Accidents too ... stupid!

Audio 02:33

By: Marina Mielczarek

The planes swallow more and more birds and the boats strike more and more whales! In its new report, insurer Allianz shows an increase in accidents involving transport and animals. Land, sea, air, all regions of the world are concerned.

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For having wanted to avoid a reindeer escaped on a road in Lapland, soldiers had an accident. It was September 2019 and there were twelve injured. When we tell the story to Louise Nordstrom, a Swedish woman living in Paris, she smiles. Reindeer or elk accidents, she grew up with, with also the piles of anti-skid salt that attracts them.

" Reindeer love to come and eat the snow-proof salt from country roads ," she explains. In my home, in the far north of Sweden, reindeer and elk move freely. Most belong to the Sami community. The Sami live near the forests, they do not put barriers. Once on the road, she remembers, the reindeer behave like your sheep in France, they are very slow animals which do not react to horns ! There are really a lot of accidents. My grandfather was a veterinarian, he was the one called to examine the corpses of reindeer or elk on country roads. The Samis recovered part of it but they also gave her a lot, so when I was little I spent my life eating reindeer with the family ! "

Game detected by infrared road radar.

In France, this is a first, the department of Isère in the Alps has reduced accidents by installing the first infrared game detector on its roads. 150 serious collisions occur each year in France, mainly with wild boars and deer. Insurers are required to include this type of damage in their contracts with almost half of the material or medical costs reimbursed.

40 bird strikes per day in the United States

With the plane, insurance plays, but this time on a global scale. A collision with birds ranges from 330,000 euros up to 16 million for the most serious cases. For Michel Polacco, journalist and pilot, birds are especially dangerous on takeoff and landing.

There are few birds at high altitude, on the other hand, at medium altitude a pilot of plane or helicopter can meet some. Sometimes it's a whole group in full flight. The damage varies, it can range from damage to the cockpit, the windshield or even the wings of the aircraft. We all remember the accident in 2009 where an Airbus 320 passed in a cloud of Canadian geese over the Hudson. Three minutes after takeoff, some of these geese were swallowed in the turbojets, so they ended up with the two engines broken with the obligation to land or else they crashed. To secure take-offs, especially at aerodromes, today we use bird scaring vehicles, they make noise and keep raptors away from runways. But that does not prevent all accidents, pilots have even lost their lives.

Whale skeletons marked by propellant shocks

Cruise liner, merchant ships, increasing traffic in the Mediterranean worries Pascal Maillol, the Honorary President of the Association Souffleurs d'écume in Marseille.

" Collision, " he says , "is the number one cause of unnatural death for whales in the Mediterranean Sea. Most of the time, these 40-ton animals sink, but some remain attached to boats and return to port. Accidents are increasing and are happening all over the world. The most endangered species is the North Atlantic right whale. To remedy this, we have set up REPCET training courses for ship operators. It was not easy, he added, not all seafarers and shipowners were ready to buy and learn to record the presence of large marine mammals. Fortunately, in 2017, French law came to our rescue by requiring boats over 24 m traveling near our coasts in the Mediterranean to be equipped with a detection system. "

From Paris, accidentology can have exotic accents, so Thailand worries about collisions between scooters and tigers, Australia speaks of an increase in camels on its tracks and Florida deplores the cases of alligators and crocodiles on its roads.

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