Mother nature cannot be fooled

January 10, 2012 3:03 PM

Besides the 2008 financial crisis, what are some well-known tragic incidents within the past 50 years of American history that could be categorized as having happened as a result of willful blindness on behalf of management or authorities, i.e. failing to heed clear warning signs or available data/statistics that prophesied the event?

I realize this is a difficult question because it's dealing with issues that are fairly subjective. So here's another example of what I'm talking about: the Challenger shuttle disaster, where the MTI engineers knew that launching on a cold day was very risky yet the management turned a blind eye to the engineers' reports out of pressure from above and fear of losing their government contracts.

What are some other large-scale historical incidents that took place in America which were at least partially caused by a similar "glossing over" of known statistical risk? Not out of malevolence, of course, but motivated by hubris, fear of ridicule, fear of financial reprise, or whatever the case may be. The more specific the better.

(Not trying to start any wars or push a POV here, I'm just curious about historical precedent and looking to be educated.)

posted by egeanin to society & culture (31 answers total)

Hurricane Katrina.
posted by mdonley at 3:05 PM on January 10 [4 favorites]

9/11 was partially the result of massive willful ignorance.
posted by griphus at 3:07 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

Love Canal
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:07 PM on January 10

(Although the incident itself was out of maleovalence, so I'm not sure how well it fits your profile.)
posted by griphus at 3:08 PM on January 10

The flooding and general mayhem caused by Hurricane Katrina.

I grew up in South Louisiana and heard talk for YEARS - talk prominent enough for me to be aware of it as a child - about how the levee system of New Orleans needed to be upgraded, and how there would eventually be a hurricane that would hit NOLA in exactly the right way as to potentially destroy the city if improvements weren't made*. Politicians punted for years, assuming that said storm wouldn't strike while they were in office.

Whoops.

*I even remember at least one storm during the 90's that was looking to be the manifestation of said storm, but they always shifted course at just the right moment.
posted by Sara C. at 3:10 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

The Bay of Pigs incident.

The war in Iraq.
posted by Clambone at 3:12 PM on January 10

The Iraq Invasion probably counts, in a bunch of ways.

Here's one: the public case which opinion leaders and decision makers made to support the claim that Iraq possessed significant WMD was not supported by the intelligence re same. They convinced themselves otherwise*.

Here's another: Military leaders and outside experts did not think the invasion force was large enough to secure Iraq post invasion.


---------------
*Yeah, I know. I went with the charitable view.
posted by notyou at 3:14 PM on January 10

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. From wiki: "The exact number of required monthly inspections varied over time, with the required monthly inspection for the first 40 months but after that around 25% of inspections were omitted...Reports of the last three inspection for 2010 were provided under Freedom of Information laws. Each of these inspections had taken two hours or less."
posted by Caravantea at 3:14 PM on January 10

Slightly more than 50 years, but the Cocoanut Grove fire.
posted by Melismata at 3:17 PM on January 10

Chernobyl seems inevitable in hindsight due to crappy Soviet safety standards.
posted by no regrets, coyote at 3:25 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, 2010
posted by BobbyVan at 3:26 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]

Lots of mining disasters stink of this, including the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia in 2006.
posted by jabes at 3:30 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

Although it bends towards the malevolence side of things, the deregulation of savings and loans banking and the plundering thereof. Also:

Pretty much any conflict since WW2 (from Iraq all the way down to Granada) with particular standouts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans
Non-intervention in Rwanda
Three Mile Island
The wildfires in the Southwest for the last few years
posted by zombieflanders at 3:31 PM on January 10

Fukushima
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:34 PM on January 10

Attack on the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, TX. My co-author and the FBI's behavioral science team told them why they shouldn't do what they did and then he had to go and tell over a dozen kids he'd promised he'd reunite with their parents and those parents were dead.
posted by Maias at 3:34 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

The Fort Hood Shooting, 2009.
posted by BobbyVan at 3:34 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]

The Ocean Ranger drilling platform sank because (among other major reasons) the ballast control room equipment couldn't handle exposure to salt water.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:41 PM on January 10

Well I think the whole housing boom and bust is a pretty easy one to fit to your criteria. In a related failure (the mode, not the actual subject) would be enron and the S & L crisis also follows the same vein. There is a reason those regulations were put in place after the great depression. Kipling wrote a poem about this kind of failure called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings". My understanding is that in victorian England pupils would practice their penmanship by copying common sense folk saying, like if you play with fire you will get burned and so on. Hence the Copybook headings and the Gods would be the subject of those headings.

On a purely technical note, The Ford Pinto comes to mind and 40 years of crappy GM cars being produced that are the result of the cost cutters overruling the Engineers (the Corvair started that ball rolling-and gave Ralph Nader his Start as well) has taken down a company that defined American Know how and manufacturing to becoming a ward of the state. Hubris indeed.
posted by bartonlong at 3:45 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

Perhaps the Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill.

See: "Tennessee: Early warnings on ash pond leaks; TVA, state inspections show repairs, suspension of deposits at Kingston ash pond".
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:47 PM on January 10

I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse.
posted by donovan at 3:49 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

Abu Ghraib and incidents similar to the one at that facility. Putting frightened, inexperienced soliders in charge of prisoners of unknown guilt, especially when these soldiers are constantly surrounded by violence and threats...it was all completely predictable.
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:51 PM on January 10

The War on Drugs. We had Prohibition in the 1930s. We knew what happens when you criminalize substances that lots of people use and force a thriving market further underground: organized crime and skyrocketing health problems. And yet, people claim to be surprised that criminalizing psychoactive drugs hasn't fixed our problems with urban street crime and drug addiction in this country.
posted by decathecting at 3:52 PM on January 10

The Station nightclub fire.
posted by deadmessenger at 4:09 PM on January 10

The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster.
posted by deadmessenger at 4:15 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

The Vietnam War. The Viet Minh defeated France in the Indochina War (1946-1954). The US provided most of the financing, equipment, and weapons to the French. Despite the example fo the Viet Minh defeating a European army using American equipment and weapons, the US thought it could succeed where the French failed.

The US also ignored its own past as a European colony that fought for its independence (Ho Chi Minh quoted the Declaration of Independence when Vietnam declared independence from France in 1946).
posted by kirkaracha at 4:27 PM on January 10

The Challenger and Columbia space shuttles disasters. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board has a brilliant analysis of how an organization can become totally blind to sgins of impending catastrophe.
posted by bluefrog at 4:44 PM on January 10

The S&L Crisis is a good one to study, especially since not only was the S&L Crisis itself predictable and avoidable, but also the lessons of the S&L Crisis ought to have carried over to prevent (or mitigate) the 2008 financial crisis, but the people in charge still believed in the same fantasies.
posted by Sticherbeast at 4:47 PM on January 10

[Folks, can we focus on specifics and not general laws of unintended consequences? Thanks.]
posted by jessamyn at 6:07 PM on January 10

Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act:

One of the leading voices of dissent was Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. He warned that reversing Glass-Steagall and implementing the Republican-backed Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was a mistake whose repercussions would be felt in the future.

“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010,” Mr. Dorgan said 10 years ago. “We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”

Mr. Dorgan still feels the same way. “I thought reversing Glass-Steagall would set us up for dramatic failure and that is exactly what has happened,” the senator told DealBook on Thursday. “To fuse together the investment banking function with the F.D.I.C. banking function has proven to be a profound mistake.”

Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, now the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, was the only Republican in the Senate to oppose the repeal of Glass-Steagall, his office noted on Thursday afternoon.

Mr. Shelby voted against the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act because of his concern that repealing Glass-Steagall would threaten the safety and soundness of the banking system, his office said, adding that he did not believe that the changes that the act made on the regulatory side were sufficient to keep pace with changes made on the industry side.
posted by Elsie at 6:15 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]

global warming
posted by cupcake1337 at 2:59 PM on January 11

The San Bruno pipeline explosion. It killed 8 people and completely destroyed 38 houses.

P G & E (Pacific Gas & Electric) has admitted that a defective weld caused the explosion and that that weld was negligent.

A recent news story revealed that supervisor bonuses were based on their crews finding fewer pipeline leaks - incentivizing poor inspections rather than strong inspections and adequate repairs.
posted by kristi at 9:50 AM on January 12