Idiots and Their Boats
Chatterbox is grateful to the many people who wrote in to share personal
stories and their views about methodological challenges as a way to help
Chatterbox figure out whether vacations are more dangerous than work life and
hanging around the house. (To view most of the comments, scroll down to the
bottom of this item and click on the link to
Slate's reader
forum, "The Fray." Be warned that, as is the case with most chat rooms, you
have to wade through a lot of ill-tempered bluster to find the occasional entry
that's genuinely thoughtful or informative; but a recent
Slate
redesign makes it easier to zoom through to the good stuff.)
As several people noted, the percentages Chatterbox cited in his previous
item ("
Do Vacations Kill?") overstate some vacation dangers in the sense
that, say, the higher incidence of drowning
deaths compared with
falling
deaths reflects the much greater number of people who
swim as compared with the number who climb mountains. (Similarly, the recent
increase in the number of amusement park deaths may show not that
amusement parks are more dangerous than they used to be, but that more people
go to them; though if more people are spending vacation time at amusement
parks , as compared with, say, spending them at art museums , that may
be making their vacations more dangerous in the aggregate.) On the other hand,
several other people noted, given that people spend a lot more
time at work than they do on vacation , on a per-hour basis
vacation dangers may be understated by the data in the previous
item.
Given these difficulties, Chatterbox still feels unequal to the task of
proving that vacations either are or aren't more dangerous than ordinary life.
(Perhaps inspiration will strike later this week.) But that doesn't mean
Chatterbox is done with the topic of vacation dangers. Today, he turns his
attention to the ways boats can kill you.
We take for our text "Boating Statistics--1997" by the U.S. Coast Guard, whose expertise
on these matters is unmatched. According to the report, 700 to 800 people die
every year in boat-related fatalities (which, significantly, do not include
drownings and other water-related deaths by people who go out on boats, unless
the boat itself is somehow responsible--as would be the case, for instance, if
someone died from falling off a boat rather than dying during a
deliberately planned swim or scuba dive; though if, during a deliberately
planned swim or scuba dive, someone were struck by a boat propeller and killed,
that would count as a boat-related fatality). In 1997 , the number
who died in boat-related fatalities was 821 . That comes out to
6.7 deaths per 100,000 boats (this is approximate; the Coast Guard
doesn't have data on every single boat in the United States). During the
previous decade, the fatality rate varied from about 6 to about 8 deaths per
100,000 boats , even as the number of boats counted by the Coast Guard rose
from about 10 million to about 12 million. (The worst year was 1987 ,
when there were 1,036 boat-related fatalities , or 10.4 fatalities per
100,000 boats .) But if 1997 was a not-bad year, relatively speaking,
for boat-related deaths , it was a terrible year, relatively speaking,
for boat-related injuries
: there were 4,555 , a record
high.
Eighty-two percent of 1997's boat-related fatalities occurred on
boats shorter than 26 feet in length. More than half of these occurred
on boats less than 16 feet in length. Forty percent of
boat-related fatalities occurred when someone who did not own the boat was
operating it. Open motor boats were responsible for the vast majority of
boating-related fatalities , with canoes and kayaks ranking
a very distant second. ( Open motor boats were also responsible for the
vast majority of boat-related hospital admissions , with cabin
motorboats ranking a distant second and canoes and kayaks
ranking an even-more distant sixth; presumably if you get into a serious
accident on a kayak or canoe, it's more difficult to get yourself
to a hospital .)
A shockingly high proportion of boating accidents-- 27
percent-- involve alcohol , and given people's incentive to lie about
such things and the difficulty of administering breathalyzer tests under such
circumstances, this statistic surely understates the problem. According to the
Coast Guard, a boat operator with a blood alcohol concentration above .10
percent is more than 10 times more likely to be killed in a boating accident as
a boat operator with a blood alcohol concentration of zero. According to
Jeffrey Hadley, a research associate at the Johns Hopkins School of Public
Health's Center for Injury, Research, and Policy, an unbelievably high
proportion of people who kill themselves on boats are male--based on his
research in Maryland, it's something like 90 percent. That should be evident
not only by the high correlation between accidents and alcohol consumption, but
also by the other major factors causing boat accidents--excessive speed,
careless or reckless operation, inattention to what's looming up ahead,
inexperience. (By comparison, "equipment failure" registers hardly at all.)
These are guys who get drunk and behave in stupid ways that are
characteristically (though of course not exclusively) male.
[Apologia, Aug. 31: Readers of an earlier version of this item may have been
puzzled by its erroneous assertion that the number of boats in the United
States, as counted by the Coast Guard, rose from "about 10,000 to about
12,0000" between 1987 and 1997. That should have read--and now does
read--"about 10 million to about 12 million." Sorry for the mistake.]
