Ohfergoodnessake! From the LA Times:
A woman going through security at Los Angeles International Airport put her month-old grandson into a plastic bin intended for carry-on items and slid it into an X-ray machine.
The early Saturday accident — bizarre but not unprecedented — caught airport workers by surprise, even though the security line was not busy at the time, officials said.
[snip]
Security experts said the incident underscored a more widespread concern about the screening process at LAX and other airports.
“The screeners are still reporting that they’re being pushed,” said Brian Sullivan, a retired Federal Aviation Administration security agent. “If a baby can get through, what the hell else can get through?”
Since the baby didn’t “get through” (according to the article, it just got in, where the screener saw it and immediately got it out), that’s hardly the problem. This is:
“Rather than focus on the radiation dose, which is a small amount, we need to focus on why this happened, so it doesn’t happen again,” said Dr. James Borgstede, a diagnostic radiologist at Penrose-St. Francis Health Systems in Colorado Springs, Colo., and president of the American College of Radiology. “Human beings weren’t meant to go through those things.”
And this:
“We’re trying to figure out what changes we can make, short of putting up signs saying, ‘Don’t put your baby through the X-ray machine,’ ” Melendez said. “We’re trying to determine how we can make this not happen again.”
Please don’t let them spend too much time and money on this effort to avoid every possible permutation of stupidity, k? You can’t keep these kinds of things from happening.
Coffee is hot, and people occasionally dump it in their laps. Hammers are intended to impact the heads of nails, but they are detrimental to one’s dexterity when applied to a thumb. Microwave ovens are not intended to serve as kitty’s after-bath fur dryer. Addicts of intraveneous drugs sometimes inject themselves with toxic poisons and die.
Darwin wasn’t writing fiction, you know…
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