Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters has been following the story of the events surrounding an incident involving Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, whose car was fired upon as it approached a U.S. manned checkpoint near the Baghdad airport shortly after she was freed from being a hostage. The incident claimed the life of Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari.
Sgrena's account of the incident, in which she claimed that U.S. troops at the checkpoint deliberately fired upon the vehicle without warning, has not withstood inspection. A joint American-Italian investigation, as reported in the New York Post, has cleared the soldiers at the checkpoint of any wrongdoing, as they were found to have acted prudently in using force to stop Sgrena's vehicle.
Given Sgrena's claims regarding the speed at which her vehicle was traveling (she has claimed her car was traveling at 30 miles per hour), I thought it might be useful to create a calculator that would indicate the elapsed time from when the official report indicates that the soldiers at the checkpoint went from signalling the car to stop to using deadly force to stop the vehicle.
The calculator above assumes the speed of the car is unchanged throughout the incident.
According to the Texas Education Agency's Driver Training and Education department, the average response time required for a sober individual to respond to an external signal requiring they brake is roughly 0.75 seconds. With this being the case, it's unlikely that Sgrena's account of the event is accurate.
Update (30 April 2005): Sgrena's claims regarding her vehicle's speed has been directly contradicted by U.S. satellite imagery (HT: Little Green Footballs.) With the evidence that the vehicle was traveling in excess of 60 miles per hour, the total time that the driver had to respond to signs and signals and begin braking is 2.22 seconds - still more than adequate time to have avoided the event's tragic consequences. P.S.: Of course, you wouldn't know any of this if you're subscribing to the Los Angeles Times - people, there are multiple reasons why you folks in L.A. should be subscribing to the Arizona Republic instead. Make the switch today....
Labels: tool
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
ironman at politicalcalculations
Thanks in advance!
Closing values for previous trading day.
This site is primarily powered by:
CSS Validation
RSS Site Feed
JavaScript
The tools on this site are built using JavaScript. If you would like to learn more, one of the best free resources on the web is available at W3Schools.com.
Other Cool Resources
Blog Roll
