Mac reacts to the Hudson River plane crash . . . and birds

Kudos to the amazing (I daresay miraculous) response to last week’s jet crash in the Hudson. I was watching some of the footage on The Weather Channel and at first had a difficult time processing what had happened. It’s absolutely astonishing that there was no loss of life.

I haven’t had a chance to dig too deeply into the all the news reports, but I imagine there are at least a couple of New York area hospitals that can check off their Joint Commission influx drill requirement for the year (not that that’s how you want to do it). If there’s anyone in the viewing audience that would be interested in sharing their experiences, I’m sure there are any number of folks out here in ether-land that would be most appreciative. Lessons learned, lessons confirmed–it’s all good.

Which leads me to one thought relative to the power of our birds: There was a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in which Sean Connery uses the flight of birds to neutralize (how do you work that into a risk assessment equation?) an airborne foe. It appears at presstime that there might well have been an avian component to Thursday’s crash.

Interestingly enough, that morning I was working with some folks in Georgia (shout out to the folks at St. Joe’s in Greensboro, GA) and my attention was drawn to the hotel room window by this bizarre-looking undulating shadow. It turns out that the brush behind the hotel is a stopping off point for migratory blackbirds. These winged warriors spilled out of the brush for a solid three to four minutes, I can see where Alfred Hitchcock got some of his inspiration;

There had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of them. I guess it all comes down to volume, but I bet they could cause some serious damage if something were in their flight path. We may think that in some ways we’ve mastered nature, but in moments like these I can only think maybe not so much.