‘Accidents can happen if I keep thinking of you’, so goes the tag line of a romantic novel. May be true. But it is only one of the many causes as to why an accident can happen. According to the Swiss Cheese Model of accident causation most accidents can be traced to one or more of following four levels of failure:

• Organizational influences
• Unsafe supervision
• Preconditions for unsafe acts
• Unsafe acts themselves

To illustrate, let us imagine a guy dropping off his girlfriend at the airport. Let us go one step further and say they had a very satisfying sex prior to leaving his condo. This guy while driving, is lost in his thoughts as to how much he will be missing her in the days to come. While his girl friend beside him is glowing and could not resist herself looking at him while he is driving. Suddenly she moves to his side and plants a passionate kiss on him and momentarily (which to them must have lasted a lifetime) they both close their eyes. Too bad for them, just then a car cuts into their lane and our guy wakes up and slams on his brakes. But not before his car bumps into the one in the front. Luckily for them it was just a minor fender bender.

Now let us analyze this situation:

Unsafe act:

1. Closing one’s eyes while driving is definitely an unsafe act. Can I say that?
2. Kissing one’s girl friend while driving is an unsafe act – if you had watched Crash you may agree with me. Remember the cop pulling over the successful Hollywood director and his wife while driving.
3. How about having a girl (like the one in the picture) beside you while driving – will that itself qualify as an unsafe act?
4. She is not in her seat belt – one must be gay to have noticed that.

Preconditions of unsafe acts:

• How would the poor guy know that, having satisfying sex prior to driving would be a precondition to an unsafe act?
• That they are lost in their world and not in ours – would it be a precondition too?

Unsafe supervision:

• She (women are generally cautious and are the first to survive a disaster) should have supervised him and cautioned him to drive safe – but not this one, you may say.
• Or he should have supervised her to stay in place and allow him to drive – but that would be too much to ask.

Organizational influence:
Could not think of any. Remember, the Swiss cheese model says one or more of the four levels of failure and not all of them need be present to cause an accident. But still if you can think of any let me know.

Now to avert this accident we again refer to this model, which says we need to raise many barriers in the Swiss cheese.
Some of the barriers I can think of:

1. Calling a taxi to take his girlfriend to the airport, while he stays home safe and sips his favorite drink and watching his game on the TV.
2. Allowing her to drive, while he is content sitting in the passenger seat is another way to avoid an accident.
3. Asking his girlfriend to sit in the back seat, while he stays focused on driving.
4. Taking his grandma beside him (she has an appointment with the dentist on their way home) while his sweetheart safely sits in the back seat.
5. Finally the mother of all barriers, staying single.

Guess what the traffic police would have ticketed our guy for this accident: ‘Following too close’
That is too simple a diagnosis, isn’t it? But we know the reasons why.