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Ten Technology Disasters
Ant writes "What do a 17th-century Swedish warship, an opulent Chicago theater and a Kansas City hotel "skyway" have in common? All met catastrophic ends and they have important lessons to teach today's innovators."
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It took just one more little mishap to make a disaster: a titanium "wear strip" fell off a Continental DC-10 in the path of an Air France Concorde leaving Paris. When the Concorde's tire hit the strip, a chunk of rubber tore off and smashed into the wing, punching a 600-square-centimeter hole in its skin and causing fuel to leak and ignite.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about airplane safety or testing, but this one set off my common sense alarm.
So, the tires on Concordes require to be changed alot - a chunk of titanium breaks of of another plane, and hits a tire on a Concorde, causing the accident - anyone else think that "Well gee, I don't think any kind of tire is designed to withstand titanium chunks slamming into them." Considering the condition of some of the commercial jets I've flown in, I'll take my chances with the Concorde. I'm sure there is more to it than just this, I thought it odd though.
Though not a "disaster" per se - the Navy's dead Windows NT ship is tops for the funniest in my book.
I live near KC and I remember when the skywalks collapsed. As the story unfolded after the tragedy, it became readily apparent that everyone just assumed everyone else was doing what they thought they should be doing or that their shortcuts were fine with everyone else. :-( Communication and checking up on how things are actually progressing versus the plans can be a real matter of life or death.
:sigh: Yeah, mistakes were made, so let's own up to them and learn something so we don't do it again.
Next time as a programmer you bitch about checking up on QA (assuming you are lucky to have a QA department) or on the users, just remember that your mistakes very rarely kill people. You've got it _easy_.
Also, on a side note, the local KC TV news organizations try hard to prevent people from getting to their archives of what happened. They don't want to present Kansas City in a "bad light". This is also very stupid. If we can't easily learn from our mistakes we are going to make more of them. 'Protecting' KC's reputation just makes Kansas Citians look more retarded than the screwup that was Hyatt Regency Skywalks.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
In 1917 collision between two ships in Halifax harbor -- one carrying close to 3000 tons of high explosive -- resulted in an explosion which levelled much of the city and killed 2000 people, in what was one of the largest non-nuclear manmade explosions in history.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
every engineer has their own stories of how they SNAFU-ed. I have mine (one of the reasons why I wuss-ed out and now do theoretical physics instead :)).
:
Usually, the problem is
(a) Pushing Envelope without prior analysis (Vasa)
(b) Not exercising Due Diligence in design (Tacoma Narrows)
(c) Failure of communication between departments (Mars Climate Orbiter : remember the units SNAFU?)
(d) Insufficent redundancy design (Iroquis Fire)
(e) Failure to recognize likely failure modes (Concorde, Titanic)
and others of course.
I've once fucked up an expensive spacecraft component because of (c). I worked on the mechanical design of the component housing, some electronics guy worked on the electronics detector sitting inside my housing. We have an innovative design whereby some of my mechanical supports were designed to keep some of his electronics ICs in place without the PCB board. The SNAFU : both of us thought the other is suppose to apply anti-vibration gell (layman's term here, we call it RTD...).
So the part was fab-ed, electronics put in, and the whole thing was sent to a vibration table for testing..
Result : a loose IC, clanking around the housing for 2 minutes at about 600Hz. The whole thing was toast.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
the Navy's dead Windows NT ship is tops for the funniest in my book.
Many psychologists have suggested that the emotion of humor has evolved as expressing relief from danger.
I find it truly frightening.
- passion
Phrogger wrote:
m
... well there was no US version, except the real life one on September 11th, 2001. Tristar, why was "Rebirth of Mothra 3" never released so we could have been warned as Mothra clearly intended?
> First Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next?
Sorry, Tennessee would have to get in line. One of the most spectacular examples of stupidity causing a nuclear accident was at a plant in Tokai-mura on September 30th 1999, and it is the greatest nuclear plant accident in Japan's history. Basically, they dumped all the safety precautions and mixed themselves up a batch of acidic nuclear soup in a big steel bucket and stirred. Instant hot fission! You can read the World Nuclear Association's writeup here (it has a nifty table of different levels of nuclear catastrophe that is a must read):
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf37print.ht
The interesting thing is, Toho was filming on location at the Tokai plants for a Godzilla attack in the then upcoming "Godzilla 2000 Millenium". They were probably done with filming by the time the accident actually occured. In December 1999, the movie opened, with Godzilla heading over to attack the plants.
This wasn't the first one of Toho's monster movies to "come true", only one in a long history. Here are two other famous ones:
"Gojira" 1984: the Russians have a nuclear accident in the movie (in the original Japanese version, US version makes it a deliberate act). In 1986, the Russians had a real accident: Chernobyl.
"Mosura 3: King Ghidora Raisu" 1998: the King of Terror (King Ghidora) begins his attack on Tokyo by flying through the twin towers of a skyscraper. Office workers flee while talking on cell phones. The US version
Sonora:"New Godzilla reading. He's moving inward toward Tokai."
Shinoda: "The nuclear plants, I knew it.
Sonora: "Afraid so."
Yuki: "Well, that's just lovely. Another Chernobyl."
"Godzilla 2000" (US version dialog)