Volcano crisis: Sense vanishes in a puff of ash

April 25, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

telegraph.co.uk

The closure of our airspace casts a highly disturbing light on the way we are governed, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:51PM BST 24 Apr 2010

Last week, for the second time in a decade, a major crisis erupted out of the blue that cast a highly disturbing light on the peculiarly contorted way in which we are now governed. The Icelandic volcano shambles had striking parallels with the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001.

Both episodes involved a massive system failure in a complex new structure of supranational governance which was being put to the test for the first time, Both were made much worse by over-reliance on an inadequate computer model, which ended up causing unnecessary chaos and misery for hundreds of thousands of people and costing not millions but billions of pounds.

What turned that shower of abrasive volcanic dust from a drama into a crisis was the central flaw in a new international system for responding to such incidents, which was put in place only last September. As everyone now recognises, the emptying of the skies which plunged Europe’s airlines into chaos was a grotesque overreaction to the reality of the risks involved….(Full Story)

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