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Episode 18 – Friendly Fire

This episode is about military fratricide accidents, also known as friendly fire, blue-on-blue, and the reason why your allies are sometimes scarier than your enemies. Friendly fire accidents are a...

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Episode 19 – Star Trek Transporters and Through Life Safety

Have you ever noticed that very few people get hurt during the design of a system. From precarious assemble-at-home microlight aircraft to the world’s most awesome super-weapons, the hazards that can...

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Episode 20 – An Unexpected Risk Assessment

There is a fine line between confidence and stupidity. In the 1970s the London Ambulance Service tried to implement a computer aided despatch system, and failed because they couldn’t get the system’s...

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Episode 21 – Safety Integrity Levels

What do electric cars, steel capped boots, and balloons bursting in crowded lecture theatres have in common? Not much, except that they all feature on this episode of DisasterCast. When it comes to...

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Episode 22 – Bicycle Safety

This episode addresses seven questions about bicycles and safety: How dangerous is cycling compared to walking or riding in a car? Does cycling actually get safer as more people cycle? Should cyclists...

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Episode 23 – Preflight Briefing

This episode discusses a few aspects of preflight briefings on passenger aircraft. In particular, we look into accidents and evidence relating to lifevests, oxygen masks, and brace positions....

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Episode 24: Reruns

DisasterCast is on hiatus until January 28. In the meantime, here are three segments from previous episodes. This episode covers Three Mile Island, BA 5679, and Clapham Junction. The post Episode 24:...

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Episode 25 – Feynman Gap

The Feynman Gap is the gulf between engineering understanding of risk, and management understanding of risk. The concept is named after Professor Richard Feynman – drummer, lockpicker, nobel prize...

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Episode 26 – Battery Dangers

If you’ve ever wondered why safety is considered a systems discipline rather than simply a specialisation of chemical, civil, mechanical or electronic engineering, the humble battery is a great...

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Episode 27 – Security and Safety

In this episode we talk about Stuxnet, and the relationship between safety and security more generally. Stuxnet demonstrated that a determined cyber attacker could influence the operation of...

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Episode 28 – Level Crossings

This episode is all about level crossing safety. Level crossings are a simple situation, repeated throughout the world, that illustrate a number of important safety concepts. Through accidents such as...

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Episode 29 – Ethics and DC-10s

Safety engineering and management is full of compromises. We compromise between short term and long term risk. We compromise between absolute assurance and practicability. We compromise between blame...

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Episode 30 – Not the Titanic

We’re up to 30 episodes of DisasterCast, and we still haven’t talked about the Titanic. Why start now? This episode talks around the Titanic. We talk about icebergs, lifeboats, shipwrecks and radios,...

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Episode 31- Unsafe Safety

This episode is about attempts to make things safer that actually make things worse. The episode focusses on the work of two specific authors, Edward Tenner (Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the...

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Episode 32 – Safety Management is not Enough

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of accidents which triggered a really intensive examination of organisational safety. Both the idea and reality of management failure weren’t new in safety...

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Episode 33 – We Don’t Kill Enough People

This episode discusses measurement of safety and the Imperial Sugar disaster. Measurement is the foundation of both research and business improvement. If we can’t compare two companies, or our own...

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Episode 34 – Operator or Automation?

This episode is about a clash of principles I call the “Question of Final Authority”. The question is: In a given situation, should automation be designed to prevent system states which the designers...

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Episode 35 – Independence and Nimrod XV230

What is independence? Why does it matter for safety? Why can’t we have perfect independence, and why wouldn’t we want it even if we could have it? Are there times independence is an actively bad thing?...

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Episode 36 – Texas City

This episode features the BP Texas City Refinery explosion of 2005. Unlike most accidents featured on the show, it is a story of management fully aware of danger as a situation tumbled towards...

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Episode 37 – Quantitative Risk

When I claim that the chance of my front-lawn rocket exploding is “ten to the minus six”, just what does that mean? Does it mean the same thing to me as it does to you? Does it mean anything at all?...

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Episode 38 – Zagreb Midair

This episode was recorded in the Safety Science Innovation Lab, and comes filled with thoughts about how we tell stories about safety. Do we even have theories of safety, or just meta-narratives –...

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Episode 39 – Boston Molasses Flood

DisasterCast has covered some pretty weird topics. We’ve dealt with pilot defenestration, spontaneous human combustion, and exploding death stars. I don’t think we’ve ever described an accident quite...

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Episode 40 – Shootdown

Sean Ellis visits DisasterCast this episode to provide a detailed discussion of TWA 800 and the associated conspiracy theories about US armed forces being responsible for the accident. We also discuss...

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Episode 41 – West Gate Bridge

One of the weird things about safety is that we spend so much effort on safety analysis during design, despite the fact that almost all accidents happen after design is completed. One explanation is...

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Episode 42 – Lightning Strikes

This episode covers an Iranian military transported downed by lightning, the Milford Haven Texaco Refinery explosion, and the dangers of blasphemy on a golf course. Lightning alone is seldom enough to...

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Episode 43 – Explosive Mixtures

In this episode I discuss some of the people who’ve helped shape my own thinking on safety research. The second part of the episode is all about mixing things together to create explosions. There is a...

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Episode 44 – Hinsdale Fire

This episode is about single points of failure, common cause failures, and the Hinsdale Central Office Fire. The post Episode 44 – Hinsdale Fire appeared first on DisasterCast Safety Podcast.

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Episode 45 – Mann Gulch

Episode 45 of DisasterCast tries something a little different. This episode has three different stories of exactly the same accident – the deaths of 13 firefighters in the Rocky Mountains. The post...

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Episode 46 – Term Around Again

This episode returns to the language of safety. As an illustration the 2013 incident involving a lithium-ion battery fire on a Boeing 787-8 is discussed. The post Episode 46 – Term Around Again...

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Episode 47 – Apollo 1

After a brief hiatus, DisasterCast returns with Episode 47. In this episode we ask what it means for something to cause something else, and explain why the answer is not as simple as it sounds. We then...

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Episode 48 – Metro North Railroad

The NTSB has released a report examining common organisational factors in five accidents on Metro North Railroad in and around New York. Do five accidents in a short space of time indicate an unusual...

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Episode 49 – Aberfan

This is an episode about large piles falling over. We start with the physics of sandcastles, and move quickly to the coal tip at Aberfan. This leads further to discussing hindsight explanations for...

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Growing into Uncertainty

This is the first episode of “Two Cents Worth of Safety”, which will interleave with the regular DisasterCast episodes. In this installment Ron explains how looking backward we see a whole lot more...

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Blindspots of Behavioral Observations

This is the second “Two Cents Worth of Safety” by Ron Gantt. Regular DisasterCast has been slightly delayed, and will be back next week. In this episode Ron describes Behavioural Observation programs,...

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Episode 50 – Why?

This episode takes a new look at the really big safety question – “Why do accidents happen?” We discuss how different answers to this question lead to different approaches to safety, where common...

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Stop Telling People Safety is Everyone’s Responsibility

This is the third episode of Ron Gantt’s “Two Cents Worth of Safety”. Ron discusses the use of safety slogans, in particular the hidden messages behind the overused “Safety is Everyone’s...

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Episode 51 – USS Iowa

This episode describes the USS Iowa explosion, the subsequent investigation, and the dangers of hindsight analysis. The post Episode 51 – USS Iowa appeared first on DisasterCast Safety Podcast.

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Beyond Unsafe Behaviors

Ron returns to ask the question “Which causes more accidents: unsafe conditions, or unsafe behaviors?” Once he’s finished unpacking the question, you still won’t have an answer, but hopefully you’ll...

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Episode 52 – Columbia and Cable Cars

This episode dives into the background of the Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster. It also discusses the aftermath of a US Marine Prowler hitting a cable in the Italian Alps. The post Episode 52 – Columbia...

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Episode 53 – Interlocks and Quintinshill

This episode discusses interlocks in general, and also the application of interlocks to train safety. Britain’s worst rail disaster, Quintinshill, is used to illustrate a common pattern in blaming lack...

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