4 ms·

Reading this it’s a classic systems failure: multiple defensive barriers gone wrong through poor safety planning. It’s reminiscent of the Victorian ESSO gas pla

Reading this it’s a classic systems failure: multiple defensive barriers gone wrong through poor safety planning. It’s reminiscent of the Victorian ESSO gas plant accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esso_Longford_gas_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esso_Longford_gas_explosion

krisoft 5y ago
In what way is it reminding you of that incident? The paralels I can see: - both involve energy installations. - both happened in the same state. The differences I can see: - one involves a gas utility the other an electric one - one has killed and hurt workers while the other did not killed nor injured anyone. - one happened after several years of operation, the other happened during installation. - one left the state without energy service for 20 days, the other did not affect service at all. Don’t get me wrong. I love reading about how complex things go wrong, one of my favourite pastimes. So I thank you for your link. It just doesn’t seem that similar to me. Not sure you would be citing the same case for example have they not happened in the same state. If I have to choose a failure which the Big Battery fire reminds me of I would rather choose the Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse. Why? It seems these batteries had adequate safety functions and monitoring planned in for their operation. Just these systems were not activated during the installation in the right order. Similarly with the bridge it seems they did calculations with the full bridge in place, but nobody seems to have checked if the intermediate steps during the construction will stay up too. Another similarility (to my untrained eyes) is the aim to install a system fast. The bridge project wanted to be a flagship for accelerated bridge building, and the big selling point of these Megapack installations is how fast they can be comissioned. With the bridge project we know that this demand for speediness was a contributing factor. Was it maybe also with the Big Battery fire too?
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >In what way is it reminding you of that incident? It's just in group signaling. "Hey this reminds me of <vaguely related thing>" is a more polite way of saying "look I know about X, I'm like you, gimme dat virtue points" You see this on literally every virtue points (i.e. up-vote) based form of social media that's big enough that any given participant can blend in with the crowd. The behavior is endemic these days you can't even post a picture of a rotten and falling down deck on the internet these days without some jerk derailing everything by dropping a link to the wikipedia page on the hyatt regency and then several more riding their coattails with quotes copied from the page. He probably doesn't even consciously realize he's doing it.

krisoft 5y ago

In what way is it reminding you of that incident? The paralels I can see: - both involve energy installations. - both happened in the same state. The differences I can see: - one involves a gas utility the other an electric one - one has killed and hurt workers while the other did not killed nor injured anyone. - one happened after several years of operation, the other happened during installation. - one left the state without energy service for 20 days, the other did not affect service at all. Don’t get me wrong. I love reading about how complex things go wrong, one of my favourite pastimes. So I thank you for your link. It just doesn’t seem that similar to me. Not sure you would be citing the same case for example have they not happened in the same state. If I have to choose a failure which the Big Battery fire reminds me of I would rather choose the Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse. Why? It seems these batteries had adequate safety functions and monitoring planned in for their operation. Just these systems were not activated during the installation in the right order. Similarly with the bridge it seems they did calculations with the full bridge in place, but nobody seems to have checked if the intermediate steps during the construction will stay up too. Another similarility (to my untrained eyes) is the aim to install a system fast. The bridge project wanted to be a flagship for accelerated bridge building, and the big selling point of these Megapack installations is how fast they can be comissioned. With the bridge project we know that this demand for speediness was a contributing factor. Was it maybe also with the Big Battery fire too?

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>In what way is it reminding you of that incident? It's just in group signaling. "Hey this reminds me of <vaguely related thing>" is a more polite way of saying "look I know about X, I'm like you, gimme dat virtue points" You see this on literally every virtue points (i.e. up-vote) based form of social media that's big enough that any given participant can blend in with the crowd. The behavior is endemic these days you can't even post a picture of a rotten and falling down deck on the internet these days without some jerk derailing everything by dropping a link to the wikipedia page on the hyatt regency and then several more riding their coattails with quotes copied from the page. He probably doesn't even consciously realize he's doing it.