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 research; what was special about each of these accident

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 Revenge of Unintended Consequences) and Lisanne Bainbrid

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, but not the sinking of the unsinkable. The next epis

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 and understanding. The one thing we can't compromise is

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 Hixon, Lockington, Kerang, Langenweddingen and Fox Riv

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 potentially hazardous industrial machinery. Just how represent

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 example. To a chemical engineer, a battery is an electrolyt

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 winning physicist and member of the Rogers Commission inve

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.

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. Transcript is available here. References Miracle on the Hu