EP 14: Wade Bartlett | Recon Foundations

WADE BARTLETT| RECON FOUNDATIONS

Wade has a uniquely broad career. From consulting engineer, to Deputy Sheriff, to Adjunct Faculty at IPTM, to NAPARS Administrator, he’s an integral member of the reconstruction community. 

Wade has a bachelor’s and master’s in mechanical engineering, a professional engineering license, and is also ACTAR accredited. He’s authored or co-authored nearly 50 technical publications, and has presented at conferences all over the world.

We sat down for nearly 3 hours and covered a wide variety of topics, including:

• How Wade accidentally became an engineer

• Going from failure analysis to accident reconstruction

• Handling expert testimony

• Overcoming the fear of public speaking

• Becoming a police officer

• Giving back to the community

• Monte Carlo analyses

• Critical Speed

• Drag Sled wars

• Advice for the next generation

• And more…

You can also find an audio only version on your favorite podcast platform.

A rough transcript can be found below.

Links from the Show:

• Connect with Wade

• Read Wade’s Papers

• Organizations Discussed

  • ACTAR (Accreditation Commission for Traffic Accident Reconstruction)

  • IPTM (Institute of Police Technology and Management)

  • NAPARS (National Association of Professional Accident Reconstruction Specialists)

  • SOAR (Society of Accident Reconstructionists)

Timeline of Topics:

00:00:00 - Career Overview and the Importance of Meticulous Field Work

00:05:05 - Researching Motorcyclist Perception and Response with Eye Tracking

00:07:51 - Academic Challenges and Learning to be an Engineering Student

00:18:56 - Transitioning from Failure Analysis to Accident Reconstruction

00:31:08 - Self-Teaching HVE and the Vital Role of Forensic Photography

00:37:49 - Handling First Depositions and Navigating Cross-Examination

00:52:30 - Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking through Teaching and Mentorship

01:07:49 - Growth of NAPARS and Modernizing Information Sharing

01:33:46 - Becoming a Police Officer and Bridging the Civil-Criminal Data Gap

01:54:54 - Applying Monte Carlo Statistical Analysis in Excel

02:13:26 - The Science of Critical Speed Yaw and the Drag Sled Research Wars

02:39:19 - Advice for the Next Generation: Constant Learning and Multi-Disciplinary Knowledge

Rough Transcript:
Please find a rough transcript of the show below. This transcript has not been thoroughly reviewed or edited, so some errors may be present.

Lou (00:00:00):

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Data Driven Podcast. My guest today is recon pillar, Wade Bartlett. Wade has a uniquely broad career from consulting engineer to deputy sheriff to adjunct faculty at IPTM to NAPARS administrator. He's an integral member of the reconstruction community. Wade has a bachelor's and master's in mechanical engineering, a professional engineering license, and is also ACTAR accredited. He's authored or co-authored nearly 50 technical publications and is presented at conferences all over the world. We sat down for nearly three hours and covered a wide variety of topics, including how Wade accidentally became an engineer, going from failure analysis to accident reconstruction, handling expert testimony, overcoming the fear of public speaking, becoming a police officer in giving back to the community, Monte Carlo analysis, critical speed, drag sled wars, advice for the next generation and more. So without further ado, enjoy the show.

(00:01:16):

Let's roll, man, because we don't want to burn all of our good content and our catch-up stuff.

Wade (00:01:20):

Yeah, we can chit-chat all night. I know we do.

Lou (00:01:23):

Yeah, absolutely. So I actually, I thought we'd start with kind of a fun story. I was doing a little bit of an archeological dig into our history, and I'll talk a little bit about this, but I first started reading some of your stuff in 2003 when I was still an undergrad and had no idea about recon, that Monte Carlo paper. But you and I met in either late 2008 ... No, late 2007 or early 2008. I was looking at some photos from that testing in Arizona, and they were dated from the metadata 2008. And I was like, "Man, I think we met just before that when we were doing eye tracking calibrations and training to figure out how to use that eye tracking software." And you and I are responsible for all those calibrations in the sun, which was the first time that was ever being done.

(00:02:14):

But I figured I'd give you the queue of duct tape and let you run a little bit with that one.

Wade (00:02:19):

I'm a firm believer that if things move when they shouldn't, duct tape is a good answer. And in that Vegas section, I think you had a, it was a grand marquee or we had a grandmark. I think it was yours in fact.

Lou (00:02:38):

It was not actually mine, although we treated it like it was mine. It was a rental. Yeah. But it was your rental

Wade (00:02:42):

Car. And we had had a discussion the day before about attaching the suction cups to the car and how it needed to be clean, very, very clean. You are very meticulous about your suction cup attachment. And as a result, your suction cups work great. Your cameras never flew off the car, unlike everybody else I know who just kind of licks them and sticks them. And yeah, so we went out in the morning before you got up and wrapped an entire roll of duct tape around your car and then we left and wish we were able to see your face when you came out and had to cut it apart.

Lou (00:03:22):

No, that was fantastic because I think if I remember correctly, we were running subjects very early. So we were kind of burning the candle at both ends of the stick where we were processing data really late at night and getting everything ready. And then we had to leave the hotel at like 5:00 AM or something like that to get to the test site, pick everything up, get everything sorted, set up, and then the subjects would come. And I rolled out of the hotel, sun wasn't even up yet. And I'm looking at my car and I'm like, "What's going on with my car right now?"

Wade (00:03:52):

And it was gray.

Lou (00:03:54):

It was gray. Yeah.

Wade (00:03:55):

It was a gray car and gray duct tape, so it kind of blended in probably until you got close enough to really get a look at it.

Lou (00:04:01):

And I was like, "What the hell's going on? " And I really appreciated that because you brought a little fun to it because it was so serious. We're working so hard. We had, I think, one day to set up all the data acquisition on the motorcycle, on the car to test everything at the track. And it's a pretty heavy situation where you have 30 people coming that are relying on you and 10 researchers or whatever it was, and you're just like, "Let's have a little fun. I'm going to wrap lose car in duct date." Yeah, that was a good time.

Wade (00:04:31):

We might have met before that because you were working at SD Lyons.

Lou (00:04:34):

Yes.

Wade (00:04:35):

That's how we met originally was through our SD Lyons connection. I mean, they're close to here. I know those guys, I occasionally wound up in the building. We all wound up at inspections together and that sort of thing. So I think we had crossed paths before that as well.

Lou (00:04:53):

It's possible. I remember emailing you and then Chris Borelli a lot of the time, if I had a recon question that he wasn't sure of the answer to, would always recommend, "Hey, reach out to Wade. He'll know what's going on. " So I think that we had emailed, but I'm not sure that we met until the eye tracking because I specifically remember introducing myself to you as if you were a celebrity and you were like, "Hey, man, you're good. Take it easy. I'm nobody big." But at that point, I'd read so many of your papers and you're so prolific that you were like this recon icon that I was very privileged to meet at that point.

Wade (00:05:31):

I bless you.

Lou (00:05:32):

Yeah, thank you, sir. Thank you. And on that note, I remember very specifically during that research kind of showing up. So I had never done any real research before, and that started because I took Muttart's class and noticed there was a huge gap in perception and response analysis of motorcyclists and just went up to him after the class and said, "Hey, would you be interested in doing some research?" And in true Jeff fashion, he's like, "Yeah, let's do it. " And then he brought you into the process. So this is my first research role, and it was really fortunate that you came with these giant Pelican cases with every bell and whistle inside, all organized, all the cables were organized. You had Vericom, string pots, everything you might need, zip ties, lots of duct tape, lots and lots of duct tape. I brought the suction cups, but I remember being so impressed.

(00:06:21):

I'm like, "Okay, well, this is where I want to go in my career, be a person who has these capabilities and can do research like this. " So that was kind of an eye-opening experience for me.

Wade (00:06:34):

That was a great experience for, I think, all of us who were involved. And I didn't know you had been the one who suggested to Jeff. I didn't know how he got on the idea of doing motorcyclists because he wound up getting a lot of mileage out of that with the eye trackers of the motorcyclists. We did them in Nevada. And then remember when he submitted his paper, the reviewer said, "Boy, we really wish you had another eight or 10 subjects." So two years later, we all got together somewhere else and did it all over again.

Lou (00:07:07):

That's right.

Wade (00:07:08):

I mean, it was like he called us all up and said, "Hey, can we come do that again? Okay. Yeah, let's see. What equipment did we have? Okay, let's get that equipment again." And we showed up down in UMass Amherst and met in a parking lot and just put it all back together again so that he could collect enough data to keep the reviewers. And that might've been part of his PhD.

Lou (00:07:35):

Yeah. I can't remember if that was or not. I think it might have been. The big upgrade I remember too is because remember originally we were using the Vericom, which is not a bad tool by any stretch of the imagination, but you eventually had a video VBOX for that second round. So we had two and you built this contraption where we had the cameras on a pole so we could see over the rider's shoulder and one other view and it was all synced up to the data. That was a huge upgrade compared to what we were dealing with in Bullhead City. I think it was Bullhead City, Arizona.

Wade (00:08:08):

Yeah, that was good times. Yeah,

Lou (00:08:09):

Good times, good times. I think, like you said, I was looking through your resume and preparation for this, and I think there's, I don't know, four or five papers that came out of that research that sometimes now and again, somebody would be like, "Were you on this paper?" I'm like, "Not that I know of, " because Jeff just went wild. He kept writing papers and sticking all of our names on there because we had already obviously processed all the data and he was just kind of analyzing it from a different perspective, but good times. And that brings me to another point which is writing. Obviously, you're super prolific. You've written so many papers and you strike me as one of those people, I shouldn't even say strike me because you've proven it over the years, that has that unique combination of verbal skill and technical skill.

(00:09:01):

You can write well, you're very accurate with your grammar.

Wade (00:09:07):

How much am I going to owe you for this?

Lou (00:09:11):

Yeah, a lot. I'd say I'm trying to pump up your business, but you're obviously not trying to get any. But no, so it's very interesting to me when people have both sides of the brain like that. There's not a lot of very talented engineers that can write well. It's rare that you get both sides of the brain like that. So I'm curious, what was going way back growing up, what was school like for you? Were you proficient on both sides of the spectrum?

Wade (00:09:38):

I did okay. Actually, oddly, I hated chemistry, but I think it's because I hated my high school chemistry teacher. Just we weren't a good fit. And so I think I got a C there, but I did okay. I missed senior year in the US because I went to Germany as an exchange student. So over there, zero book learning the whole year. I just had to show up for class. I was not a graded student. I wasn't even allowed to take tests, but I got credit for it in my American high school. So I graduated with three years of high school basically and a year of life experience in Germany. And because of that lack in the last year of high school, I was behind the eight ball in college, but other than that weird fourth year, I was just bored in high school. I did not enjoy it because mostly I'd sleep.

(00:10:35):

I honestly slept in math class. If you did the homework, the books tell you how to do it. You do the homework, it ain't rocket science, you just do the homework. And I kind of felt that way about most of the classes. If you just did the homework, the teachers weren't springing things on you out of nowhere. They wanted you to be able to parrot back the things they'd already told you, "We're going to need you to parrot this back to us." And okay, did the homework and that worked pretty well. But because of my high school experience, I was not a good college student. It took me three years to learn how to be a college student because I'd never had to study. And in college, in engineering, you got to study and I didn't know how. I didn't know how. So my first semester, I think I had like a 2.9 GPA and actually it might even have been a two six now that I think of it.

(00:11:34):

It was terrible. Not enough that they invited me to leave, but it was terrible. And it just got better every semester until I kind of flattened out at three eights, but it's because I didn't know how to study and I hadn't had physics, I hadn't had calculus. And most of my peers in freshman college engineering already had a year of both of those. So I was behind the eight ball on them and I had to take remedial calculus. It was awful.

Lou (00:12:05):

Yeah, that sounds like a rough entry. So then how did you get tuned into ... I'm trying to think because I was kind of one of those kids where I'm like putting the Weber grill together at eight and I imagine you were too. And my mom was always like, "Hey, you seeming kind of like an engineer. Maybe check that out. " And that was how I got into it. But at the same time, I had physics in high school that proved to me, "Whoa, this is really interesting. This is blowing my hair back." What led you down the engineering

Wade (00:12:31):

Path? I wish I had a really good, cool story like, yeah, I was building Weber Grills at eight. The reality is much less mundane. When I was a junior in high school, the local state university, University of New Hampshire sent around like a questionnaire. What would you be interested in? Okay. I think I checked engineering because I was thinking designing things for Disney would be fun. Designing rides, roller coasters. That sounds like a good gig. And I was vaguely mechanical. Okay, so engineering. I think that's what happened because I missed the orientation. I took a year off because I had to earn money to pay for school, and then I missed orientation because I was working out of state and I showed up the day before classes and presented myself at the registrar and said, "Hey, I'm here. Where do I need to go? " And they said, "Oh, you're in the engineering school.

(00:13:33):

Go over to Kingsbury Hall." I'm like, "What?" I was thinking I might be an accountant. I might go for accounting. My mom was a CPA, so I thought, "Oh, I might be an accountant." And no, I wound up in engineering and it was like water. I just went where they pushed me. I flowed downhill.

Lou (00:13:53):

So yeah, you kind of fell into it. Yeah, the washout rate is so high even for those that have some sort of intrinsic motivation to be an engineer. Nevermind if you're just kind of wading into it, no pun intended. Yeah, just belly in. The material, it seems like came pretty naturally to you. Were you a motorhead prior to ... Because I know you're wrenching a lot now. Was that something that was in your background prior to undergrad?

Wade (00:14:21):

I would say that I was an aspiring motorhead, but I didn't have anybody else around to help me out. So I was good at taking things apart. I was not that good at putting things back together. So I had lawnmowers and there was one dirt bike and all kinds of things like that, that I figured out how to disassemble them, but I wasn't so good at putting them back together. So I aspired to be a mechanical, but my dad was a carpenter, so I also had some basic hands-on stuff. I understood how to use my hands in general. I just didn't have a lot of background in the machinery. And yeah, it kind of came natural. I lucked out on that one that it makes sense to me. Unlike electronics, my EE classes were terrible for me. I can't picture what electrons are doing at all.

(00:15:16):

Anything beyond 12 volt DC, I hate it. And even that, once you get into the question of capacitors and oscillating systems in DC, ah.

Lou (00:15:29):

The sparkies are a different breed compared to the mechanical engineers. I think I had to take one class in undergrad double E and I got my way through it, I think with a B, but it was very difficult for me and I never felt comfortable. I was just kind of like blindly feeling my way through every problem and getting a little bit lucky every time is how I felt. Not like, "Oh, I get this. " Yeah. So I mean, with your dad being a carpenter and your mom being an accountant, actually that kind of puts a nice picture in my head of you because you do have both that hands-on acumen and the number crunching acumen. So that makes sense. That was actually one of my questions is what your parents did because, like I said, you're a unique breed and I was curious exactly where the heck that came from.

(00:16:17):

You were saying you were working at that point, so where were you working in high school/beginning of college?

Wade (00:16:26):

That particular summer, I had taken a job working for my uncle mowing lawn. So I was running a small lawn maintenance crew. I had two guys working under me and spent the summer mowing lawns. It was great. I enjoyed it. Before that, I spent a year working in McDonald's. Everybody in America has worked at McDonald's at some point, right? It's like 35% of the workforce has. And yeah, I was a full-time guy who did the kitchen. I cleaned the kitchens overnight and got it set up for the next morning shift, which was great because I didn't have to deal with bosses. As long as I got the work done, they didn't care what I wore, what music I played, how loudly I yelled or sang with the radio because I was alone in the building basically.

Lou (00:17:14):

We just put up a posting for an engineering intern at Cal Poly San Louis, and I was looking through the applications and I noticed myself kind of drawn to anybody who had worked at a fast food restaurant in high school because to me it says a lot about what you're willing to do and what you've experienced and probably your gratefulness for having some sort of desk engineering job in recon.

Wade (00:17:42):

I got a great story about that when you're finished.

Lou (00:17:44):

I was just going to say, I didn't have the fast food one, but I worked at a kitchen in Princeton, Massachusetts at a restaurant. And I mean, same thing. You just covered in muck and slime at the end of the day for four and a quarter an hour. And then I went to CVS and worked at the Photo Lab and the Photo Lab is a great gig, but before they gave me the Photo Lab gig, I was walking up and down the aisles facing every product and I've never wanted to leave a job more in my life than doing that. So it makes me grateful every day that when I'm in recon, I'm like, "Man, I could be facing shelves at CVS somewhere." Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not for me.

Wade (00:18:22):

It's all about motivation. So one of my favorite motivational stories was from my mentor, and I think he absolutely pushed my career by 10 years, just because he gave good advice and helped kind of push me along. But he said early in his professorial experience, one of his students in engineering came in and did crappy, did a pretty typical freshman year, bombed out. The university invited him to take a year off. He spent a year working at a factory that makes shock absorbers. So for a year, he stood at the end of a conveyor line, reached out, grabbed a pair of shock absorbers, stuck them in a press, pressed on a foot lever to compress them, set them in a box all day long. Fred said when he came back the next year, he was the hardest working kit in class because he saw what it's like facing shelves all day long.

Lou (00:19:25):

Exactly. Exactly. You need that experience. I remember walking out of CVS for a lunch break and just being like, "Freedom, the world. I can do whatever I want for an hour." And that's a very motivating pain to have. So I hope to inflict such pain on my children. You got to be calculated about it.

Wade (00:19:46):

That is the risk where you've reached the point where you probably could make that not happen for them. If they miss that experience, they miss the lesson. So that's a really tough thing to do, not

Lou (00:20:05):

Overhelp. So your mentor, was that an undergrad, a grad professor, or was that at New Hampshire Materials?

Wade (00:20:12):

My boss at New Hampshire Materials was that professor. He was near the end of his career when I met him as a freshman in materials one. And I got along with him just like that from the beginning. And basically I petitioned the school to let me take a couple of his graduate classes before he left because I knew he was leaving. I wanted to take all the classes I could with him before he did. So I got a graduate level course in materials, science, selection of steels before he left. And then I went to work for him. So he retired from teaching and opened this materials lab. And then I worked as his in- house mechanical engineer guy. I got paid to break things, which was pretty cool. I ran an Instron, broke stuff. And while it's not glamorous, here's some aluminum coupons. Okay, make the little tensile bars.

(00:21:06):

Okay, get them set up, measure them, get the machine running, write the little report. It was still fun and interesting to see things getting broken. And once in a while, it was really neat. I got to break boat anchor chains at one point, small, small chains, not the big US Navy stuff, but that was fun. Seatbelts, we got to do some testing on seatbelt webbing. There were lots of interesting things that I got paid to break, and that was fun. And that's actually how I wound up in accident reconstruction, because a small part of Fred's business was consulting on failure analysis, mostly for industry. The machine that's been running over in the corner for 20 years suddenly doesn't work, but we haven't changed anything. Okay. We'd go in and try to figure out what really did change. And it'd be something dumb like a supplier of their plastic beads started adding a little bit extra polyethylene and that changed the surface tension in the bin so it didn't quite draw down into the screwdrive the way it used to.

(00:22:16):

And now you get holidays in the part or dumb things like that. And they'd say, "We didn't change anything." Well, yeah, but something changed. So I got to tag along with him on those failure analysis cases and being a little bit of a gear head, he pushed me to go get my ASE certification. So I became officially a master automotive technician and a master heavy truck technician by virtue of the fact that I had looked at a bunch of cars for insurance companies working for him when they said, "My brakes failed." And I'd go look at it. And of course, what did I find most of the time? "Buckus, there's nothing wrong with your car." And they'd say, "Well, why did my car crash?" Okay, that's how I got into reconstruction to answer those follow-on questions. And just having Fred along redlining all my reports, lots of guys that we know went to work for big firms that have an English department who clean up the reports and then send it back for cleaning.

(00:23:22):

No, my reports came back with big red ink, just like they did when you were a sophomore in college and you got back that midterm report, I'd get it back, fix this. Okay. So I got four years of practicing to fix my stuff and not wanting to have any more read ink than I had to have.

Lou (00:23:43):

Was that part of where you got that grammatical eye from those reviews or did you already have it? Because I know you are very precise in the way that you write. Words mean

Wade (00:23:55):

Things. I was a big reader for a long time. Mostly in junior high and high school, it was trashy science fiction, escapist stuff. A lot of it was short stories because they were short enough to read a story on the bus between classes or whatever, but I liked reading. I enjoy reading and have ever since I can remember, but just reading a lot, I think gives you a better sense of how things should sound and reading good books helps. Though Charles Dickens was really hard for me. The first couple of Dickens books I read were just painful. I wanted to gouge my eyes out. And then I finally, I read Great Expectations. That rehabilitated him for me. I loved that.

Lou (00:24:48):

So he's the author that is like the pinnacle of simplicity, right? Generally considered no big words, very simple sentences, digestible by everybody.

Wade (00:24:59):

Yeah, he was writing for the masses. Most of his books came out one chapter at a time. He was getting paid for eight pages in this month's journal of whatever. So yeah, he was not writing to be impressive. And I probably fail on that metric because I tend to string too many words together. I have to remember to cut my sentences down and just put a period, start a new thought, don't string them together. But yeah, reading a lot helps and Fred clarified things for me. He let me review his reports. So I got to see somebody who was 40 years in how they handled it. And I'm sure that still flavors some of what I do.

Lou (00:25:50):

I had that same experience at SD Lyons. There was a guy there, Jim Siegfried, he was also an engineer, but he was very good at writing reports and putting in there what was necessary and taking out what wasn't and changing structure and captions. And I remember the first few reports and just so much read. And he was very encouraging. He's like, "Lou, this is really good for a new guy like you. Don't take it too hard." And then eventually a couple years down the road, there was almost no red ink anymore. Then I was getting red ink from Chris Borelli on the recon stuff and I felt like it took me many years to get past those hurdles where Chris wasn't looking at something and being like, "Yeah, I always say six. Six is the number, so we're really close." Whereas I wasn't good for a while.

(00:26:37):

I could do like at Northwestern when they gave me a recon, I would get it, but it's different in the real world.

Wade (00:26:44):

Testing well is different from being able to cope with the real world.

Lou (00:26:48):

Yeah.

Wade (00:26:49):

And I passed the ASE test because I test well. I can read the book and answer their questions. I never swung a wrench on an HVAC system, but I passed that test and not everybody tests well. I don't know about you. I can think of a couple of guys that I went to school with who were very smart, but did not test well. They just worked themselves up into a bundle of nerves and there was one of them who'd push his way through it. He'd come out like he'd been through a ringer, but he did okay. And we had one guy who did not. He was forever just skating by on the skin of his teeth and we'd be in study. We'd talk about it. He'd know the answer, he'd be able to work the problem. But then when he sat down in the test room, it didn't work for him.

(00:27:34):

And some people, everybody's different. We all have different skill levels and high points and that just wasn't his. But fortunately for me, I test okay. And that worked for the ACTAR thing too. I didn't study for that either.

Lou (00:27:53):

Oh, geez. So yeah, how did you learn? Okay, so you're working at the New Hampshire Materials Lab. He's primarily focused on mechanical testing, failure testing. Then you start to see enough of these failure cases related to the auto side where you realize there's no mechanical issue, so there must be something else going on. Let me figure out how to figure that out. Because it doesn't sound like you had a recon mentor at that point. Could be wrong obviously, but how did you teach yourself recon or how did you go about trying to put all of that knowledge in your head?

Wade (00:28:24):

Think about the people that you know who never took an actual recon class and yet they're still doing recon. I mean, that was me. I just worked from basic principles and I did a little bit of reading. I got a couple of the books out there. I think I got Northwesterns early on and just read through it. And okay, conservation of energy. I get it. I hear it. I understand energy, momentum, I understand it momentum, but early on I was pretty limited, I think as everybody is early on and the concept of speed from skids, oh, Route 30DF killed me as an engineer.

Lou (00:29:07):

Oh my gosh. Yeah. I know.

Wade (00:29:09):

I'm like, no, no, no. And the drag factor friction, coefficient of friction thing, that took me years to get comfortable with. And now I'm good. I get it. Drag factor and coefficient of friction are different. I'm fine with that. I can articulate why I use the word drag factor when that's what I'm using, but nobody was around to explain that to me. And I just thought, "Oh, coefficient of friction is the real thing. I'm an engineer. I know this. " Coefficient of friction is the right word and everybody else is wrong, pretty classic Dunning Kruger.

Lou (00:29:43):

Yeah. Billy Joel's got that great, great quote. "The more I find out, the less that I know. " I think it's in the song Shades of Gray and it's, yeah, ain't that the truth.

Wade (00:29:52):

Wow. Man, he stole it. I didn't learn it from him, but I have often said the more I learn, the less I know because, and For me, it actually started when I was three. I told my mother that when I learn how to tie my shoes, swim and ride a bike, I will know everything. That's great.

Lou (00:30:14):

Hey.

Wade (00:30:15):

It's been downhill since then.

Lou (00:30:17):

Yeah. Yeah. It's all been downhill. Yeah, I was going to say, because when I went to Northwestern, Dennis Lyons, the owner of SD Lyons, such a good guy. And I'm straight out of grad school, master's degree in mechanical engineering, but don't know my ass from my elbow with respect to collision reconstruction. And he's like, "Go to Northwestern for eight weeks. I'll put you up in an apartment, take every class and come back." And I did. I had a really good time. Obviously, it's kind of tough to do eight hours of class every day for two months straight. Away from

Wade (00:30:51):

Home

Lou (00:30:52):

Too. Away from home. Fortunately, no children at that point. I just had a fiance, but even still, that wasn't super easy. But man, getting immersed in the language, the nomenclature, the subtleties, there was no new scientific principles being presented to us that I hadn't learned already. But where do you start calculating the ... How do you calculate departure angle? And what is contact damage and what is induced damage? What's coefficient of friction? What's the drag factor? All these subtleties of this business that is really good to have that formal education. To your point though, at the same time, obviously I recommend people go to the classes. The immersion. You can't beat it, but you could just sit down and read that whole book if you have that skill, if you have the ability to read a textbook like that.

Wade (00:31:43):

I think a lot of it ... I've heard it said that an engineering degree, a bachelor's in engineering proves that you can be taught. That's all it proves because no matter where you go, you're going to have to be trained in the job because your bachelor's or even your master's has not put you in a position to just step into a company and be productive. You're going to have to be taught the job, but having the degrees proves you can be trained. And so Fred did a little bit of accident reconstruction as well. And so he had a few of those books. I read some of those books.

(00:32:24):

I wound up working at Annapolis for a long family story, but I had to go to Arizona for a couple of months in ... Let's see, that would've been 94-ish. And the job at NHML was not available anymore. So I left NHML, had to find new work, wound up working in Annapolis, Maryland at what was then called Forensic Technologies International. Now then it was FTI. And then they bought SEA and became SEA. And then SEA split again. So I have no idea exactly where FTI is right now. But it was a big engineering firm. They had like 50 engineers and 70 graphics people working on all sorts of things, fires, human factors, jury selection. They had some of everything and a reconstruction group. And they had a big library. And I spent the first 10 months there just learning how to run HVE. I took the manual and figured out how to run EDCRASH, EDSMAC, read papers, all the SAE papers they had on what makes them different, how do they work, worked through their library on all the various things, learned how to run AutoCAD, because I'd never had AutoCAD before.

(00:33:47):

When I was in college, funny story, I missed engineering drawing freshman year because I missed orientation and I got scheduled in the wrong order. So I couldn't take it again until after I finished. So I was my four and a half year to get my engineering drafting class. And by then we had to do a little bit on the computer. But when I started, if I'd taken it when I was supposed to, there was no computer. They didn't even have CAD machines in the building. It was all by hand. So my summer job, my first summer job after freshman year was working on Velem. I was correcting drawings at GTE on Velem with an eraser and a pencil. And half of the people listening to this don't even know what Velem is.

Lou (00:34:36):

No, that's the blueprint stuff, right?

Wade (00:34:38):

Right. It's that kind of opaque yellowish paper that engineering drawings went on. It's almost plasticy and you can erase off it very well and it's very durable. It's very tolerant to changes, very stable in the drawers. It doesn't yellow the way white paper would. It stays constant. So yeah, lots of people won't even know what vellum is.

Lou (00:35:04):

It's before my day. I took my first CAD class in high school and I could still remember the logos, AutoCAD 94LT was what I was working on. It wasn't 1994. It couldn't have been. It was probably like 97 or eight, but that's what I was using. So I went straight. I got lucky on two counts, straight to AutoCAD and straight to digital photography when I started in this industry. I didn't have to deal with the blindness of 35 millimeter.

Wade (00:35:29):

Yeah. And I also had to learn that. And that was one thing that wasn't impressed upon me enough was how important photography was. I mean, realistically, that is 30% of my job, maybe even 50 sometimes. And I'm sure it's true for you as well. People need good photographs if you don't document what you see carefully and properly so that you can put it up in front of a jury, it didn't happen,

Lou (00:35:54):

Essentially. I beat that drum all the time. I think people are probably sick of me talking about it because I'm very interested in photography and I didn't get interested. I got interested in it via recon. I specifically remember trying to take photographs of subtle damage on a vehicle, which is very difficult. Coming back, looking at my photos and being like, "Those are all out of focus or the exposure's not good." Focus was really tough on minor scratches or you have an imprint from a license plate on a car or an emblem or something like that. Very difficult to capture. And I've started reading and practicing, I don't know how many photographs I've taken at this point, how many cameras I have in the office next to me right now. But yeah, I wrote to the point recently, I think the title was something to the effect of like, "We are very high paid photographers." If you don't get the photo of it, like you said, if there is a red material transfer on the car that helps you understand how they came into contact with each other, but you weren't able to get a photograph of that, then how do you prove that to the trier of fact?

(00:36:56):

How do they believe you on that? You have to be a good photographer. Agreed. So FTI, it sounds like they were super supportive in letting you run because HVE, obviously they trusted your intellect because that's a very difficult program to learn or your ability to learn. Difficult program to learn. You had the book, just kind of went through it. Did you have a mentor there or somebody, an elder, or were you kind of, again, like McDonald's style working without a boss singing to yourself in your office?

Wade (00:37:30):

It was kind of self-directed and they hired me knowing that I didn't have that under my belt, but basically gave me jobs that required me to use it. And it took me a long time to figure out the whole business model there. I felt like, "Oh, I'm an employee." But you had to advocate for yourself to get jobs. They expected you to go out and find work. They expected you to find those clients and get them happy with you to call back and say, "Oh yeah, I want Wade to handle this case for me. " Otherwise, you were at the mercy of the case managers to find you work and to assign it to you when it came in. But yeah, I just kind of slogged through the books and the instruction manuals have what you need to know and it would've been faster if I'd taken a class.

(00:38:27):

I'm sure. And there were a couple of other people in the office and I could sometimes go to them and say, "Hey, I need to do this. How do I get a different frictional value on this tire?" Okay, here's how ... And they'd show me, "Okay, great. Now I'm good." But yeah, there was a little bit of modeling. There was a lot of crush analysis and even so, even at that point, so my first deposition was in 93 on ... It's funny how you remember things, right? You don't forget your first one. Mine was a garbage truck being driven around the parking lot at a school, going to the back of the school to pick up a dumpster. He's got the forks in the front kind of thing, and there's a 5% grade down the slope, and they'd had freezing rain that day. So the truck driver comes in, gets on the grade, there's no salt, no sand.

(00:39:28):

He gets on this glazed ice that's right at 32 degrees and just slides off the edge of the parking lot into the trees. And one expert opine, he must have been going too fast. He was being reckless in his operation. That's why he crashed. And I dredged up the references that showed, "Hey, wet ice is like a 0.04, and this 5% grade is enough that you can't stop even if you're stationary." And that made sense to me because heck, I've been on that hill. I've tried walking up that driveway that was glazed ice and you couldn't stand on it. So you don't have to be going fast to fail to stop. And yeah, so that deposition stuck in my head. How about yours? What was your first deposition?

Lou (00:40:22):

It was in Providence, Rhode Island. Casby Harrison, I think was my attorney's name, and he gave me some great advice during that deposition. It was a firetruck. I can't actually remember the specifics of the crash itself. It was a firetruck, maybe like a T-bone somehow. What I remember more is the environment of the deposition being terrified. And then the attorney who was very well seasoned and a great character who was also very wise, telling me, when you're in a depo, it's like walking through the jungle. You walk around, everything seems peaceful, but you never know when a Jaguar is just going to jump out from behind a tree and try to take you out. And I was like, pretty much it. Exactly. And I'm just a young buck. I don't know how old I was at the time. It was probably around 08, so I was 26, 27.

(00:41:15):

And I think I did okay, but a Jaguar definitely came out and I didn't handle it as well as I would 10, 20 years down the line. But that's a sensitive time in your career, I think, where it's like, oh man, you could get pushed out of this business very easily if the first few, if you're not prepared properly for them, which is partly up to you and partly up to your mentors and partly up to the attorney, I guess. But mainly it's like you and the people you're working with, they got to help you understand what you're in for and what the best way to handle those things are, but it's tough.

Wade (00:41:50):

I had a very seasoned attorney on the other side of the table that first time. And we got through to the end. I explained all of my findings. We had my references. He got what he needed and Fred helped me kind of get prepared for it because he'd been through it and the whole yes, no, I don't know. Okay. We got to the end and ... So Mr. Expert, you wouldn't presume to opine on a matter that had occurred before you were even out of college, wouldn't you? You wouldn't do that, would you? Did he just ask what I think he asked? Hold it. I made him repeat it. And I said, "Well, yeah, I would, because physics is physics." But he almost tripped me up. It was that Jaguar waiting to bite me in the ass.

Lou (00:42:33):

You can get lulled into that false sense of security. Usually they're not, but sometimes four, five hours. The sixth hour is when the real ... What word am I looking for? Stinger, ringer, zinger, that's it. The real zinger comes and you're kind of tired now and you're like, "Oh, this is going great. Everything's good. This guy seems great." And not really trying to pull anything over on me and then boom, there comes the Jaguar out of the jungle. So I thought that is good advice. And yeah, I've gotten better at depos, that's for sure. It was interesting because I don't know if your experience was similar. We would write a lot of reports at SD Lyons back then and then just go straight to trial because they would read the report and be like, "Okay, let's go to trial. I already know what Peck thinks." So for the first part of my career, when I came out to California and they'd be like, "How many times have you testified at trial?" I can't remember what the number was, let's just call it 30.

(00:43:30):

And then they'd be like, "How many times have you testified at depo?" And I'd be like, "15." And they'd be like, "How's that possible?" And I was like, "Oh, it's kind of a different breed when I started."

Wade (00:43:38):

Well, it's also a state by state thing. So there are some states where, particularly if the attorneys involved or the attorney involved who would be deposing you theoretically already has a pretty good idea of what you're going to say, there's not much for them to gain. The only reason they would depose you is to see if you can be rattled, to see how you present in order to maybe set their client up for a mediation and know where they stood and do I need to be worried about this guy or is he a loose cannon who's going to come across like a jerk and the jury will hate him. And we both know guys that the juries hate because they don't come across well. They just don't present well. It's not necessarily anything wrong with their technique or their analysis, but their presentation. So there's more art to this, I think, than we were all led to belief.

(00:44:34):

We were all told if your science is good, you're good. And no, no, you got to have good pictures. You got to have a clear, followable, readable report, a relatable report. You have to present well, you have to make eye contact with the jury, you've got to be able to answer all sorts of weird questions off the cuff. That's another good one. What questions have you had that you wished you had a shot at again? Here's the one I wish I had a shot at again. It was a case that had two young guys on motorcycles and things went badly for one of them. And the attorney asked me, well, he was painting the picture of just young, careless riders. He said, "When does a boy become a man?" And I wish I had a do- over on that so that I could say at his bar mitzvah.

(00:45:33):

And instead, it was much less creative. It was just like, "I'm an engineer. That's not an engineering question."

Lou (00:45:40):

Right, exactly. I was not prepared for that because a lot of the questions, right, you're pacing outside in the halls prior to trial or before depo. And nowadays, I do it in kind of a structured format where I'll write down every question that I think I might be asked and ponder the question. So I've got some things in the chamber. It's like part improv, part prep, but when somebody asks you a question like that, that's pure improv in a weird situation. Mine are generally, I don't have that many that I regret the way that I answer. There's a couple of them, but very often I can think of a couple situations where it's like a hypothetical where they're like, they're trying to prove a point like, "Hey, if he had braked here instead of there and been going 40 instead of 35, would the collision have been avoidable or whatever it is?

(00:46:27):

" And I remember once at trial, I was just like, "Yes, it would've been avoidable." And I'm like, "You know what? At least repeat back all of your absurd assumptions." Yes, if he was going 35 and he pressed the brakes, applied the brakes and this, then in your hypothetical situation, yes, the collision would've been avoidable, but X, Y, Z.

Wade (00:46:50):

I personally hate hypotheticals. One piece of advice I got was just keep making them pin down more and more details. Okay. So in your hypothetical, is the roadway where the car starts to break exactly the same as it was later on? Are traction still the same? Is the weight distribution still the same? Are there any other cars on there? Just keep making them refine their hypothetical to the point that they finally say,

Lou (00:47:16):

"No,

Wade (00:47:17):

Nevermind."

Lou (00:47:17):

Nevermind, Bartlett. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I hate hypotheticals. And very often you're kind of protected from them at trial. It depends on the attorney you're dealing with and what their method is. I've had both sides of it, and I'm sure you have too, where sometimes an attorney's like, "You know what? I am just going to trip up this cross-examining attorney so hard." Every time they ask something that's objectionable, I'm going to object and they're eventually just going to pop and be like, "I got no questions because he's made sustained objections the whole time." And then other times they're like, "Ah, I trust my recon and I don't want to look like a guy who's trying to interrupt this line of questioning, so just let him cook," as the kids say nowadays. So it depends on, a lot of times the hypotheticals will just get shut down, but when they're not, and you're like, "Okay, what do we want to do here?" And I like that advice.

(00:48:09):

I'll give that a try and see how it works for me.

Wade (00:48:11):

I've also seen judges who don't get into hypotheticals. Judges quite often keep the attorneys on a shorter leash. I'll say, "Okay, counsel, move it along." You've dealt with that question, where's this going? So it really depends not just on the attorneys, but on your judge as well, and timing. So I've had judges who were like, "Okay, we're going to be done with this in two hours. Move it. You've got 20 minutes."

Lou (00:48:38):

Yep. I love that. I love that. Okay. So you started, I'm back calculating a little bit, but you started MFES, Mechanical Forensic Engineering Services in 1996. So you're around 30 at that point, coming from Maryland, right? So you lived in Maryland. I suspect that that's where your client base was. How much of a leap of faith or how much gumption and bravery did you feel like it took to start your own thing, hang your own shingle, and kind of count on being able to accumulate clients?

Wade (00:49:14):

I think there's probably some level of calculation built into that. So I actually started the company in Maryland. I left FTI. We had a difference of opinion about the way my contract was written and how it should be interpreted to the tune of about $15,000 of the year. And that was enough that I couldn't book. So I left FTI, started my own company, just started advertising to insurance carriers in the area and pretty quickly decided I didn't love Maryland. It wasn't my home.

Lou (00:49:49):

Okay. So you started MFES in Maryland?

Wade (00:49:52):

Yeah. And did the first, I don't know, five months down there, thinking about moving back. And I spent that five months doing things like learning how to run QuickBooks and keeping full double entry bookkeeping, making sure that I was getting the same result manually and with QuickBooks before I finally trusted QuickBooks, trusted myself to run it. I knew QuickBooks was going to be fine. I wasn't sure I could be fine. And so kind of setting up, but I still had contacts up here from when I worked at the lab and a few of the other companies around and I called them up and got a couple of cases working for them. So it wasn't a complete blind leap of faith. I had a little bit of work lined up and I knew I'd be closer to the support system. My family was up here and so it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Lou (00:50:47):

Yeah, and it worked out. I remember I started my own thing, 2018 Axiom and just kind of like sitting on a cardboard box while I was unpacking everything. And I had a family at that point too, so wife and children to support. And I'm just like, oh man, I'm pretty sure I've made the appropriate calculations to know that this is going to work. And I don't know if it actually is. Of course, I got myself into the opposite problem, which I think a lot of recons do is you say yes to every single case when you're starting your own thing because you just want to make sure that you could pay all the bills and then you end up completely inundated, but hopefully everything goes well.

Wade (00:51:26):

Or doing things that you probably shouldn't.

Lou (00:51:28):

Yeah.

Wade (00:51:28):

So for me, that was fires. So up here, we had a fair number of people who specialized in building fires. There were very few people who knew enough about cars to really be good with car fires. I knew enough about cars that I could slog my way through a car fire. I wouldn't ever touch a building fire, but I did car fires. Ugh, hated them and compared notes with guys who made a living with that kind of stuff. And okay, my success rate was about the same as theirs. It's like 10 or 20% of the time I found the smoking gun and then 30 or 40% of the time, I think I know what happened, but I can't prove it. And then there's the rest of the time where who knows? It's just the only thing left is a steel frame and a puddle of copper and aluminum.

Lou (00:52:21):

That doesn't sound very rewarding most of the time. A, and then B, I remember the smell of those things. When you see them in the junkyard and you get anywhere near them and it's just like permeating your sinuses.

Wade (00:52:33):

And it covers your clothes.

Lou (00:52:35):

Yeah. Did you always have one of those white suits?

Wade (00:52:38):

No.

Lou (00:52:39):

No, just go it in there. Yeah.

Wade (00:52:40):

Just I pulled on a set of coveralls, but then you had to wash them every single time.

Lou (00:52:45):

Almost certainly worse than smoking Marlboro Reds.

Wade (00:52:51):

Probably.

Lou (00:52:52):

So how'd you get involved with ... IPTM was your first foray into teaching. One of the things that I've always appreciated about your career is it's very difficult for anybody to step away from our billable rate and our clients who are very demanding and say, "You know what? I'm going to start teaching at say IPTM for, I don't know what it is, but I'm just going to say 10% of what I could make if I stayed at home." And you've done that with so many different things from being the moderator du jour at INCR, the admin at NAPARS, teaching at IPTM, teaching at many different venues, including your own stuff. What was the first opportunity? It looked like it was IPTM around 2002. How did that present itself? And then how do you think about kind of balancing those two things, billing and then contributing when you can?

Wade (00:53:46):

I think that I kept my CV in mind a lot. I recognized that being an instructor is a good thing. It matters to clients. So being able to say, "I taught that class." And I had to do that because I never took that class. So I benefited from the worldwide web in that shortly after I came back up here in 96, I was surfing the web and found the TAR Origin website that was created and run by Bill Wright, who was a police officer working on his engineering, his mechanical engineering degree. And he was a gearhead, he had a website and looking at the website, it was neat. It was clear he and I had a lot of overlap in our interests, but there was an issue. It was something dumb like the HTML editor he'd used back when we were using HTML editors, remember, inserted a carriage return in some places that he couldn't see in the way he was editing it.

(00:55:16):

So when I opened it in my browser, there were weird carriage returns, midline and some crazy stuff. So I did a screenshot and wrote to him and said, "Hey, there's this thing going on with your website and I don't know if you know it, but here's what it looks like on my screen and here's what I think is happening." And he's like, "Nope, never saw it on mine." "Cool. Thanks for letting me know. "And that opened up a dialogue between us. And if you look through my CV, you probably noticed that William Wright or Bill Wright is a co-author on a great many of the things that I've been involved in. He and I were inseparable for a long time. He wasn't a teacher for IPTM at that point. So I got introduced to IPTM that way. I tagged along with him. We assisted with some of their crash tests back when we were running crash tests with live humans.

(00:56:08):

I mean, I'd put on a ballistic vest and crash into a car. Good times.

Lou (00:56:15):

I learned

Wade (00:56:15):

A lot that way.

Lou (00:56:16):

I bet.

Wade (00:56:17):

But because I was there doing the work with it, the guy in charge of their programming was willing to take a flyer on me as an engineer. And he said," I don't usually hire engineers because they usually can't talk to my clientele. They're mostly training police officers. And I open most of my shows with, "Hi, I'm an engineer, but I'm trying to get better." Because if you're going to talk about things like the engineer books, the guys who've been trained at IPTM and Northwestern maybe to a slightly lesser extent, they're not even going to know what language you're speaking because they haven't been introduced to it that way. That's not the way they learned it. So you have to be able to present stuff. And that was Dave Brill back in the day who gave me the shot at teaching the advanced class early on, which was two weeks of being with a good instructor and watching somebody else teach the class and trying to do my best to slog through my hour of instructional block each couple hours.

(00:57:28):

And that's how the IPTM thing grew up. And I did it because it's a learning experience for me. I became better as an instructor by watching other instructors and by practicing myself. That's actually why I went to become an MSF instructor way back. So I was an MSF instructor from around 1990 to about 2000, maybe it was even 89 or 88. Oh yeah, it was 88.

(00:58:03):

And I did that because I hate public speaking. My palms get sweaty. And in grade school, I had a couple of really horrible class presentations that still stick with me. You'd think it's 45 years ago, I should be over that by now. And yet I still remember trying to give a report to the class and my voice just kept ... Actually, there was one case, I just couldn't say a word. That one in fourth grade, I just got up and stood mute. I couldn't talk. I was terrified. And then early ... So I decided I need to get better at public speaking. I need to do that with something that I already know the material on so I can work on the presentation. And by then I'd been riding motorcycles for several years. I was a good candidate to be an instructor and so I could focus on the presentation, not on the material.

(00:59:08):

And that worked pretty good. So I got better through that. The same thing happened teaching accident reconstruction classes because they send you out with somebody else. You're not alone. So I got to watch other guys who were good at what they do. Some of them were just fabulous. Guys who were on the road 40 hours a week or 40 weeks a year. There we go. That's all they did. They did their career in police, they retired, and now they're doing this 40 weeks a year on the road teaching people. And they've taught this class 80 times. They know this material inside and out. They know exactly where everything is going. They keep things moving. They did it on time. It was good for me to see somebody good at that. I think the best example of that right now would be Alan Moore. I love watching Al and more.

(01:00:00):

I learn from him every time I watch him, not just whatever topic it is. And I always learn stuff on the topic too, because he knows more about most of those things than I do, but he is such a good presenter that I take every chance I can to go watch him just because he's good at pacing, at follow through, at annunciation, at clarifying things, at fielding questions. And it's good to watch somebody who's good at it do what they're good at. So I made time to go teach because I felt like that was important to me as a career development item. And yeah, you take a hit, but it's not that bad. Nowadays, it's probably like one fifth, one sixth, something like that. So it's not nothing. It didn't cost me money. And I was busy enough that I could pay the bills. I knew I had the bills paid.

(01:01:00):

I wasn't going to be putting my family on the street by accepting this gig. Same thing for working in the PE. I helped write the PE exam for 10 or 12 years, go to Clemson and spend three days cooped up in a little room with some really smart people talking about how to write good questions and what makes a good question and is this a good question and how can we fix this?

(01:01:30):

Those are all learning experiences that I think help me be better at what I do, whether it's trying to explain something to somebody else or write it on a piece of paper or banging out my Facebook posts just because I've seen a lot of that stuff. And I usually, I think, have a pretty good handle on what's going to be interesting to some portion of the people watching.

Lou (01:02:08):

There's so much there. I was going to touch on a few of those things because I agree in recon, obviously it's very important that you can speak publicly without a tremendous amount of fear. You're always going to be afraid and anxious to a certain degree heading into deposition or trial. But if you have a lot of experience in front of peers, especially, I think, because almost every peer that you're educating has a lot of experience and they know the topic as well. So they can call out anything that you didn't present clearly or maybe presented erroneously and those conversations hone your craft just as much as the audience is almost every time. The questions you get during a class, obviously there's no ill intent behind it like there sometime is at a deposition, but they can be even more challenging than an attorney can give you because you're speaking to an educated crowd.

(01:03:06):

And once you've done that for years, there's almost nothing an attorney could ask you technically that could trip you up. You're like, "I've heard from hundreds of experienced reconstructionists the questions that are going to come up on this topic." I already know that. And then two, to just be able to put yourself directly into that situation like you chose to do and be like, "Well, there's only one way to get better at this and to make my palms a little less sweaty, and that's to just go do it a bunch." And I think that's key. I've heard from a couple other recons who've done Toastmasters and things like that, just like get up there and then speak. And the giving back, there was one other thing I was going to say on that, that you hit on, but I really do think it's extreme. Oh, just mastering the topic, mastering the topic, there's no better ... I remember even hearing this in undergrad from some of my professors, my thermodynamics professor specifically.

(01:04:04):

He's like, "I wasn't that good at thermo until I came to this university to teach it. And then I had to know everything really, really well." And you can bite it off in chunks. Well, week one is turbines or whatever it's going to be. So let me learn everything there is to know about those and do it. So when you're co-teaching with somebody, you can be like, "Yeah, that's a little outside my realm. You teach that. I'll teach this. I'll get really good at it. " And then eventually you just become better and better. And then agreed Alan Moore, when he speaks, it's just as if he wrote everything that he is about to say. It doesn't sound like he's reading. I'm not saying that. It's just like polished and cadenced and precise. And then the other guy that I really love listening to, there's a bunch of them, so I'm not saying these are the two, but John Daly.

(01:04:55):

If I can ever go watch John Daly present, I take that opportunity and know I'm going to learn something.

Wade (01:05:01):

Probably predates you, but Bruno Schmidt was an early one for me that his presentations were so polished, so smooth. I went up and asked him one time, "How do you get so smooth like that? " And he said, "Well, yesterday I ran through this presentation four times in my room."

Lou (01:05:23):

That'll do it.

Wade (01:05:25):

Okay. Repetition, that helps. And I certainly see a difference in my presentations if I've ... So most of my shows take a week to build. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to spend two or three or four hours on stage, it's going to take me at least a day per hour to put a show together, to get the slides right, to get them organized, to get my thoughts in order. And if I get done with that month or week of preparation and have my show, I'm good. If I let it sit for five months, the next time around, I've forgotten some stuff. I really do have to go back and run through the show again sometime in the few days before to make sure that it's familiar, but being familiar with the material is great. And that's one of the things that Alan's great at and I think is consistently across the board for really good instructors is that they know where they're going.

(01:06:29):

So when somebody says, "Hey, what about this thing?" They can, instead of veering off out of order, they can just say, "We're going to cover that. Hold that thought. We're going to talk about this tomorrow." Yeah, lots of tips that I've picked up over the years. Bill Wright was really keen on referring. So where we were team teaching, he and I would always just go back and forth. He did an hour, I did an hour, he did an hour, and I would sit in the back and watch him. He would sit in the back and watch me. And when I'd get up, if my topic had anything to relate to what he had done, refer back to that and say, "Bill told you the last hour that EDRs mostly record at this rate. Here's one of the places where that's not the case." Or, "Here's another reference that talks about that and here's what it means to us on this section." So trying to tie the pieces together, not just inside my show, but with the other instructor or at conferences, lots of conferences these days, you can do that because there's enough of a theme, right?

(01:07:37):

You get the one show that's all about pedestrians and the ones that are all about EDRs. So there's overlap across the board and you can drag in that other experience to help illuminate pieces of your own discussion. And that takes a lot of practice to get used to. And I certainly had never thought of that myself. That was Bill. That was all Bill. And the only way I got that is because I spent time teaching with Bill. And if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't be as good an instructor as I am. Not that I think that cats me out. I still feel like I'm flailing a lot of the time, but I think I have an idea of where I want to go, whether I actually get there or not is a different problem.

Lou (01:08:25):

I agree fully. I love to, if I have the availability to sit in on the day of presentations when I'm going to speak, because almost certainly there's some sort of overlap there that you can weave together and tell a better story than as if you're just coming in and presenting yours and walking out. Sometimes I have to do that. So then how did NAPARS come about? You've been on the GBOD there, the BOD, I guess it's called, since 2008, 15 years. And now for the past, what, admin since 2012, so 13 years, you are just fully immersed.

Wade (01:09:05):

Yeah. NAPARS wound up running my life in ways that I had not anticipated. So we have only recently reached a point where we're almost run out of OG guys at NAPARS. There are still a couple of OG guys that were here in 84 as part of its founding. There are not many, but they still exist. And one of them, back when I started, way back in the '90s, he was a retired New Hampshire state trooper who then opened his own professional business, Chip Johnston. He lived and worked 20 minutes south of me.

Lou (01:09:50):

Crash Lab, right?

Wade (01:09:51):

Right. That's Crash Lab. And so Chip, because he was doing recon, he knew Fred. He had come to Fred for some material science stuff, testing of paint flex and things. When there was a failure analysis, they had a broken tie rod end, it would come to us and we'd look at it to see is the tie rod a fatigue failure or was this a single event impact, whatever. And so I knew Chip through that. Chip knew I was back in the area in the '90s. We connected, we talked. I occasionally did mechanical inspections for him because that wasn't really his big focus. He was in the recon part. I was doing the mechanical part. So I would do vehicle inspections for him and for Bob Dubois at Northeast Collision, who was also very close to me here.

(01:10:44):

And Chip was one of the OGs in NAPARS. I think he was the treasurer for like 25 years. And when he, at least officially, he was the treasurer. I think one of his employees was really doing all the work, but it was his name on it. And he finally button holed me at a NAPARS conference in 08 and said, "Hey, I want you to be on the board. Can you be on the board?" It's really not a lot of work. It's just a little bit of work. You just got to sit. That's all. "Yeah, okay, fine. I'll do it. " So he got me on the board and then it was like three years later that Chuck Pembleton, who was the administrator then, just basically sent an email to the board on December 23rd and said, "I'm done. Come get your

Lou (01:11:40):

Stuff." The Christmas season finally, yeah, it was the last straw. He's like, "That's it. I'm out. I'm going to go enjoy Christmas for the rest of my life."

Wade (01:11:48):

He was done and there was nobody else on the board who had the flexibility to take on the job. "Okay, fine. I'll do it. " So Chip and I drove down to Maryland and hooked up the NAPARS trailer with all the NAPARS shirts and a box of NAPARS paperwork and drove it to my house. And yeah, here I am. At that point, it was shortly after that that the board wanted to get a new website, which we did. And since then we got a new website again and then Facebook and social media appeared. And hey, I like to think I'm a modern kind of guy. I dragged NAPARS into the modern age and got a Facebook page and okay, what are we going to put on a Facebook page? Okay, well, let's talk about recon stuff. So early on, I just would post things like, "Dues are due next month, be prepared if you haven't received your notice, blah, blah, blah." So it'd be admin stuff.

(01:12:56):

And then I just started posting other random recon stuff. And eventually we decided that as the admin, I probably shouldn't be on the board. So I'm the only paid member. I'm officially a paid employee of NAPARS. And so I gave up my board seat. I no longer have a vote on what happens, but that's okay. I've kind of kept things afloat and moved it forward. And we're at almost 1,800 people now.

(01:13:32):

Yeah. We were talking about closing the doors when I took over. We had just transitioned from ARJ to Collision and NAPARS fronted Collision Magazine 80 grand to print the first issue. That was how they came about. We fronted them that money because they were going to be our big magazine. We were the premier sponsor. We were the industry partner and the relationship kind of soured. There were expectations on both sides of the fence that didn't get met, and our biggest failing was that we didn't keep 800 members. That was the original agreement.

Lou (01:14:20):

Wow. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I thought that I remember at some point there was like 695 members.

Wade (01:14:25):

Yeah. So we were supposed to sell 800 magazines every issue and we couldn't get the membership up. It was $125 or $130 a year, and it was just too spicy for the police departments. It was a little too spicy for the average guy who's working a beat and working three collisions a year that are mostly your fault kind of analysis. And Collision Magazine wanted us to sell 800. We tried buying extras. When I picked up the trailer, I had like 60 issues of one issue, of one volume of Collision Magazine because we bought 800, but we'd only sold 700 something. And then we stopped doing that and just said, "We can't afford doing this. " We're spending, at that point it was 50 bucks an issue. So there was $2,000 sitting in the trailer that eventually I threw away because nobody wanted it. But after that divorce, we went back to ARJ, membership price went way down.

(01:15:42):

So it was just 65 bucks a year for six issues. Membership started climbing and then the Facebook thing. I'm convinced that it was the Facebook thing that made a difference for us. There was a pretty good surge, got us into the 1,100 mark, and then our president, Tommy Sturdivan, had the great idea to do Zooms, the little Zoomie shows. And he said, "Let's just do those. We can put in for a couple of CEUs. Let's do that. " Okay. So we started doing that and here we are four years later and there's something like 36 recorded two hour Zoom shows in the bank that members can just go watch. They want to go see John Daly talk about trailers. They want to watch Greg Russell talk about momentum. Yeah, there's two hours of Greg Russell talking about momentum, and it doesn't get better than Greg Russell talking about momentum or John Daly talking about trailers.

(01:16:40):

So I'm with you. And John Daly actually plays into the whole Zoomie thing. When we started talking about the Zooms, somebody said, "Look, we should record these and put them in the library." I'm like, "I don't know if people are going to go for being recorded. I'm not sure I want to be recorded." And I called John up and said, "Hey, would you consider coming on, spend two hours and remember that show you did on? " I don't remember which one it was. One of his shows said, "Could you do that for us again? I need to fill two hours a time. Would it be okay if I record it? " And John, bless his heart, was just no hesitation, said, "Sure, go ahead."

Lou (01:17:20):

Yeah, he does not care.

Wade (01:17:21):

I've concluded I'm in that same boat. I don't mind being recorded because the things that I say are the things that I mean. And if I change my mind, and there are some things that I've changed my mind about over the years, I will have to just admit, I changed my mind. I've found better research, I've conducted some of my own research. I reevaluated what I thought I understood or what I was told. And yeah, so I've had to reevaluate some of the things that I have said not much lately, but fortunately I don't have to back up and backpedal too often, but I still do once in a while. You post something on Facebook every single day, once in a while, I stick my foot in my mouth. But the internet is good about letting you know when you put your foot in your mouth.

Lou (01:18:11):

That's for sure. Yeah, and that's kind of handy. When I write my To the Points, which are once a week, if I do anything wrong or omit some sort of piece of research that I didn't know about, I'll hear about it very quickly and that helps make everybody better too, because then I can write an addendum, correct it, whatever, and then publish that again, and then everybody's better as a result.

Wade (01:18:31):

And we're all better off if everybody else is better. I would rather review a good report than have to correct somebody for a bad report.

Lou (01:18:40):

Yeah, absolutely. I've been in the camp of teach everything you know and the abundance kind of mindset, not a zero sum game. It's like the more people that know this, the better. And if I teach a couple hundred people everything I know about motorcycle recon and they're getting hired on motorcycle cases, that's totally fine by me. There will never be a ... I don't ever forecast a situation where I'm struggling to get a motorcycle case or a photogrammetry case or whatever it is. I prefer everybody to be better. And then like you say, you have a great saying that I really like, and I think about it from time to time, is when somebody in our community passes away, you always say, "We'll take it from here," which is always very powerful to me. And it's like, "Yeah, you're not going to be here forever." So this is a community, we all need to be good and everybody needs to be able to handle whatever type of case.

(01:19:40):

Obviously, sometimes it's like a very specific motorcycle case, you got to pass it off to a motorcycle specialist or whatever, but it's like you're not going to always be there. And if you taught somebody how to do it, then they can take over.

Wade (01:19:51):

There's a real perspective that comes with age. And I'm in my 60th year now, so I'm reaching the point where that perspective has changed. I realized a few years ago that some of the people that I know, my mentor, in fact, when I first met him, he was not as old as I am now, and I thought he was really old, but I was 19. I didn't know anything. I was just a young punk and you gain a perspective on what's going to happen when you're not here, what's going to happen with my library, who's going to take over NAPARS, who's going to clean out my garage? So there was one of the other local recons around here who had made a career as accident reconstructionist and failure analysis guy, a car guy. He loved Cadillacs. He collected old Cadillacs. His son went to engineering school, got an engineering degree, but he worked for his dad his whole life.

(01:21:01):

So he never got the experience necessary to take the PE exam because they wouldn't count working for an accident reconstructionist as quality enough to sit for the exam. So he couldn't take the exam. And his dad passed away and I happened to see him. Actually, I was at his facility looking at a motorcycle that was stored in that building on a case that his dad had started and he was now trying to carry the ball on. And he and I talked a while, he said, "Have a plan, have an exit strategy because my dad didn't." And look, he had this huge warehouse full of Cadillacs and Cadillac parts and pieces and files and just stacked up on shelves. And he's like, "I'm drowning here. This is my inheritance and I have to figure out how to make something of this. " That was pretty powerful to me.

(01:21:59):

He was clearly kind of at his wits end because it wasn't his passion. He didn't love Cadillacs and his dad had not successfully set him up to really run with the ball as it were. And we all need to.

Lou (01:22:18):

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. It's like pass on that information. And then with respect to the possessions thing, I know this is a little bit of a tangent, but I suspect you know this. Is it the Swedish that do the Swedish cleaning, which is like a cleansing well before you die of getting rid of all of your possessions. I think it might be the Swedish that do that, but I think it's brilliant. It's like before you go, well before, start pairing down as much as you can so that you don't leave your children with that burden.

Wade (01:22:48):

It makes sense. I've never heard of it. Now I'll have to look up Swedish cleaning.

Lou (01:22:52):

I think it's Swedish cleaning, something like that.

Wade (01:22:54):

The internet will correct you if you're wrong.

Lou (01:22:56):

Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Those two hour Zoomies, the other thing that's super cool about those, one, to the point that we're talking about right now, that is really critical information that is memorialized and made permanent in the NAPARS library. So if somebody passes or they're no longer in a position where they're involved in the community, it's like we can always go watch that Zoom. And the other thing that's really cool about that is for people to develop an entire class, like a week-long class or a two-week class, that is a major undertaking, A, and then B, somebody might just have something that's extremely helpful, but is bite-sized, and not that two hours is really bite-sized, but compared to a two-week class it is. And you can present a really cool topic in two hours that helps everybody out substantially, and that's not a huge undertaking to prepare a two-hour thing.

Wade (01:23:56):

I try really hard to find ways for people to leverage work they've already done. So there's a fair number of our Zoomies that were presented at Pennsylvania, the PSP conference, or at IPTM, or at the EDR symposium. And I know that not everybody was there, right? There were only so many people in the room, those things weren't recorded, so I'll give them that opportunity like Chris Daly with his siren work. That was a great show. And I knew Chris was going to be a great presenter on that because I saw him four years ago when he was working on his degree, and I knew he had a lot of great material. I knew it would only be better when I saw him in Pennsylvania a few years ago. So I knew he didn't have to work. So I don't want to put a burden on people to do that, but give people a chance to share what they've already done.

(01:24:52):

As you say, it's not a huge undertaking, but to build one from scratch, you got to dedicate a day or two for even a two hour show. Even if I know where I'm going, it's going to be a day or two to put it together.

(01:25:08):

And I feel reticent about asking somebody to spend that much time because I don't have a whole lot to offer on the other side. I give away a membership to NAPARS, I'll give them a year's membership, but I don't have a lot to offer otherwise. And that gives them a broader audience and as you say, preserves that knowledge for when the time comes that they're not doing it, whether it's because they've decided to go run a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico or because they've moved to the hills of California or whatever and try to document stuff. I feel that way about the library too, the reference library and the index that I built that for me, I like being able to find stuff and just doing a word search in the directory isn't all that efficacious. So always open to advice or suggestions on that one too.

(01:26:15):

Things that need to be there that aren't.

Lou (01:26:17):

That is key. The index, the way that Vic did it was obviously very valuable, but now you guys, you and Andy putting it in that Excel file is very valuable. So to those that aren't NAPARS members, I mean, it's most of us in America at this point. I've always kind of felt like there's maybe four to 5,000 recons in America, including private and law enforcement, and I feel like there's about 10,000 worldwide. That's kind of my best estimate. And to have 1,700 is a lot, but if you're not, it's worth the money. One, like you're saying, you get access to that library, the searchability, the Zoomies, which are really valuable. Then you get the ARJ, which is huge. And then the Facebook page, obviously anybody can follow. And you've got like 4,000 followers on that, which is very interesting. I think that's got to be the biggest account in recon right now.

(01:27:11):

And did that take over ... Remember the mailbox review that you used to do? Did that kind of transition into the NAPARS page?

Wade (01:27:19):

Yeah. So the mailbox review was just, I would keep a file off to the side in my drive. And when I saw an interesting thing, I would just go copy and paste and copy and paste. And then once a month or so, I would go through and clean it up and organize it. And there would be some common threads, like there'd be a little bit on firearms and there'd be some skid testing and there'd be some new car developments, some new valve train or tires, tread design or something, so I could kind of cluster things together. And then, yeah, I just basically moved that into the NAPARS news. So we had a newsletter that's currently on hiatus this year because our editor has retired from recon and left NAPARS and I just didn't have bandwidth to build it myself, but we may try to resurrect it.

(01:28:17):

So I would roll that into the NAPARS newsletter and then Facebook came along and I just started ... When I see something, I cut and paste it into Facebook instead. And Facebook for business, I don't know if you can even do this for private ones maybe, but for the commercial account, I can schedule things. So anybody who's watched that may have noticed that they always appear right about 6:00 AM because that's just the time I picked. I'm going to post it at 6:00 AM. So right now I've got two weeks in the can. All those posts are written and I can do nothing on the NAPARS Facebook page for the next two weeks and it'll keep churning away without me. And when I find something, I just tack it on to the next open day or if I find somebody's birthday like today was somebody's birthday that I thought deserved a little bit of notation, so I put hers today on her birthday.

(01:29:19):

And that's interesting for me. It gives me an outlet that without the mailbox review, I was kind of missing. I don't know why I feel this urge to share. I don't know. It's a misplaced gene somewhere.

Lou (01:29:40):

It's appreciated because a lot of the stuff that you've come up with, one, I don't see, and obviously it's very helpful to the whole spectrum of recons, whether they're starting out or they've been doing it for 20 years, I have to imagine that. I wish I was as organized as you with that whole schedule. That's got to take a lot of work and It seems to me one of your superpowers, and I think I've always known this, but this conversation has made it more clear, is your ability to read and to learn. And then that translates obviously into a lot of posts as well in knowledge. How do you stay up to date on all of the current technologies? Just your role with NAPARS, does that naturally keep you up to date or do you make an effort to keep an eye on the latest and greatest?

Wade (01:30:31):

It's so hard to know where to even look for the latest, greatest. So like drones. I'm sure there's journals about drones and I don't know what they are. So some of it is just happenstance because my Facebook feed is so heavy on that stuff that things pop up. There's one site, interesting engineering that has lots of interesting engineering that I may use to dig into. Reading the SAE journal, reading the ARJ. So just going through the ARJ and when I read an article, it's not just, "Okay, I'm going to read this article. Great, put it down." I read the article and then I think, "Huh, where's the paper that was based on? And what else is in that paper?" So a lot of the things like a lot of ARJ is public sources. The source from SOAR, the Society of Accident Reconstructionists, the source that comes out every few months or quarterly is mostly open source stuff.

(01:31:34):

And they cite it in there. You don't have to pay anything to go dig it up. Sometimes it's just visit research gate and poke in a word, motorcycle, see what you get.

(01:31:47):

So there's just a lot of ... I said it before, I feel a lot like I'm flailing around. I feel like I flail around a lot, but if you flail around enough, eventually you touch interesting stuff in a lot of different places and my life is generally pretty flexible. So I spend a lot of time just sitting at the laptop, reading either books or journals or reading the ARJs or working through the library to catalog stuff and then saying, "Well, what else has this person written?" Or read the bibliography. When you find a paper that's interesting, read the bibliography because there's always going to be something else interesting there. If the paper had an interesting topic, you could bet they cited somebody else that's interesting. And if I go through that bibliography and I say, "Yeah, I know that one. Yeah, I know that one.

(01:32:40):

Yeah. Oh, I never heard that one. Let's find that. " So yeah, there is definitely some active searching, but I'm not sure that I would categorize it as organized. And just being involved, talking to people, doing the NAPARS thing, people suggest ideas that they think we should add onto or things that they'd like to hear more about. And okay, then I'll flail around. Who knows somebody who does boat accidents? I'm still trying to get that guy. He hasn't returned my emails yet.

Lou (01:33:16):

Yeah. Those always seem so challenging to me because you're like, "Okay, we have tire marks. We have a defined roadway." I cannot imagine trying to reconstruct a boat crash where you have just the aftermath and not even all of that because some of it's sunk to the bottom of the sea.

Wade (01:33:30):

Boat fires though. You know what? Boat fires are not that hard.

Lou (01:33:33):

Just because there are fewer electronics?

Wade (01:33:35):

Fewer electronics in a small position. It's basically always fuel gets into the bilge and something sparks it and it blows up.

Lou (01:33:42):

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(01:35:02):

No left turns until we find out that in your mid 30s, you became a law enforcement officer, which would not have been expected. It's not the normal career path for somebody who's already developed a career as a mechanical engineer analyzing crashes and has his hair on fire busy. So what motivated that shift? I suspect it was similar to what motivated a lot of your other things, but I don't think we've ever talked about it. What made you do that?

Wade (01:35:33):

I live in Rochester, New Hampshire. We are in Strafford County. New Hampshire has 13 counties, all 13 of them. It's a tiny, tiny state. For all you people out there with 60 and 80 and a thousand counties. Yeah, New Hampshire's small. Anyway, Strafford County has an accident reconstruction team. So I lived here in 96. I moved back and of course met reconstructionists in the area. One of them was semi-retired from police work and was doing accident reconstruction. He actually sold total stations. And he said, "Hey, Middleton is looking for police officers. You should go join and you could be on the TAR team." I said, "What's the TAR team?" Well, that's the traffic accident reconstruction team that is made up from guys from all over the county that go deal with a crash because most of our towns are too small to have a dedicated recon on staff.

(01:36:37):

So when they got the big crash, they either, A, did nothing, call the tow truck and an ambulance and then they're done or B, called the state police. And the state police only have so many resources if it was a single car crash and the only guy in the car is dead, they're not coming out for that. They don't have time for that. But that guy's family probably would like to know what happened and the team will turn out for that.

(01:37:08):

But in order to be on the team, you had to have a badge. And New Hampshire is one of very few places where you can be part-time certified. So I'm not a reserve officer. I am part-time certified, which means I can work 1,300 hours a year, which is essentially full-time for four months. And when I'm on duty, there are no limits. I have full power of arrest. I carry a gun, I drive the car, I pull people over, I arrest people, the whole thing. I mean, that was the deal. As a part-time guy, you are a police officer, but you only had, in my case, a 100-hour academy. It's like 11 Saturdays or something like that. So it was essentially the law package. Here's what constitutes a legal arrest. Here's what constitutes probable cause, the states of mind. Here's how to use a set of handcuffs, that sort of thing.

(01:38:18):

And the department was responsible to make sure I was good with a gun and I could drive a car and I did okay on both counts. And I rode along with a sergeant for six shifts in my little town and they cut me loose. The town was small enough that when I was on duty, I was the only guy in town. And so I worked a lot of weekends. I did a lot of Sunday night, Monday night shifts because the full-time guys didn't like that shift. And okay, I'd go do that in order to allow me to be on the team so that I could help them get it right the first time. People who need to be in jail, let's put them in there. People who shouldn't, let's cut them loose as soon as possible and let's get the best data we can for everybody.

(01:39:06):

So just in trying to further that information gathering to just kind of improve my karma and with respect to my neighbors, pushing a cruiser around was just paying the dues. And as it turned out, I enjoyed pushing a cruiser around. I love motor vehicle stops. It was a hoot. Everybody has a story. It was great.

Lou (01:39:36):

Yeah, I bet.

Wade (01:39:37):

It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it immensely. And yeah, I miss those days. I'm still officially part-time with a neighboring town that's bigger and can tolerate having a guy who's not running patrol much. So this part-time position in New Hampshire exists because of tourism towns, Hampton Beach, for instance, that needs to add 30 officers in the summer. So they hire college professors, high school teachers, people who only want to be up here in the summer, and then go back to Florida when it's cold. And they work up here for that period of time, and then they leave. But those guys are mostly running with a full-timer. Not all of them. I've talked to a few who said, "Oh yeah, first day on in Hampton, they cut me loose. I was alone." But most of them are there to be extra eyes, extra muscle, extra presence.

(01:40:40):

And the full-time guy who does this every day, all the time, he's the one who's making the decision about, "Okay, you need to come with us." And I was a real rarity to be alone in town myself. And I got away with it because one, it was a really small town that had very few issues particularly. And two, I was a grownup already. I can't imagine cutting a 21-year-old loose like that.

Lou (01:41:09):

Yeah. It takes a lot of time, especially for men to develop a maturity and good judgment.

Wade (01:41:14):

But my son had grown up, he had moved out. I mean, I didn't have other things going on at home. I had spare time and decided, "Okay, let's do this now." Also, that got me onto the hot scenes. Turns out you'll learn stuff on hot scenes that you don't get from the police report.

Lou (01:41:33):

No, I can't imagine. That was going to be where I was going to go next because I'm really curious. You had been in recon at that point for 13 plus years, and now you're going to your first hot scene. Do you remember your first hot scene? And then I'd like to talk just more broadly about that experience compared to the private side.

Wade (01:41:51):

Yeah, you don't forget the first one. And I was lucky enough that about two months after I was cut loose, so I'm alone in town. We had our first, and to my knowledge, only double fatal crash. So I'm alone in town, have zero training in how to deal with crashes on the police side. And here's four little old ladies in a car that went ... It basically went straight when the road went left and took a big tree right in the nose. And so I got neighbors from the house coming out and they're hopping the hood to cut battery cables. I'm like, "Get away from my car." And one grandma who's really hurt, she probably had a medical event and she's passed out over the wheel. One grandma who's hurt because she hit her head on the dashboard. One grandma who's up and walking around and seems fine, gets in the ambulance, leaves and dies and never returns.

(01:42:49):

Yeah, it was a trial by fire. And so that was a car that I could download. And that was a single vehicle crash. The driver died and there would've been no reconstruction, but I took decent photos. I measured crush on the car. I downloaded the car. We can talk about what was going on. I mean, we didn't prosecute anybody over that, but if the family ever wanted to find out what happened, that information is there. And presumably the families of the injured lady may have sued this one. I never got involved. And usually I don't. I very rarely hear from the others from the civil side. It's almost unheard of that I'm involved in the civil aspects, but I know from other guys in the area that they see my reports. So some attorneys are getting these things, they're getting all this data that I give to the PD.

(01:43:48):

And so they've seen my reports. Now they get to see my FARO scan E57 files and they get to see my photos and they get to see my measurements. And if there's a TAR report, they get that too. So my goal is to just preserve the data primarily. And once in a while we prosecute somebody, but it's only ... The team handles about one or two cases a month, and we have one or two prosecutions a year, maybe three or four, but most of them end in a plea deal. So I'll get deposed and then it's gone or it just disappears. They come up with a plea deal and I never hear. We actually had one of the first trials where I was the primary prosecution witness on that count for the reconstruction a couple months ago. And he was found guilty of negligent homicide.

(01:44:49):

This 82-year-old guy is going to get sentenced next month, so we don't know what's going to happen. And putting him in jail isn't going to do him any good, honestly. I don't know what the end game really is. There's no benefit to society. As long as he's not driving, society is basically as served as it's going to be. And it's tragic for everybody involved, including the gentleman he killed, who was kind of a big wig around here, which is why it went as far and as hard as it did, I think. Sadly, all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And if somebody is well-known and an important personage, they do get different treatment than if it's the homeless girl who's walking across the road. And I've had that case too, where nobody ever calls for the report on the homeless girl's case.

(01:45:49):

It's just sad. And there's no family, there's no prosecution, there's nobody to prosecute. The guy didn't do anything wrong, but you see things handled differently for different people, even though we would hope that it isn't. The nature of being human, that is unfortunately just the nature of being human, I think, where we tend to be a little tribal. People who are like us get better treatment than people who are not like us, people who are important that we look up to get better treatment than people who are wearing rumbled clothes. And it shouldn't be that way, but it kind of is.

Lou (01:46:32):

So what's the biggest thing that you've learned from being on scene or a few of your big takeaways from being on scene? Because that seems to me from an outside perspective as a very valuable experiences, granted probably highly disturbing most of the time, but from a technical perspective, a great deal of information you're being presented with that you wouldn't otherwise get.

Wade (01:47:02):

So the law enforcement end is different. And this took me a long time to figure out having started in civil work. First, it was a lot of years before I understood that civil and criminal were different. I never dealt with the criminal end of it. And once in a while, I'd hear that tossed around, "Well, this is a criminal case." And okay, well, the F equals MA for everybody. What's the difference? Well, the civil case will be next year. What do you mean the civil case? So the whole disparity of civil versus criminal took me years to figure that out. But once I got that basic understanding, I wondered why police officers did things the way they did. So their reports often didn't have the stuff I wanted and they answered questions I didn't care about and they ignored questions that I thought were really important, but it's because they were specifically tasked with answering different questions than I cared about.

(01:48:08):

So all most officers have time for and is, do I need to prosecute somebody and do I need this to prosecute them? And if somebody is in a crash and they are still in the seatbelt on the driver's seat, when the first officer shows up and he unbuckles him and this guy blows a three-two and he's the cause of the crash because he's on the wrong side of the road and he killed somebody, that might be all they need. We've got him blowing a three-two. We can see the crash happened here. We're going to prosecute you for that. We don't need a reconstruction. And I would say, "Why didn't you take more pictures?" "Well, we didn't need to. We got a prosecution and we were successful. That's all we needed. "So they're answering questions different from what I wanted answered. And I'd say," Why don't you download them?

(01:49:05):

"Well, we don't have that equipment. And now I really do understand how hard it is to stop when there's disaster happening. There's people running around, there's cars leaking out of the fluids, there's maybe a little smoke. People open the door and they think their car's on fire because the talcum powder from the bags is rolling out the windows and they're all screaming to run around with chickens with their heads cut off. It's really, really hard as the first guy on scene to stop, plant your feet and take a photograph. It's like, " There's somebody over there. Hold on, I got to take a picture.

(01:49:44):

"It's so hard to do and police officers are drilled with life first, deal with safety, yours and theirs. Get the sick people help that they need, and then we'll deal with other stuff. Okay, but that means somebody has already cut the door off the car before anybody takes a picture of it. The wrecker has already hooked onto it and dragged it out of the driver's door before anybody takes a picture because they're working hard to save a person. And if you're the first guy on scene, you really can't just stop and say," Oh, hold on. I know you're bleeding out the aorta, but don't worry, I'll be right with you.

Lou (01:50:26):

"Yeah. Let me just do my download first. The key's still on.

Wade (01:50:31):

Yeah. There's a triage issue that trumps some of the data that I really wish could get collected, but even so, lots of the second, third, fourth guy on scene, they could be doing that. They're not adding to the help factor particularly, but they don't think to because they don't have to. They can already answer the question that they need. And so it's a different set of questions that they're answering is why they're doing it differently. And sometimes I would look at a police report and say," Well, he picked 0.6. I would really use a 0.76 here. "Drag factor skidding on drive pavement. I mean, you and I knew exactly what I referred to. Not everybody will, but it's because the officers are always looking at it in the light most favorable to the defendant. So they don't care what their most likely speed is. They just need to know what's the lowest speed they might have been going and is that high enough for me to charge them?

(01:51:30):

And if it's not, we're done.

(01:51:34):

My reports to my county attorney tend to include that 0.76 and the 0.6 and the 0.82, because I'm going to tell them," Here's the most likely number. "And the jury will get to hear that. The speed might have been this low, but it's only this likely. And then it's exactly as likely that it's this high as well. This is the most likely number and fits this other stuff that we've got, and this is why this is his speed really. So I tend to approach it a little differently coming from the engineering background, and I'm willing to chase that probability issue that most officers just don't have training for. Statistics is not something that they cover in police academy. It's not something that most accident reconstruction classes cover. And I don't know about you. I haven't seen the syllabus for your class, but when I do my full one week motorcycle class, we spend an hour or two on stats.

(01:52:34):

We talk about a bell curve. We talk about standard deviation. In order to have access to the literature, I think you have to understand that. And coming from an engineering background, oh yeah, you're going to get standard deviation. You may not completely understand it. I know I sure didn't when I got done with my bachelor's, but you have enough access to the literature to figure it out. But the stuff they cover in the academy and in the first six weeks or eight weeks that you went to Northwestern, they didn't talk about stats. They probably didn't talk about standard deviation or about skewness or any of those things that I think are necessary to really understand what somebody's writing. When you pull up an SAE paper where they've done a bunch of tests on some surface with some car in some condition, whether it's a flat tire or it's up a grade or it's wild breaking or in ABS or with a flat tire, whatever, in order to understand the results, you really have to understand the stats.

(01:53:46):

And I feel like that's one of those places that gets short shrift in most classes just because it's not an easy topic and it's not something that everybody says, "Oh yeah, I need to know that. " But I think that's important.

(01:54:04):

And again, I think it's just part of the engineering background, you and I and anybody who's been through engineering or a physics student or another higher end science background, whether it's microbiology or whatever, science background, they've got that math at least enough to be able to go say, "What does that mean here in this paper?" And dig into it. If they want to learn, they can. It's much harder for somebody who has never been introduced to it because they probably don't even know to go ask the question. And I see that as part of my job is getting information out because there's stuff that the engineers know that the police generally don't like that, but there's also stuff that the police know that the engineers generally don't. Think of all the engineering reports you've read over the years where somebody said somebody with letters after their name and well respected, been years doing this, and they said something just completely bonkers, like Newton doesn't have anything to do with crash reconstruction.

Lou (01:55:17):

Is that a real thing you read?

Wade (01:55:19):

Yes. Yeah. Black and white in a deposition.

Lou (01:55:22):

He wanted to do a quantum mechanics version?

Wade (01:55:26):

I don't know. I don't know. But I've also seen guys with big degrees get flummoxed on the stand by, what are Newton's three laws? Simple stuff that anybody doing reconstruction should have heard them, but not everybody has been impressed, I think, sufficiently with how imperative it is to know them and be able to rattle them off. So that winds up being one of my recurring themes. If you read the Facebook thing, you see me post that once a year, something about Newton's laws because it comes up. It's an issue. And if you don't know the answer, you look dumb.

Lou (01:56:10):

Yeah. The Monte Carlo stuff in the sensitivities and the quantifying your probability, first of all, that was one of the first papers that I ever read because I'm in undergrad, 2003, I think I still had two years left, but I was introduced to recon from one of my professors. So this is when SAE sold the accident reconstruction book. It was awesome. So I just bought all the papers that were written with respect to accident reconstruction in 2003. Monte Carlo was in there. First flip past it, all I thought was Chevy Monte Carlo, only thing I knew. It's like, "What the heck is Monte Carlo? You must be talking about a Chevy Monte Carlo." And then I read it and I was like, "Oh, this is really cool." Didn't really have a chance to put it into practice until many years later because I wasn't actually doing my own reconstructions at that point.

(01:56:59):

And now, to your point, I think Northwestern is teaching Monte Carlo in their recon three class. And then my motorcycle class, that's the last module we teach. I teach them everything that I know about motorcycle recon and then say, "Well, you just learned that the braking rate of a motorcyclist is not going to be a single number. It's going to be a range. You just learned that if we calculate the impact speed of a motorcycle, it's not 35 to 36 miles an hour. It's going to be a bigger range than that. You just learned that a sliding motorcycle is like a 0.48, but there's a standard deviation of 0.13 on there. So what do you want to do? Do you want to give up that entire range every time you testify or do you want to develop a normal distribution curve within the possible speeds?

(01:57:45):

And within ... So almost universally, I nip it in the bud now because I've taught it enough to know that there's going to be some grumbling and I let them know this is not difficult. Okay? I know there's going to be 10,000 calculations done here at the end of the day, but we're just doing one line and then we're just going to drag it down and Excel 10,000 times. And I think I've over the years gotten good at describing what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the benefit is. The other thing that's very helpful is to your point, like you just said, it's not for some people. It's not for some people's jurisdiction. It's not for some people's boss. I'm like, do this if you want. And if you don't, just listen and then you don't even have to do the exercise. I don't care.

(01:58:26):

If you find that it's not for your situation, I get it. But I feel like that is such a valuable tool to help me understand ... And I just teach the uniform distribution method. So 0.4 is just as likely as 0.6. Obviously, you can get more detailed than that and it's phenomenal when you can, especially when you have the data, but to learn that uniform distribution methodology of a Monte Carlo analysis, not very difficult and extremely beneficial. So thank you for writing that paper, A, because what you did is, and I'd be curious to hear what made you write that, but what you did is essentially take something that I think was like a crystal ball methodology using that software or something that is specifically adapted towards statistical analyses and just make it accessible to those of us that are using Excel and kind of brought it into ... I'm sure there's ... PhD physicists were probably already doing Monte Carlo, but us regular practitioners, I don't think were.

(01:59:28):

So what motivated that paper and how'd you make that jump over to Excel with it?

Wade (01:59:33):

So that came from seeing some SAE papers before that. So there are a couple older ones from, I think there's one in 98, and then there was another one in 01, and I was intrigued by the idea, as you may have intuited, I'm sort of an Excel goofball. I I love Excel. And I liked the idea, but I didn't like the price of Crystal Ball or Risk, which was another program at the time. And the people who were doing that who were using that stuff were mostly actuaries and physicists. NASA used it to help narrow down probabilities, but a lot of insurance companies had been using Monte Carlo for risk probability analysis. How much money do we think we're going to lose on this issue? How much do we need to anticipate? That sort of thing. And it just seemed like there had to be a way to do that in Excel.

(02:00:48):

And I sat down with Excel and figured out how to form a normal distribution and a uniform and get random numbers and ran between and a few others. The triangular distributions and the asymmetric triangles and all that fancy stuff, that seemed pretty fancy. I was pretty happy with myself about it. And in hindsight, that's pretty useless. So that's not necessary. Uniform is the way to go. And it's because of the central limit theorem, because it doesn't matter what the underlying distribution is. If you have enough variables, everything shakes out to a normal distribution in the end.

(02:01:31):

And so I liked that ability to put all those pieces together to see the ranges, but particularly I wanted to be able to throw out things that didn't work. So if I ran a set of numbers, I picked my number from column A and column B and column C and came up with an end result that I knew to be fictitious. It involved a negative restitution value or required or an effective approach speed that was negative. Okay, that's not true. That's not possible. I know that's not one of mine. I can throw that out now. And in my Excel program, I could do that because I'd save all 10,000 and then I could just say, "Well, anything that's got a negative restitution, that means you got to calculate the restitution, but then just say everything with negative restitution, throw that one out. What do we have left?" Okay.

(02:02:28):

Now everything that has a negative approach speed, I'm confident none of these cars was backing into this crash. Throw that out. What do we have left? So I could just evaluate the cases that actually could have happened. And that's a place where I see a lot of these software packages that are applying Monte Carlo fall down. They run the numbers in the background and then just give you a beautiful bell curve, but there's no way to tell how the pieces fit together. If you do it in Excel, you can then plot and say, "Okay, how does my friction affect the speeds of vehicle one and two?" And you can plot friction versus V1 and say, "Well, as friction goes up, V1 speed goes up, but as friction goes up, V2 speed goes down." Or you can find those inflection points and say, "Ah, this means something." Because we've got competing things in many of these cases, right?

(02:03:27):

And one of the reasons that I hate viewing the evidence in the light most favorable for one person in the case is that I'm kicking somebody else in the head, essentially.

(02:03:43):

If you're taking it away from one party, you're giving it to somebody else. And that's why I tried to chase my best answer is my primary goal. And then look at the tails, but discard stuff that's impossible. And most of the software packages didn't allow me to do that. I think Andy Rich's new approach does. He preserves the data so you can go through and discard things that you don't like because they require stuff that wasn't true. So that conditional sampling was missing as far as I could tell. And I did actually have a subscription to a crystal ball at one point and you couldn't do that conditional sampling. It didn't do what I wanted it to do. Made really beautiful graphs though. Oh my God, they make nice graphs.

Lou (02:04:36):

Imagine when you get on the stand, like Mr. Bartlett, you're a scientist and you're telling us what the probabilities here are of speeds for vehicle one and two. It looks like you used a program called Crystal Ball. Is that accurate? Obviously you could defend that, but it's not the best name software for our business.

Wade (02:04:55):

Yeah. Well, Monte Carlo in itself has created trouble for me.

Lou (02:04:59):

Oh, really?

Wade (02:04:59):

So you're guessing at the value that you put into the analysis? Well, not exactly. No.

Lou (02:05:09):

Yeah. It's funny. I'd be curious to hear what your cross-examination is on Monte Carlo, because for whatever reason, I have gotten nothing. Basically, I report my average value, I report the 68% confidence interval, and I report the 95th, and then I let the jury do what they want with it. It's not my job from there. Here's the ranges and here's what they mean, and here's what could have happened within that range. This one's most likely, this one's ... And I've never really gotten any pushback from attorneys on it, not at trial, not at depot. So I'm curious if you have gotten any pushback on it, how you've handled that and what the result was.

Wade (02:05:49):

I think the biggest pushback I get is that when I present it to them before the case, before the fact, when we're just talking and I'm explaining this, is that you can watch their eyes roll up into the back of their head. And I suspect you have followed a similar trajectory in finding ways to kind of bring down the complexity to simplify it. And I wind up saying something like, "It's a way to assess how many different variables all interact at the same time." It's easy enough to just do a Route 30 DF and range high low, and now we got to go high low on the distance. We can go high low on the friction. Now we get a value for us. But what if we have another car that's coming in? Now they have to have a range for each of those and we have some skids, so there's a distance measurement, and then we have some departure angles, and there's some range there, and we can use Monte Carlo to see how all of those different variables interact at the same time across their whole range, instead of trying to pick one or two things.

(02:06:58):

And that's been simple enough that they are okay with it. I gave up on normal distributions for anything except friction. If it's dry good pavement and a car spinning on dry good pavement, that's a normal distribution. And I know that because we have enough good data for that. It's 0.76 plus or minus 0.06. And maybe I stretch it out to one standard deviation, maybe you stretch it out to two. I usually go to two, but anything else trying to talk about normal distributions and people's eyes are glazing over and they don't care. And it turns out the end result doesn't change. There was an article, gosh, now it's probably 15 years ago that Vic Craig in the ARJ reviewed a case study where somebody had come to him with a local crash and asked for help doing momentum. So he did a momentum on a car, blows a stop sign, hits a bike, blows the rider, and the bike down range and the passenger kind of bounces off the hood and winds up redirected, but not quite so downrange.

(02:08:04):

And then the car comes to a stop and there's some skids, there's all these variables. And he went through and picked one value for each of them. And I wrote to him and said, "Dude, this is the perfect Monte Carlo case." And I showed him, I said, "Okay, I looked at your numbers and I picked a range of plus or minus three degrees on the departure for everybody and plus or minus two degrees on the approach here and plus or minus two feet for the skids or whatever." And you get a normal distribution at the end that says, "Okay, the bike is going between 35 and 59 or 60 and the car is going between 38 and 52." Or actually the car was much smaller. It was like 42 to 48 or something like that. And because of the mass weight ratio, mass ratio, weight ratio, the car winds up getting a really narrow speed range and the bike, it's a big one.

(02:09:03):

And Victor didn't like the numbers I picked, so I reran it with his. And it didn't matter if you ran it as a normal distribution where we had them or uniform distribution, you get the same result in the end within a decimal place. So that's where I gave up doing complicated triangular trajectory for probably distributions or anything because it's easy to tell a jury I allowed it to be between 0.4 and 0.6, anywhere in there. And then I said, or maybe I give it a even wider range and work on canceling out stuff later on. Okay, I'm going to look at what happens between 0.3 and 0.7 because we know that sometimes it's really that low, especially at high speeds. So okay, what if it's that range? Well, then you wind up seeing things that are impossible like backwards speeds on the other vehicle. And then you can go back and say, "Well, which speeds, which ranges gave me an actual potential result?" You can narrow your ranges to get actual possible range.

(02:10:14):

Yeah. So there's lots of things you can do in Excel if you want to play with it yourself that I think a lot of packaged systems don't allow because they're not built for somebody who's going to play with it that way and look into the data and, "Hey, I want to plot how the approach angle of this car relates to the departure speed of that one." You can do that and see whether your approach angle matters.

Lou (02:10:41):

Yeah, that's really valuable too. I mean, especially if you're chasing down some sort of parameter that you're not 100% confident in, you could perform that sensitivity analysis, see what matters, and then broaden your range to the point where you're like, "Well, I'm really confident in between those two numbers and that doesn't really change my end result. So cool, I'm good with my analysis now." That's huge.

Wade (02:11:03):

Yeah. So I don't use it every time because it's not necessary every time, but it's a great tool. And I encourage people to use it. I encourage people to think about what it means, not just plug it in. I've seen cases where somebody gets that Monte Carlo and runs it and gives the two pages in their report of how they use the Monte Carlo analysis and they start it off with bad numbers. So their end result is junk, but they want to talk about how, "Oh, I ran 15,000 tests and it shows my data is accurate to within plus or minus 0.6 feet." Well, no.

Lou (02:11:47):

Yeah. If you're not picking the right drag factors or the right impact speed method, then it doesn't matter. And one way I describe it when I'm teaching my class, by the way, everybody grumbles at first, or most people do, except for the nerds among us. But by the time I'm done teaching it and they've gone through an exercise using it, almost everybody is like, "Wow, that is super cool." Because I think all of us don't enjoy giving up that entire range. Yeah, 39 to 59 is possible, whatever the case may be, but how likely is that? Very, very unlikely. And if you can quantify that, then that's valuable. But I say, okay, say you have three things that are contributing to the initial speed of the motorcycle. It breaks for a while, so you have the braking rate during that maneuver. It slides for a while, so you have that acceleration, and then you have an impact speed.

(02:12:46):

Those three things you don't have one single number for, they're all going to interact to tell you what the initial speed is, and you have a knob for each one of those, and it goes from 0.4 to 0.6 and 30 miles an hour to 40 miles an hour, and the sliding bike goes from whatever, 0.3 to 0.6 as well, and you twist all of those, and every time you twist one of those, you're going to get a different initial speed. And if you twist all of those 100% randomly, 10,000 times, then you'll get 10,000 different speeds and you'll start to see a distribution come out of that, that is very helpful for you to understand your certainty. So I'm with you. I encourage people to try it out. It can be a little intimidating from the outside, but I think if you're taught it in a very direct Charles Dickens-like manner, then you'll see it's not very difficult and it is very valuable.

Wade (02:13:35):

And that allows you to look at the rest of it. So it's not just speed. So once you've got that speed on line 28, you can then say, "Okay, what's his PRT?" Pick your range from IDRR or Response now and then calculate, okay, where was he when he began to perceive this hazard? Was he visible to the car? So suddenly you can answer these other questions that with some probability that we otherwise can't.

Lou (02:14:02):

Yeah, agreed. Well, you've written so many papers and as I was sitting down, I knew and I wrote in the email, the prep email, I was like, "We're not going to get to all of this. " You've written so many papers. I picked four topics, but we're not even going to have time for all those. So I figured this can be a multiple choice situation and you can choose your own adventure. On here, I had drag sled, not that I wanted to start any wars, but it's an interesting paper. And then critical speed yaw analysis has been a big topic of yours for over a decade. And then EDR reported speeds during steady state and braking. Which one of those would you prefer to tackle?

Wade (02:14:42):

I think the most useful one would probably be critical speed. I think that's the most important one. And I love critical speed because it's one of those places where I support it. When I started and probably when you started, you saw people using critical speed. I know I thought I've seen the simplifications for this. That can't be right. They're missing out on the whole ... They're saying that my Corvette gets the same critical speed as my Chevy Chevette. That can't be right. What if the tire pressure is five pounds higher and friction is different? And it turns out it all comes out in the wash. It's amazing. Over and over and over, not just me, guys and the California Highway Patrol guys for years did those tests, Australia did those tests, Dick Lamborn and England did those tests. And over and over, we keep getting good data.

(02:15:38):

And now that we've got EDRs, I get EDR data that matches critical speed data. When you follow the technique and do it properly, it works great.

(02:15:51):

And that's the beauty of critical speed. It's simple. That's the danger of critical speed. It's simple. So it's easy to step on your own wiener by doing things that you shouldn't. Every time you see a curved mark, somebody in the crowd is going to say, "Okay, pull a cord and middle ordinant on that. " But if you only have one, boy, you better have a bunch of good physics behind you to prove what's going on. Whether it's a video that shows them continuing to get out of shape or tire marks later on that show they continue to get out of shape, just a single tire mark and somebody recovers and redirects, walk away, critical speed will bite you in the butt and lots of guys don't know that. So there are lots of, I think, engineers who poo-poo critical speed when it's a great technique when used properly.

(02:16:46):

And I think there are lots of police officers who use it, not always when they should. And this came to light for me, gosh, back at an ARC CSI conference, my friend Larry Wilson, who I worked with at FTI back in the day, he did a lot of rollover stuff back when Bronco 2s were flipping over on every sharp corner in the highway. He was involved in a lot of those cases, high-end modeling, a lot of work. And he and I were chatting one day and he said, "Critical speed never works." I said, "What are you talking about? Critical speed always works." And it took us probably 20 minutes to figure out what happened. He only sees cases with short wheelbase. At that point, he was seeing short wheelbase, things like Bronco two, Ford Explorer with the double I- beam suspension and Jeeps. So short wheel bases that turned quick and he would get a report from an officer on scene who saw a single tire mark pulled a cord in middle ordinant, but by the time he got to the end of his cord, the car was already too far sideways for critical speed to work.

(02:18:12):

It was not almost going in the direction it's facing, let's see, almost going in the direction it's facing. It was sideways and getting ready to tip over because they tipped over so fast that by the time they were leaving a 30 or 40 or 50 foot cord, they were rolling over. So guys would pull that cord and run a number, but they were calculating critical speed at a point in the vehicle's trajectory where critical speed no longer applies. The car was too far out of shape. It was side slipping at too big an angle. And what's too big? There's no clean answer for that. It's a shades of gray thing where five degrees? Great. 10 degrees? Good. 15 degrees? Yeah, okay. 20? 25? No, you should probably walk away. And it depends on who you ask where that bright line is. And if you're on scene and you can find two tire marks and they're diverging the whole way, that you can measure it.

(02:19:22):

It works great just over and over. But again, it's easy to get bitten by single tire marks are a problem. Anybody who countersteers is a problem and good drivers are going to countersteer. Who do we see doing that who are good drivers, but counter steer too late? They're the drunks. That's who I see who I get two marks from, and they diverge for a little bit, then they figure it out and they get on the stick. And then we have lots of drivers who don't know what to do. So they diverge and they just keep getting more and more out of shape until they fall over or hit something. And so critical speed is one of my favorites. And it's my favorite because I was one of the lone voices in the wilderness preaching against drag sleds. So I'll hit that one. I know you're coming close, but it's worth mentioning why I love critical speed because I can use it, I can support it, I can get behind it, especially now with EDRs where we often get some data to help us understand it.

(02:20:34):

Drag sleds, which look like science and smell like science, don't accurately model the dynamics of pneumatically inflated tires moving at speed. It's just that simple. I wish they did. I tried for years to make it happen to show that they did. And we had a couple hints along the way. We thought we might have found a way to make them work, and then it didn't happen that way. We had to give up. So that paper that you mentioned from SAE is my Magnum Opus on drag sleds. Anybody should read it. We spent years. We even got the guy who wrote the book, Ed Livesy, on board to come help us understand. And after that work was done, he told IPTM to stop publishing the book because he was convinced that it doesn't work anymore.

Lou (02:21:27):

That was a huge undertaking. A lot of subjects, a lot of different surfaces, a lot of different drag sleds. That was a major effort.

Wade (02:21:35):

Different places. Over years, over years, it started out in 98 at the NAPARS conference. Al Baxter invited a bunch of guys to bring a drag sled, bring a drag slot. Let's prove them that they work. And it didn't work out. And Al said, "What's going on? " He budded to a patch of road and said, "Okay, give me the number for that patch of road." And they were all over the place. And so then there was some work at Rex 2000, did the same thing, same problem. Then Bill Wright and I worked with IPTM. We did some tests with IPTM attendees at their conference where we had a handful of sleds in different pullers. We had people bring their own sleds. I still have a sled in the basement from that, in fact. A tire full of concrete and vermiculite, but we eventually got to where we thought we had a line because if we got people trained the same way to do exactly the same thing with the same tool on the same surface, we could get the same number with the same sled.

(02:22:44):

And that kind of feeds into the whole calibrating the sled to the puller and the surface kind of thing. Well, you can only use a sled if it's your sled and you've calibrated it to your own technique. But then we tried skid testing on different surfaces and from surface A to B, the car skid value would go up, but the sleds were all over the map. Some went up, some went down. Next went down a little bit all over the map. Some went up, some went down. Next, down some more. Some went up, some went down. And at the end of our day on the big, big test where we had 27 different sleds on four or five different surfaces, we had one sled that tracked the car the whole way. Where the car went up, it went up. Where the car went down, it went down.

(02:23:34):

It looked exactly like every other box of ammunition with a tire glued to the bottom of it. No difference, none.

(02:23:44):

And Frank Navin did some work with drag sleds. I know he came to a different conclusion with the breaker boxes. He concluded that it was a tenable situation and he had a formula to convert the low speed, low normal force, full force of a sled to a high speed, low normal force, and then convert that to a high speed, high normal force. I've never seen anybody successfully use that to try and come to something of it. But he presented that stuff at IPTM at the same conference that we presented our work. So it was a little bit like the rumble in the jungle.

Lou (02:24:33):

Yeah. I remember some of the internet posts on INCR probably back then just blowing up and being like 20 messages a day for 10 days or something.

Wade (02:24:44):

Yeah. The drag sled wars still have a scar. So I don't talk about drag sleds a lot. I think the paper speaks for itself. If somebody asks, I'll talk about it. I'm happy to, but I don't look for places to talk about it anymore because it's a religion. It really is. No kidding. You either believe in them or you don't. And if you believe in them, you see the evidence. If you don't, you can't. It's like intelligent design. If you believe God made us, you look around and say, "Well, look, I have two arms and two legs and a torso and a head and two eyes, and so do all the other animals. This is clearly the hand of God at work." Or you look at it and say, "This is clearly the hand of evolution and near the twain shall meet." I've given up trying to convince people who believe one way or the other in God or evolution, just like I've given up trying to convince anybody one way or the other of drag sleds, the paper exists and I encourage people to read it and think about it.

Lou (02:26:08):

Yeah, it's 2006 SAE paper. It is I think 2006-01-1398 for those that want to read it and see what was done.

Wade (02:26:21):

Anybody who wants one of my papers, if they email me, I will make sure they get it. So SAE doesn't like people sharing stuff, but they're kind of tolerant of authors sharing their own work. And now they're all 20 years old, right? So it's not like this is the cutting edge stuff, but yeah, write to me in private, I'm easy to find.

Lou (02:26:43):

So for the CSY stuff, how do you recommend obtaining the coefficient of friction and then are you using that directly in the equations or is there some sort of adjustment?

Wade (02:26:54):

The testing that we've done on pavement and on gravel and on grass and on split co surfaces where you just drop two tires into the grass, all pretty much leans towards use the skidding value and you'll be a little conservative. If you're on grass and there's a paper on that, ABS number is a little low and think about what a tire is doing on grass. When you're cornering hard, it's rolling and sliding, it's kind of doing what the ABS is. So in general, your ABS value is going to be really close, but might be a little high. The skidding value tends to be low, but not outrageously low, particularly on dry pavement. You tend to be a few percent low. Some other researchers, Dick Lamborn among them, McKinnis among them found that they tended to be like maybe one or 2% high and maybe three or 4% low.

(02:28:00):

So there are some researchers and Bellion in Australia with his project Yam Yaw analysis method. Again, an SAE paper from, I don't know, 99 maybe, 98, something like that. And that's Bellion, B-E-L-L-I-O-N. He found, again, a plus or minus five or 8% range on the result that, okay, I can live with that. It gets you close.

Lou (02:28:32):

Yeah. Belly and Project Yaw analysis methodology 97095.That was a good one. Yeah, it is such a simple analysis that I've found to work. Yeah. Like you said, you have to be careful and you have to understand what's going on, make sure there's no impacts around that period. It's got to be the tire in the roadway doing the work.

Wade (02:28:56):

Be careful there. So many people think, oh, if I get hit in the corner and then yaw off into the grass, this hit that somebody drives away from, that doesn't invalidate critical speed as long as it's tire forces driving as radius. If somebody gets hit and spins like a top, yeah, critical speed's out the window. But if somebody just gets disturbed and then they oink and veer off such that their path is controlled by their tire forces, critical speed still works. So particularly if it's a small thing or somebody that gets tapped on the quarter panel and they see the car coming and they yank the wheel, that's a good critical speed case. So don't immediately throw out impacts until you've understood the dynamics of the impact. I guess that would be my cautionary tale on that one. That's one of those old wives tales that, not an old wives tale, it was a rule of thumb to make sure somebody He didn't get attacked by the tiger jumping out of the forest.

(02:30:07):

So if you're a new guy and if you want to teach a new guy how to run critical speed so that he doesn't get himself in trouble, you just tell him if there's an impact, don't do it.

(02:30:22):

If you know enough vehicle dynamics though to be able to articulate that the path here is controlled by the tire marks, the impact was way back there, it was light, destabilized the car and yes, then the guy steered and he steered himself into the weeds. If you can articulate that it's tire forces driving the boat where you're measuring, it still works. It's still good. But lots of guys just throw it away because they were told, "Don't do it if there's an impact." I've heard guys who were told, "Don't do it if you don't have all four tire marks because you don't know there might be braking." Well, that's all silly. As long as you don't have locked skids, critical speed works great. And now we've got stability control in ABS. It even works greater. You get even more conservative result if the ABS is playing along.

(02:31:17):

It's only if you get a locked tire and if you get a locked tire, you should have a skid that shows it. And you'll see it. Even if you don't have the skid that you can see, the curved mark is going to have a little straight patch. If you step back and look at the mark, you'll see the straight line where lateral traction got lost even on just one tire.

(02:31:37):

It's amazing how one tire, and it can even be the inside tire. So if you're cornering, the inside tire's really light, that's one that's going to lock first. And when that locks, you start to go straight, you really change your trajectory and you can see that in the mark if you step back and look at the curvature. And if you don't have the scene to do that with, what you got to do is go get a picture, get a photo of the seam and hold the photo up like this. And the same foreshortening that you get by standing way back on a scene and looking down the road, you can get from a photograph. And people don't think to do that, but you can do that. Looking at a chart, you can look at the curvature of the road, look at the curvature of the mark by looking right along the edge of the photo.

(02:32:30):

It's exactly the same as getting close to the pavement when you're looking for tire marks.

Lou (02:32:34):

Oh, that's handy. That was one of the biggest things that kind of shocked me from your CSYSAE paper with Rick Ruth and ... No, no, that wasn't Rick Ruth. That was the whole list of Bill Wright, now Baxter and all those guys, if I remember correctly.

Wade (02:32:51):

So yeah, the huge list was the drag sled paper. The critical speed is mostly me and Bill.

Lou (02:32:57):

You and Bill. Okay. But the ESC and ABS, I figured before reading that paper that electronic stability control would come in and start applying acceleration and breaking and kind of muddy the water and make this a very difficult analysis to use. But at the end of the day, like you said, if you're using the skidding coefficient of friction and putting it in there, that kind of absorbs some of that slop and you end up with very credible answers even when ESC is activated during the event.

Wade (02:33:33):

And in fact, the ESC allows you to work closer to the peak. So you are in fact using more lateral traction than you otherwise would. And you wind up with an even more conservative calculation when you're using the skidding value. And stability control is working now at all four corners independently. Back in the day, it was just axle would get both on the rear and then two fronts. Now we've got four channel, four sensor systems, and those are all working independently. So they kind of blur together. They almost never all come to close lockup at the same instant. They're all going up and down independently. So that kind of blurs their effect essentially. And you just get a gentle, a slight increase in lateral traction. So by using the skidding value, you're conservative. And I still don't hate the idea of running the number with the ABS number just because that's going to be pretty close to true, but potentially a little high.

(02:34:38):

And that's one way to help suss out whether it makes sense or not.

Lou (02:34:41):

What advice do you give to people or how do you coach them on taking that measurement, getting the radius of the CG?

Wade (02:34:48):

The wheelbase adjustment is so tiny. It doesn't make a difference. When we talk about a three-foot adjustment to a 500-foot radius curve or a 400-foot radius curve, it doesn't matter. My coaching to the folks on the team when we're out pulling a cord middle ordinant is, number one, look for enough middle ordinant. You don't want to have a three-foot middle ordinant because then you're giving away the farm. Take your cord so that your middle ordinant is between eight and 12 or 14, somewhere in there, a little bigger than a hand span. That's a good number because the uncertainty and measurement at each end here is like a quarter inch. By the time you pull a tape measure and you've got somebody eyeballing where the mark is here and where the tape is here, you've got a quarter inch on either side and that half inch on 10 or 11 inches isn't a deal breaker, but on three inches, it really is.

(02:35:51):

If you've got a really tiny middle ordinant, that same half inch of uncertainty is huge.

(02:35:58):

So pick a middle ordinant that gets you or pick a cord length that gets you a good middle ordinant. And that's easy to say, but I'm here to tell you, it's tough to look at your results and say, "Oh shit, I need a longer cord. Let's go back and start again." But you have to sometimes. You pull the cord out. We had one not long ago that EDR puts her over 90 in the 40 zone and it was a left-hand bend. Again, it's a drunk. She's late with the steering. So she's really cooking and leaves a pretty clean mark. Actually, she dropped off the pavement, came back and left a really nice set of marks and then back off the pavement, tried to steer again. It winds up in the trees. And I thought, okay, 30 foot cord. I pulled that out. I'm like, "We're not doing 40 miles an hour here." No.

(02:36:57):

"Okay, let's go to 40." "No. Okay, let's go to 50." And with those big speeds, the problem we get is that they run off road really quick, so you don't have the chance to do multiple cords. So I encourage people start as soon as you find some divergence, that first mark where you see this other tire is headed off, okay, start there wherever you can find the first mark, pick a good middle, ordinant length and set your cord to match and then do two or three. And I usually use partial overlap cord. So I'll do one cord here on the mark and one cord here so that they overlap by half. Where I took the middle ordinant the first time, that's where I set the tape to do the second cord.

(02:37:47):

So the car here is going some speed and we're going to calculate that speed. Right a moment later, the car is right here doing almost the same speed, so I better get almost the same middle ordinant. And they're probably slowing down, but they don't have to be. That was another old don't get yourself in trouble. If they're on the gas, they can't be doing critical speed because you lose lateral traction. It turns out that's fine, unless you have a car that can spin the tires. So if you're driving a McLaren at 60 miles an hour and you romp on it, you'll light them up. That car, you can't do critical speed if he's under power. My Highlander, if I'm doing 60 and I romp on it, I'm not lighting anything up.

Lou (02:38:36):

No, I don't think so.

Wade (02:38:38):

And as long as I don't spin the wheels, critical speed works great. And that dovetails with the ASC, ESC, stability control, ABS. ABS keeps you from spinning down too much and power limitation keeps you from spinning up too much. And you're still on the traction circle really close to full traction laterally and the slop built into it, the lash that we build into that analysis by using skidding instead of peak makes up for that. So good middle ordinant and multiple overlapping cords, which you can check on seeing right now because if you get a nine inch measurement here, this one should be nine and a half, plus or minus a half inch. And the next one should be 10 plus or minus a half, give or take. And if they're not, hey, you're still on scene, go measure them again. You don't have to do the math to do the speed calculation to know this middle ordinant and this one should be the same.

Lou (02:39:48):

I love it. I think that's really valuable. Okay. Last one, but I don't know how long this could go and you take as much time as you need. It could be a quick one liner or it could be a nice soliloquy. But I'm curious, because you've been in this industry for a really long time, you've worked with a bunch of reconstructionists over the years, teaching them at conferences, research. I mean, you and I spent, I think, probably 40 hours plus in that Grand Marquis driving around that circle, and I learned a lot from you. What advice do you have for young recons who are coming into this at this stage and hoping to make a career of it and make it a craft, their craft, I should say.

Wade (02:40:35):

The most important part is to keep learning. I see so many people who, in my local team, I've tried to foster it, but it's really hard to find people who are willing to stick with it and chase this stuff outside of billable hours, outside of the workday. Oh, I've got tomorrow off, so I'm not going to that training that you're putting on because it's my day off. I hear that. I'm like, "Dude, you're in the wrong business." I spent 20 years before I ... Well, for me, I figured you said six years for you. For me, it was seven years. At the seven-year mark, I started feeling like I knew what I was doing. I wasn't flailing all the time. I had a sense of where I was going. I had a sense of expectation, what to look for. I knew what to look for.

(02:41:36):

Instead of just looking to say, "What can I see?" I had enough background to start expecting things to anticipate what I needed to look for. So for me, it was seven years, and that was working full-time at FTI. And then for myself, this is all I did, was crash analysis and in my case, mechanical analysis stuff. But people who think they're going to get good at this, only when they have a case on their desk once a month without digging deeper or kidding themselves. There are just too many aspects to this. You might become a ... So take for instance, I went to a lock picking class. Part of the cool business of being in the police, I got to take a police level lock picking class. So for two days, we spent time learning how to open locks, and I got functional. I never got good at it, and I haven't practiced it in two years.

(02:42:42):

I'm not a lock picker because it's not my regular gig and I didn't practice it. The same thing goes for recon. You're not going to be a functional recon, able to go out and do a case, handle a crash, take care of a customer's needs by just doing it once in a while.

(02:43:04):

There is a level of passion perhaps required, and there's also a level of ... What's the word I seek? I guess maybe there's a little art to it, right? recon has more than just some easy numbers. It's a complicated multi-aspect task, and you have to be willing to try and chase information from lots of different sources. Oh, PRT. Boy, I hated that when I had to start getting into PRT. I really wanted to just look at busted cars, but if you're going to do reconstruction, you've got to understand drivers. You got to understand how people behave behind the wheel.

(02:43:49):

You've got to understand something about the mechanics of cars. You can't do this job and not understand how a steering system works, I think. I mean, that's my personal opinion, that you're doing your clients a disservice if you don't know the basics of how the mechanical machine functions, if you don't have a grasp on how friction behaves, if you don't have some idea of how tires function and the tread courses and sipes and tire wear indicators and compounding. And not that you need to know what the compounds are that differentiate a dunlop from a continental, but you do need to know that compounding matters and that it's something to be aware of. And looking at the rubber and looking at all the aspects of these events, injury causation. We've got a couple of Zoomies coming up on human anatomy and kinematics inside the car. Yeah, I hate people.

(02:44:58):

I just want to do cars, man, but you got to know this stuff. You got to have some basic idea of what's the sagittal plane and what's anterior and posterior because you're going to read those documents and you need to be able to relate that to your crash, whether it means looking at a postmortem diagram and saying, "What did he cut his leg on? " "Oh yeah, it's the fender edge because he was standing right here and he caught his leg as he went by and that's what sliced him open, but there's no blood. "Well, there's a reason for that. You need to know that in order to be good at this. So just a thousand examples like that. We could each rattle off 50 different things that are kind of specialized, that are not my specialty, and they're probably not your specialty, but there's someone's specialty and you need to know that that specialty exists at least enough to be able to say," Hey, I got a guy you need to talk to.

(02:46:01):

He's a tire guy. He's a seatbelt guy. He's a perception reaction guy. He's a motorcycle guy. He's a heavy truck guy. He's a transmission guy. He's a pavement guy. He's a pavement sealer guy. He's a weather guy. "I mean, without even trying, I've just run through 20 different things that I know enough about to be dangerous on that I sometimes have to call somebody else for help.

Lou (02:46:32):

It happens all the time with even motorcycle and it's like, " Okay, I'll get called. I hear you're a motorcycle expert. So we want somebody to opine on this guy's riding behavior and whether it was standard operating procedure and safety, standards and practices type thing. I'm like, "That's not the motorcycle guy I am." I'm like, "Oh, okay." And then I'll get a call and they're like, "We need a helmet analysis. I hear you're a motorcycle guy." I'm like, "Well, not that kind of motorcycle guy." Even within that discipline, there's so many. It's so true. I think I'm with you on that one. I think learning is absolutely the most important skill, which made me think again about your reading abilities and habits. It's like reading is arguably the most important skill because that's how you're going to learn most of the things. You can go to classes, you should go to classes, but is that going to be enough?

(02:47:22):

How many classes can you go to a year versus picking up ARJ and picking up SAE and picking up a CCTV book or a video analysis book? It's like there's so much to learn and it's only accelerating. It's only getting "worse" as time goes by.

Wade (02:47:39):

But reading is so much more efficient than going to the class. So for instance, I personally expect if I go to a three-day conference just on general reconstruction topics, if I come away with a 15-minute period where I said, "That's good. I didn't know that. " If I get a 15-minute window of actual good new information right now, that's a win. And you know I spent a day getting there and a day getting home, so it's a five-day commitment for 15 minutes of something really good and probably a few other minutes where, "Hey, I like the way he presented that. " Or he referenced something, "I want to go read more about that thing." Whereas reading, you can really narrow down, especially with things as focused as SAE papers, ARJ articles that ... So for instance, I once heard that if you have an idea you want to pitch to somebody, say you're going to pitch your big idea to the boss man, you want to see if you want to get some funding, he's going to give you two minutes.

(02:48:45):

Maybe he'll give you five minutes, right? He'll give you five minutes to give your spiel. You should type out your idea on one page, easy to read and hand it to him and shut up because he can read twice as fast as you can talk and he'll be done in two minutes and you can spend the next three minutes of your five answering questions because we read so much faster than we can hear, faster than we can talk. And think about all the times you spent an hour in a class and you could condense it down to one page. We had two hours with Chris on sirens. My notes from that are two and a half pages long. I could read those two and a half pages in 10 minutes now, but it took two hours for him to work through a course. There's some other draws, some other drags in this medium because of the video and the QR codes and all that stuff, and he did a great presentation.

(02:49:52):

He wasn't repeating himself. He wasn't stumbling. He wasn't out of order. This was something-

Lou (02:49:59):

Yeah, it's the nature of that.

Wade (02:50:01):

It's the nature of a spoken presentation. It's going to be slower and it's a really rare class that you get half of the time is really good stuff just because there's such a different level of experience in most classrooms. If you and me are in the same room, we have a lot of overlap, but you and I are still going to come up with different things that we take away from listening Alan more. And that doesn't even count the people who haven't spent 20 years working on these things, who are going to take away something different that you and I maybe already knew or you and I maybe missed because we were focusing on this other thing while they were listening to a different aspect. So the classes are important and I know that there are some issues in the broader community about some question about the value of online trainings and Zoomies in general and whether they should get ACTAR credits and that sort of thing.

(02:51:10):

There have been some online discussions about that, that are not all in favor of it because learning in person tends to be a little more focused, but I think there's a place for all of them. And a lot of it comes down to the listener. It's got to be somebody who wants to learn. I don't know about you. I know I have had prisoners of war in class. That's what I call them. The guys who sit in the back-

Lou (02:51:37):

The boss told them to go. Yeah.

Wade (02:51:39):

Boss said, "I'm going to be here. I'm going to be here." Polos opened the newspaper and that's the last I see of his face until lunchtime. I'm like, "You can just leave."

Lou (02:51:50):

Yeah.

Wade (02:51:52):

"I don't want you here."

Lou (02:51:53):

Yeah, you can feel that as the teacher. You really want everybody to have some motivation to be there or else it sap some of your energy for sure.

Wade (02:52:01):

And I don't mind confusion. If somebody doesn't understand something, I'm perfectly happy to have them say, "What's that mean? What?" And once in a while, I've had somebody ask that question like, "What's Rut30DF?" I'm like, "Oh boy, this is going to be a really long week for you and we'll work. Stay after, we'll work to try and get you through it, but this is going to suck because they really weren't prepared for it. " And then there's other times that somebody already knows pretty much everything I'm going to talk about. I'm thinking to myself, "What are they learning here?"

Lou (02:52:37):

I know. Yeah. You always feel bad. You're like, "Man, I hope I can give you something new. Couple gems that you can leave with and be like, that was worth my time."

Wade (02:52:45):

And usually I get good feedback that the guys ... I had an engineer from Buell in one of my classes once. Can you imagine trying to teach motorcycles to a guy who designs them?

Lou (02:52:56):

I know.

Wade (02:52:57):

Yuck.

Lou (02:52:58):

Was that Steve? Steve Anderson?

Wade (02:53:00):

No, I don't think so.

Lou (02:53:02):

Oh, okay. He's great.

Wade (02:53:04):

It's been a long time. I had Danny, who's a test rider, been a test rider for motorcycles for years and years and years in my class. He said nice thing. He said, "Oh yeah." But he wasn't a recon. He was a motorcycle guy. So he learned some recon stuff that he was able to take away. And so everybody has something to offer. Everybody has something to gain.

Lou (02:53:24):

Absolutely.

Wade (02:53:25):

And when you start thinking you really know it all, you're in trouble, I think. But we both met that guy.

Lou (02:53:34):

Yep. Yeah. It's a fortunate whatever. It's not in my genes. It's not in my nature. I'm consistently a little bit paranoid that there's something out there that I should know that I don't know. And it's served me well.That's actually the sign off to my weekly newsletter now. It says, "Keep learning. Thanks for reading, keep learning." And I do think it's the most important thing. So summarizing what you just said there, I'm going to try to put in a line. One of the most valuable skills for collision reconstruction and obviously a lot of other things is learning and the highest leverage activity for learning is reading.

(02:54:11):

So read to learn and obviously immerse yourself. The conferences, the conversations that happen over drinks and in between sessions and the sessions themselves and like the nomenclature, that stuff's all really important and you have to grasp that stuff too. And it takes a long time, but there's no better bang for the buck than just picking up a paper or a book. Stay curious. Stay curious. Richard Feinman, one of his famous things and Einstein, two very good learners, obviously. Well, thank you, Wade. I really appreciate you spending the time to sit and talk about all this stuff. I think you're an extremely valuable asset, not to objectify you, but a very valuable human to the reconstruction community. And I appreciate everything you do to contribute and to continue educating all of us and helping us all get better at this craft.

Wade (02:55:04):

And likewise to you, my friend.

Lou (02:55:06):

See you soon.

Wade (02:55:07):

Stay curious.

Lou (02:55:10):

Hey, everyone. One more thing before you get back to business, and that is my weekly bite-sized email to the point. Would you like to get an email from me every Friday discussing a single tool, paper, method, or update in the community? Past topics have covered Toyota's vehicle control history, including a coverage chart, ADAS, that's advanced driver assistance systems, Tesla vehicle data reports, free video analysis tools, and handheld scanners. If that sounds enjoyable and useful, head to lightpointdata.com/tothepoint to get to very next one.