Question: do you like working on fatal crashes? whats the best thing about your work?

Mark Hill answered on 16 Mar 2011:

Hello again Student12,

If you have to go to work for about a third of your life, then it really helps if you enjoy your work. It somehow seems less like a chore.

Even after over 27 years of this, I really enjoy arriving at a chaotic, crash scene, with bits of debris, bent vehicles and emergency vehicles everywhere. I start my examination of the scene, sometimes whilst the fire crews are still cutting people out of their vehicles, but then it is important for me to gather the evidence before it is possibly destroyed, or altered. Firemen have big boots and tyre prints on grass verges are easily spoiled!

Once everyone has left, I can then start a more thorough examination and start to make sense of the earlier chaos. When I can turn around to people and explain what has happened, how it happened and, usually, why, then I am satisfied.

Sometimes, I have to wait until I am back at the office, in the lab, and sometimes on the internet researching, to find the answers. I cannot always come up with ‘the’ answer, but certainly the most likely answers, or causation factors. Sometimes they are physical and mechanical, other times they may be medical, and more so now, I am looking into the psychological factors – why a driver was behaving as they were. That is a really interesting area and is often not considered.

As you can tell, my work is a mixture of adrenaline rushes – ‘blues and twos’ to the scene, working within a ‘live scene’, and the somewhat quieter ‘slow time’ enquiries – examinations and research. It is all interesting and makes the day go really quickly.

Really, it is about making sense out of non-sense, in a collision scene, and in being to investigate and research thoroughly the reasons for the crash, then to relay it to other people, the courts and families, in a way that they can understand. It couldn’t readily get much better for me. However, the misery of injuries and loss of life is always tragic and I never forget that there are ‘real’ people, sons, daughters, mums, dads, fathers, mothers and friends, involved. That is such a heavy price to pay for, in many instances, avoidable collisions.

One thing that is not so pleasant is the phone call from the police control room, at 3 am in the morning, when I am called out, in the pouring rain, usually when it is cold. Even so, when I am at the scene, that seems to be mainly forgotten and I soon get into the investigation and start to enjoy my work again.

Thank you for your question.
Mark