Re: Incident/Accident?

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

In transportation, we use the DOT definitiions of "incident" and "accident" (paraphrased below":


Incident:  any event that interferes with routine normal transportation from the origin to the destination of a shipment.


Accident: a transportation incident involving death, injury, or sufficient damage to the vehicle that the vehicle cannot move under its own power. (For rail accidents there is also some provision about lost workdays following injury.)


So interestingly, if there is only damage to the cargo, it's just an incident.  Also, most accidents don't impact the cargo at all (the most interesting in this respect was a light airplane crash in which all five people in the airplane died and the radioisotope Type A package the plane was carrying excaped unscathed).  We are very careful to explain these definitions in environmental assessments.     


Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.

ruthweiner@aol.com