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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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....
View ArticleEpisode 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:...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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,...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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?...
View ArticleEpisode 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...
View ArticleEpisode 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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