Via Roleigh Martin's listserv: Is Complexity Interlinked With Disaster? Ask on Jan. 1

-- Anonymous, December 12, 1999

Answers

The article is very interesting. The accident at TMI was predicted by a control room operator 10 months before it happened; also, one year before it happened by an systems analyst which the NRC tried to ignore for nearly a year. The NRC met with the analyst the week before it occurred. Perrow is wrong about discovering the causes of TMI. He says they cannot be traced to discrete errors or blamed solely on "operator error." "They are accidents that are inconceivable -- until they happen," says the article. I had this debate with a Professor from Rutgers last year here in Harrisburg. In just a few minutes the audience (and the prof.) realized he was in over his head and completely wrong. He admitted he knew little about TMI. (Why Penn State would invite an "expert" who knows very little to speak to the public about the accident is beyond me.) The bottom line is: management odered safety engineers to take off their engineering hats and put on management hats to continue operating the TMI reactor or launch the Challenger. The NRC will be doing the same thing during Y2K by allowing reactor utilities to operate and break their license agreements and safety specifications to keep the grid safe. That is not the statuatory mandate of the NRC; protecting the public health from radiation is. But, I do agree with Perrow that the overall risk of the systems involved with nuclear power (including management's blunders and cost- cutting absurdities)are too high to be practical.


-- Anonymous, December 12, 1999

"The bottom line is: management odered safety engineers to take off their engineering hats and put on management hats to continue operating the TMI reactor or launch the Challenger."

********************

Speaking from experience, this goes on each and every day, in all industries.

Martha

-- Anonymous, December 12, 1999

Remember... IEEE has linked the Y2K problem with complexity in a section of their testimony to congress under "Complexity Kills." I can testify as a systen builder that this is true. The "simple" system of this browser and web server combo that I use to write this posting involves possibly hundreds of developers if you take into account all of the individual components developed to make it possible. This also explains why end-to-end testing is so necessary before we can verify that we are prepared for Y2K.

-- Anonymous, December 12, 1999

Complexity is a shorter word than interconnectedness but that is what it means. We are right back to connecting all the dots before the system will work. The parts equal the whole, but there are so many parts that can fail that no one knows what will hang together and what won't. The entire world is connected. Did you know that only one country makes ball bearings? Brazil. Need a ball bearing so your widget can still be built? Brazil better work. Need a computer chip? Believe the majority are made in Indonesia. Need electricity? Majority of the fuel is from Middle East, Venezuela, Africa. When one sits and ponders the millions and millions of connections that must work for every sector of the world to work, it is staggering.

Remember the Tower of Babel? This comparison has come to my mind a number of times. In the country of Iraq, in Biblical days, the people were going great guns on building a tower to heaven. God decided these people were advancing faster than He wanted them to, so He confused their language, making part of them speak one language, some another, and so on and so on. They could not understand one another any more so they broke up and scattered around the world. Mankind may have created themselves a new Tower of Babel situation. Communication may be impossible between citizens of the U.S. and impossible to various areas across the world. I wonder if we were advancing too fast and it crashed in on us. Perhaps we should slow down and do more study on how to construct computer networks, embedded chips, etc. so that we don't shoot ourselves in the brain (was going to use "foot" but this situation is more serious than that) in the process, providing we can recover from this present fiasco with enough infrastructure left to get us out of this potentially deadly situation (this is a really long sentence.)

In Texas we have a saying, "Remember the Alamo." If we can work out of this mess, I believe our motto from now on should be "Remember the Tower of Babel."

-- Anonymous, December 12, 1999