Human Factors in Avalanche Accidents

An IMR collaborative research project

Each summer the Institute for Mountain Research supports a number of student/faculty collaborative research projects. We’ll get updates on the research throughout the summer and the year. In one of these projects, Russ Costa and Jadie Adams will examine the roll of human decision making in avalanche terrain. They describe their project like this:

In an essay presaging the “science wars” of the 1990’s, John Maynard Smith, a British engineer turned theoretical evolutionary biologist and geneticist, noted the following concerning humans’ difficulty in distinguishing between science and myth:

“If, before going into battle, a man sharpens his spear and undergoes ritual purification (or, for that matter, goes to mass and cleans his rifle), he may regard the two procedures as equally efficacious. Indeed, they may well be so, one in preparing the spear and the other himself. If we regard the former as more scientific, it is only because we understand metallurgy better than psychology.” (p. 376)

This distinction also largely reflects the present state of avalanche safety research and education. As noted by Maynard Smith, we understand than material more than we do than the mental, and the physical more than the psychological, leading to the assumption that the former is more scientific in explanation and more efficacious in education. Although several recent efforts have brought some necessary attention to psychological, “human” factors in avalanche accidents, the field is still largely dominated by the science of snow, not of human decision making and behavior.

Recent decades have seen a surge in the amount of human travel in avalanche terrain, and a parallel upturn in literature and other educational material devoted to avalanche awareness and safety. The present proposal aims to analyze, via textual analysis and quantitative meta-analyses, the extent to which human factors, in contrast to snow, weather, and mountain terrain characteristics, are analyzed and discussed in this growing literature on avalanches. Results of this initial project will be used to develop future projects in this area and to provide recommendations for developing new avalanche safety literature, research programs, and safety courses. We operate from the standpoint that while snow sliding down a mountainside can often be a forceful event, it is only classified an “avalanche accident” if a human (or human structure) is involved in the event, and thus the study of human factors is as important as the study of snow and terrain factors in accident prevention.