Security and the statistics of rare events
May 20, 2008 10:54pm
Bolivia's road of death -- UPDATED
February 28, 2008 10:24pm
I've also been on the road to Los Yungas twice, going the route to Coroico in 1993 and the route to Chulumani in 1999. I wish I had taken more photos while we on those roads, but terror is a significant distractor.
Back then, it was a two-way road, though it was wide enough for two vehicles in few spots. The rule was that the vehicle going downhill had to back up to a wider spot, since backing up down a steep slope is obviously pretty dangerous (a relative term in this situation). Also, the downhill traffic always had to take the outside "lane".
On the first trip, I was sitting on the left by the window of a mini-bus/van that held about 14 people. I got to stare down cliffs thousands of feet into the valley starting just 2 or 3 feet to the left of the van as large trucks squeezed by on the other side.
What makes the road even more dangerous is the extremely dense fog that rises up from the valley each morning.
View from Coroico back to the road
http://www.wombatnation.com/gallery/sa93bolivia/RoadToCoroico
Road to Chulumani in Sud Yungas
http://www.wombatnation.com/gallery/bolivia99/road_to_sud_yungas
Morning fog in Coroico
http://www.wombatnation.com/gallery/sa93bolivia/CoroicoFog1
There's some good info and good pictures at the Pulitzer Center blog.
http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/untold_stories/2008/01/bolivia-the-roa.html
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My wife works at UC Berkeley and they recently had a campus event regarding preparedness and response plans in case of a shooter on campus. This was, no surprise, motivated by the Virginia Tech massacre.
To better understand the issue, she read through most of the 146-page report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel. According to the report, there are on average 16 murders per year across approximately 4,000 university campuses in the US. Before Virginia Tech, the last mass murder on a university campus was when Charles Whitman killed 16 people on the University of Texas campus in ... 1966.
While there have been multiple murders on campuses in the intervening years, none of them involved a murder followed later by another murder by the same killer on campus.