“Catastrophic bridge accidents are rare, but the number and severity of those due to ship collisions far exceed those due to winds, waves, and earthquakes combined.” — Committee on Ship-Bridge Collisions (1983) On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, shortly before 1:30 am, the cargo ship Dali drifted into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing the bridge’s [...]
“Once you start something, finish it. Don’t accumulate a backlog of unfinished projects.” — Ed Bliss If you are on the Chemical Safety Board’s distribution list, you may have noticed a lot of trade releases from the CSB in your in-box during the last few weeks. They’ve been busy. A recent press release proudly announced [...]
“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” — John Dewey There are too many celebrities and philosophers to count who have talked about the importance of their mistakes in shaping them. Many seem quite pleased, even proud, of the mistakes they’ve made and their ability to rise from them and go [...]
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.” — Lyndon B. Johnson Many of the lessons we learn in life are learned when we are children. The one I remember most vividly is learning to ride a bike. I was a stubborn child. I refused to wear any safety [...]
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” — Henry Ford I know a young woman whose relationships are in a constant state of turmoil. She keeps picking the wrong guys and each relationship ends in heartbreak. “Why do I keep making the same mistake over and over?” Why indeed? I [...]
“Here we go again. Fighting for resources. What the hell am I doing here?” — Brad Pitt as Roy McBride in Ad Astra I just received an email from a client. They were alarmed that the proposed Federal budget included, again, defunding the Chemical Safety Board, and wanted to know what they could do to [...]
“We must accept human error as inevitable - and design around that fact.” — Donald Berwick The idea of human error and its contribution to industrial incidents has been the center of debate in recent years. If you’ve been part of more than one incident investigation, you’ve probably experienced an incident being attributed to human [...]
“It’s not how we make mistakes, but how we correct them that defines us.” — Rachel Wolchin One of the most common recommendations made as a result of incident safety investigations is “improved training,” especially when the investigation concludes that the incident was the result of an error. It is not because training is so [...]
“There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight. It is essential that the critic should keep himself constantly aware of that fact.” — Lord Anthony Hidden One of the insidious effects of hindsight bias is that it puts much [...]
“…obviously some repairs or whatever will have to be done but from a safety perspective we don’t see that there’s any issue there, so we’re not concerned about it from that perspective…” —W. Denney Pate, Lead Engineer on FIU Bridge Project Obviously, Denney Pate got it wrong. In that voice mail message to the Florida [...]
