Individual accidental deaths have always occurred. Our increasingly speedy and pressured lifestyle contributes to the statistics. Sometimes these deaths are just accidental. Bill H. lost a leg making skiing history by skiing down a couloir in the Teton Mountains that no one had dared before. Years later, an avid sailor, he decided to take a modest sailboat from Hawaii back to his home in California. He pressured his younger son to accompany him. The night before setting off, Dylan, the son, had vivid bad dreams and a strong feeling that he did not want to make the trip. He reneged. Bill H. was never seen again. All that was found was a life preserver with the name of his boat on it.
Manmade accidents on the scale of Chernobyl and Fukushima Daichi nuclear disasters attest to the dangers of advancing technology, where we use forces of nature barely understood and under control. Accidents of nature or natural disasters are themselves sometimes of such magnitude that the world reels in the aftermath. Recently events of that ilk include Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami of 2004.