I have heard from several captains that if you work feeders in the Eu many trips are no sleep for 10 days then back home…
Hence 99% of accidents are fatigue but nobody wants to change manning levels
1 Like
If you look at the emergent properties (those that arise from combinations of factors) of systems, there are three that you would often like to have: safety (reduced risk of casualty), security (resistance to hostile action) and reliability (reduced risk of non-casualty interruption). When you then study those properties I think you will discover that two common ways of achieving them are redundancy and slowing of operational tempo.
Then look at what upper management gets told by venture capitalists, Stanford Business School, or operations like McKinsey: “Eliminate redundancy and go faster.” End of story.
I agree that Perrow’s observations in many cases are obsolescent and Vaughan’s are no longer surprising. Nancy Leveson’s are IMHO the most relevant to today’s problems, stronger in the analysis direction but somewhat unrealistic when talking about how to build systems.
Earl
3 Likes
Consultants always say merge when paid to say that.
How many merged companies in the USA ever deliver a better result to shareholders…
they missed the big picture that the front of the ship needs to be strong in bad weather…
This is from the footnotes in the linked paper in the OP.
Normal Accidents, the concept, are the heart of Normal Accidents the book. If this sounds tautologous, realize that only relatively small fraction of the book focuses on this specific issue. Perrow draws on evidence from a wide range of domains (nuclear power; shipping; aviation; mining and more) to make many technological, sociological, psychological and political observations about technological accidents. Despite these variegated insights, however, the Normal Accident is the book’s leitmotif and signal contribution to Disaster Studies
There’s a lot of interesting parts not directly related to normal accident theory.
This for example:
Unfortunately steel, especially high tensile steel, as used in modern ship construction, has its own cracking issues, especially on older vessels. They have been seeing and chasing after the problem on Great Lakes freighters built in the late 70’s and early 80’s lately. The old softer plow steel that ship’s built in the 20’s to the 60’s didn’t seem to have that problem. Of course that older steel was thicker and heavier than the high tensile stuff.
1 Like
Is that what the joint Swedish-Finnish-Estonian government committee found? Or is it your own “finding?”
What was the motive to sink it or just disable it?
I remember the Bourbon Dolphin, there was some retired guy going into the enquiry every day then typing it up for us every night.
When the final report came out it was was 2 different accidents. The Norwegians investigating the Norwegians…
I had a buddy on the rig too, so got a bit from him being the mooring guy.