Re: Safety Issues

The problem with safety is we all know that it's easy to talk safety, but when the moment comes for someone who says, "We're not going to get this train out unless we do _____," then it all seems to go out the window to get something to run. I'd bet most have done a few 'nudge-nudge-wink-wink' things from time to time that wouldn't make it through a safety brief without a scolding, but it worked and you then went on.
Sadly, this is how you get the "Normalization of Deviance" that led NASA (an organization which really should have known better) to lose an orbiter and seven crew because they wanted to make their launch schedule.
Sounds familiar? "Hey, that'd never happened before..."
One thing I've seen over the years is that the ones who are the most safety-minded for others will often cut corners for themselves, as if somehow they're immune. Most groups have someone like this, I'd think.


James Wrote:
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> Differing cultures between industries probably plays some part. Even on this very forum on a number of occasions, I recollect seeing "Hush shush! Don't talk about that!"-type comments when someone brought up something bad happening at this or that tourist railroad out of fears of said tourist railroad developing a bad reputation.>

I've seen that very thing happen in several different places. Not where I volunteer, to be fair, but in other museums I've heard the people in charge telling everyone not to discuss such things as in the end, it hurts the entire 'industry' if the public knows about it.
That said, a lot of train buffs are aware of the things that have gone wrong in preservation. Just this past Saturday, someone was asking about the Brit engine Blue Peter's catastrophic wheelslip in 1994 when the rods went amok. He was surprised I knew what he was talking about and had seen the video of that (thank goodness nobody was standing nearby at the time).
When I'm a brakeman, our 2-8-2 is down for the 15-yr teardown we decided to do a few years early due to a lot of firebox problems. Lots of passengers ask when our steam engine will run again and when told that's going to be quite a while, I will often explain the nutshell version of Gettysburg leading to the mandates to do the boiler work on a timeframe. I also reinforce that we didn't operate our steamer like Gettysburg did theirs, reinforcing it positively.


Jim McKee Wrote:
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> The "practical drift" mentioned by MD Ramsey is perhaps more readily know as the "Normalization of Deviance". Probably the best known cases of this are NASA's space shuttle Challenger explosion and BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster. A book worth reading on the Challenger explosion is The Challenger Launch Decision by Daine Vaughan. >

NASA has in the past used the NTSB report for the crown sheet failure at Gettysburg to reinforce "Normalization of Deviance". Sadly, one such discussion happened a few weeks before Columbia lifted off for STS-107 and some of the very people in the audience decided the foam strike to the left (CDR's side) wing was "nothing to worry about," which of course led the loss of the second orbiter and crew (and in a much more horrific way than Challenger had on STS51L, if that's even possible).

-Lee

Flickr photo set of my On30 layout



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2021 11:52AM by et&wnc.