Shawn Vestal: The Falls

Sometimes people make mistakes that have consequences way beyond the scale of anything they might have imagined.

An example of that this week is the death of three young children in Grant County, who died from carbon monoxide poisoning put out by a gas generator. The power had gone off and someone brought the generator in to try to keep the kids warm in freezing temperatures.

Then there is the case of a Coeur d’Alene mother who may be charged criminally in the death of her infant daughter, who was in an improperly installed car seat at the time of an accident in Spokane.

Both stories make us heartsick. And that’s all the more true because both of them were preventable, and yet both are the kind of mistakes that get made with some regularity.

In a lesser way, this week’s snowfall brought another note on the theme of lessons that go unlearned year after year: Drivers all over town going too fast, spinning their wheels furiously, getting too close to the car in front of them.

They can’t all be teenagers, driving in snow for the first time. Some of them ought to know better.