Causality The Engineered Network
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- Society & Culture
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Chain of Events. Cause and Effect. We analyse what went right and what went wrong as we discover that many outcomes can be predicted, planned for and even prevented.
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Callide C Blackout
In 2021 the Callide C Power Station experienced a unit failure that tore the turbine-generator apart, resulted in hundreds of thousands of premises losing power, and cost hundreds of millions to repair. We look at how design errors and ultimately a lack of information led to the incident escalating out of control, when it could have been recovered.
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Colonial Pipeline
In 2021 many of Colonial Pipelines IT systems were locked by malware and out of caution they shutdown the fuel pipelines feeding nearly half of the Eastern US leading to chaos at the gas pump and a state of emergency being declared. We look at how poor off-boarding hygiene led to an easily preventable cyber-attack.
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I35 West
The I35W bridge over the Mississippi River carried 140,000 cars every day. Inspections in 1999 and 2003 showed damage to support plates that was dismissed as unimportant at the time. We look into how poor design checking and assumptions led to the bridge collapsing in 2007, costing the lives of 13 people.
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737 MAX Ethiopian Air
Five months after Lion Air 610 crashed, another 737-MAX went down with a similar cause. However the official report was at odds with two other internationally respected investigative organisations. We dig into the detail of how the AOA Sensor was claimed to have failed, and review checklist discrepancies to extract fact from opinion as to what most likely triggered this horrible chain of events.
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Carmel Fireworks Explosion
A fireworks company in Western Australia that had been in business for nearly a century, were preparing for a fireworks display in their packing shed when one ignited and set off a fire and an explosion. Onlookers were shocked when there was a subsequent explosion that was so big it was heard 30 kilometers away leaving the facility in ruins.
Customer Reviews
Outstanding Work
Deeply researched does not begin to describe how outstanding these episodes are - highly recommended, ideal pace of information delivery, well produced, A+++
Enjoy these immensely!
I’m not an engineer and I still enjoy these episodes. He breaks things down in layperson’s terms and does a great job of explaining various types of failure, and more importantly identifying opportunities missed to prevent the outcome. I listen with my now 15 year old son because it provides some fantastic examples of smart people doing not-smart things for perfectly human reasons.
My father is a retired submarine commander, maybe you could do one on the USS Thresher or the USS Scorpion? He talked about them a little today and it was fascinating!
Well Done
Reading “Midnight in Chernobyl” book right now. This Chernobyl episode is a great addition to augment the book. Getting a handle on the incident in 3D perspective at this point. Very professional & well-presented. Looking forward to hearing the other topics in this pod now. Thank you for this stellar level of quality.
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Update: Please cover the Titan submarine implosion tragedy, once you have the adequate info available to analyze it. Best wishes to you & thank you for your thorough work