The all too believable "unbelievable!"

[hedgehog]

I grew up in a family of engineers and steel workers. I am an engineer, my husband is an engineer and two of my kids are engineers (two more are studying to be engineers, the other two are in urban planning and environmental studies).

This is what I have learned: if doing something the proper way, the safe way, is too costly, time consuming or merely inconvenient; then management will do it the wrong way unless management consists of good, responsible engineers. I have seen people put in harm's way and some actually killed because of this. Most times when there is a disaster and/or deaths, everything that happened was anticipated and could have been prevented. Stop a launch because outdoor temperatures are too cold for a particular gasket? Space shuttle Columbia. Slow the ship in an iceberg field and get to New York a little late? Titanic. Skimp the design and construction to save $11 per car? Ford Pinto.

The response after the fact is always "How could people be so stupid? That's unbelievable!" but the sad truth is that if people want to do things the cheap way, the easy way, they will convince themselves that nothing will go wrong.

On edit: I spent six years working for one employer ( 5 1/2 of those years looking for another job) and repeatedly was placed on back shifts and given nasty jobs to try to make me quit because I was a bug on safety. Two people died because management allowed things to happen that I tried to stop. I was finally fired under cover of a general lay-off. The irony? The person they kept on nearly blew up a building one time except that I stepped in to stop him and fix the problem properly.

[hedgehog]

1. Anybody else here with horror stories from industrial experience?

[Art_from_Ark]

2. Actually, the Titanic was going relatively fast through the iceberg field

The owner (or perhaps more correctly, chairman of the company that owned it), Bruce Ismay, who was also a passenger, wanted to show his ship could arrive ahead of schedule.

[TransitJohn]

6. Yeah, that's what the OP said. n/t

n/t

[Art_from_Ark]

9. It wasn't clear

The example before the Titanic is what should have been done (with Challenger), while the example after that is what was actually done.

[pansypoo53219]

3. greed & hubris

will always beat up the geeks.

[eridani]

4. I remember when the CEO at Boeing came from an engineering background

Liked it a whole lot better that way.

[vicdoc]

5. Minor correction

Minor correction: Space Shuttle Challenger was the one lost due to the solid rocket booster O-ring problem on launch in the 80s. Columbia was the one which was lost due to the foam chunk breaking a hole in the wing, causing loss of the craft on re-entry 7 years ago.

[hedgehog]

7. Sorry about the brain fart!

I don't remember the details on Columbia. Is there a possibility that people knew that the chunks had hit the spacecraft, but didn't do an inspection in space because of the magic belief that if they didn't look, everything would be A-OK?

[HughMoran]

11. thanks

saved me from feeling compelled to say something

[William Z. Foster]

8. exactly

This is why we need the federal government to have complete control over the disaster response in the Gulf, and not BP.

[hedgehog]

12. See: Challenger, Columbia, U.S.S Iowa

All organizations are subject to this kind of thinking.

[eppur_se_muova]

10. Raise passenger tickets $2 apiece to pay for intrusion-proof doors on airliner cockpits? 9/11. nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. As I used to tell my kids

SAFETY procedures are written in blood.

And yes, I was a safety bug too.

Here is one that we saw as responders that had us shaking our heads. Management decided that putting a shield on a machine (mandated after a previous accident) was too expensive... sound familiar? Well worker lost his arm due to that. Took us three hours to extricate him... oh and the machine did not end up in usable form after we were done with the saws and the jaws of life.

So not only did they lose a good worker, a shield would have run 5K dollars, the half a million machine was totaled. Oh and let's not go into the fines and all that.

[hedgehog]

14. My Dad always referred to Navy Regs for handling munitions:

"Every rule in this book is written in blood!"


Again, see U.S.S. Iowa turret explosion.