See They Did What?! Analyzing Human Behavior p. 46 in a straight path in front of the driver, making the road appear to continue uninterrupted rather than being cut in half by the river. For all of these reasons, I concluded the driving environment would cause a driver to become disoriented and the roadway environment created a dangerous condition. Unfortunately, this young woman was not the only driver to unintentionally drive off the end of this same street into the river and drown. When the police recovered this woman’s vehicle from the river, they discovered another vehicle and victim underneath hers. It belonged to a man who had mysteriously disappeared several years earlier. How Could an Employee Let a Fire Start When Their Only Job Was to Prevent One? In this case, a food manufacturing plant used plastic conveyor belts to move food from the ovens to the packaging section of the plant. Occasionally, the food caught fire in the oven and then melted the plastic belt as it was being conveyed across the plant, creating a fire hazard. In an attempt to mitigate the fire hazard, the plant assigned a worker to sit outside the oven for 8 hours a day as a “fire watch.” Their job was to detect any food exiting the oven that was either on fire or had burning embers (i.e., “flamers”) and to either douse the flamers with a hose or use a rake to pull any flamers off the line before they got onto the plastic conveyor belt. Importantly, the food exited the oven at a rate of 14,400 items per hour (4 items per second). One day, a flamer exiting the oven was not detected before it got onto the plastic conveyor belt and a large, destructive fire broke out in the plant. I was asked to determine whether the design and implementation of the “fire watch” position were adequate to detect fire hazards exiting the oven and whether it was reasonable to expect the worker to detect and remove all of the flamers that exited the oven during their 8-hour shift. There is a basic human performance phenomenon known as the vigilance decrement that can be described as a slowing of reaction time and an increase in error rates over time on tedious monitoring tasks. Research has shown that within the first 10 to 30 minutes of a sustained attention task, the probability of detecting a signal (e.g., a flamer exiting the oven) decreases to less than 65%. In addition, there are no proven countermeasures to improve a human’s ability to detect signals on monotonous or boring monitoring and inspection tasks requiring vigilance over long periods of time. In other words, humans are not well-suited to performing the “fire watch” task and are unlikely to detect nearly half of the flamers after only the first 30 minutes of an 8-hour shift. “[T]he driver was confronted with a collision hazard from every direction — 50 mph cross-traffic to the front, a crossing gate and vehicles to the rear and a train approaching from the side. Given those circumstances, it would be reasonable for a driver to perceive it was not safe to proceed either forward, backward, or sideways.” 45 Trial Lawyer | Winter 2025
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