of the main reasons being that when money is invested in new roads, little is spent on safety.

Already, road crashes are the main cause of death worldwide for people aged 15 to 29, with most victims men and boys. In poor countries, most of the people killed are pedestrians, while in developing countries such as Thailand, it tends to be motorcyclists.

In the developed world, better safety measures have seen road deaths actually being reduced. New York now has fewer than it did 1910, while Sweden has halved the number since 2000, cutting them by 80% since 1970.

*My updated website - http://www.disasterhistorian.com/index.html

Deadly tunnel

The Americans have been repairing the Salang tunnel in Afghanistan. Nearly two miles long and 11,000 feet up in the Hindu Kush mountains, it was an engineering wonder when it was built by the Soviet Union in the 1960’s. Now it has a leaky roof, a rutted surface, and failing ventilation and lighting.  

On November 3, 1982, the tunnel was the scene of one of the world’s deadliest ever road accidents – assuming that it was an accident.

The official Soviet version is that two military convoys collided, causing a traffic jam in which 64 Soviet soldiers and 112 Afghan people were poisoned by carbon monoxide.  Unofficial reports speak of a fuel tanker blowing up, perhaps as a result of an attack by Afghan guerrillas.

It is said that this resulted in a deadly chain reaction of explosions, while the Russians sealed off both ends of the tunnel, trapping hundreds of people inside. In this unofficial version, 700 Soviet troops and 2,000 Afghans may have died.