Why are we so bad at recovering from tragedy in de West?

Ubbquittious

If a house or a bridge or some other thing collapsed in China there would be a horde of workers on site the following day with orders to rebuild the thing twice as strong.

Here they'd cordon it off. Hire some security guys to sit in a little hut minding it. Then they'd send in a bunch of well paid investigators from some big international company. This would take months/years. Then the court cases would start, the blame bucket would be going around to anyone who was involved in the construction and the maintenance of the thing.

There will be inquests, the lad who was most to blame will be bankrupt/dead so they'll try their darndest to pin blame on someone else. Solicitors will be paid handsomely in the process. In the end, many years later an inconclusive verdict will come out and they won't bother rebuilding it. The families affected will continue their quest for justice for another 30-50 years causing many millions of public funds to be pilfered by well-heeled solicitors.

I remember in the 90's a swimming pool near me closed down & eventually got rebuilt years later after girlie drowned in it. If same happened today there would be no funds left for rebuilding after all the court cases. I know of another instance where a solicitor "put his children through college" on the back of a minor mishap involving a public ferry. There is no such thing as "**** happens" anymore. The aftermath of every mishap must be dragged out to the last

Ray Palmer

Well you see it is easy if you have no regards for worker safety and can simply shoot a person and claim it was their fault. Don't really need to investigate it nor actually fix the underlying cause if you decide not to care about it only appearances. No insurance companies involved either.

All in all it is just much easier if you ignore any issues and don't care if the problem is fixed

whisky_galore

I guess the relative poverty of the people affected without a sniff of getting anywhere near a courtroom, together with the legal system not being the gravy train it is here. It's more profitable to string these things out, lots of law but who cares about actual justice?

I think people in poorer countries have more of a let's get back on our feet attitude when faced with adversity. More fatalistic, Allah or Buddha or whoever wills it, instead of looking, rightly or wrongly, for someone to blame.

dxhound2005

We only had one bridge collapse in Ireland, and it was all sorted out quickly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures

Allinall

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118793109#Comment_118793109

It takes time to rebuild bridges, but we seem to have got over that one fairly quickly.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058237604/why-are-we-so-bad-at-recovering-from-tragedy-in-de-west

You referenced China as an example. Culturally, life is cheap. That's the difference. In Asia, you don't see such concern for the loss of life because people are focused on their own families, rather than caring what happens to strangers unrelated to themselves. They've been conditioned as a people for centuries to feel that way. You can see similar throughout Asia, and Africa, where poverty is more common, and as such, the focus is on your immediate family or local community rather than anything more than a token interest in an external problem or event. That's changing, due to the impact of social media on Asian societies, but it's still very much part of their societies.

In the West, we are encouraged (conditioned) to feel something for strangers... a greater bond nationally/culturally/etc.

magicbastarder

it's not as if it's a bad thing if there's a lengthy inquest into a bridge collapse or building collapse causing death? the causes are investigated and where necessary building regs would be updated to anticipate any future recurrences, and that's why bridges and buildings don't tend to collapse all that often.

better than sweeping up the rubble and rebuilding in the same place not really understandign why a building might have collapsed in the first place.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058237604/why-are-we-so-bad-at-recovering-from-tragedy-in-de-west

That last paragraph answers your question.