8 ms·
> I’m not even sure if you are asking this seriously. You make a safety assesment. People who do this kind of engineering task go through the systems methodical
by jjk166 4y ago
> I’m not even sure if you are asking this seriously. You make a safety assesment. People who do this kind of engineering task go through the systems methodically and they write up the dangers, hazards and the mitigations.
There is a fundamental difference between "we have assessed the risk and here it is below some threshold where we are confident that no further safety measures are required" and "this place is safe, no accidents can happen here."
> Cabada, a ten-year veteran at the company, shouldn’t have been near the valve when it hit maximum pressure, according to people with knowledge of the accident, *but it ramped up faster than expected, blowing a shield off the valve* and knocking him unconscious.
A lockout would have done nothing. The test didn't start early, the test went wrong, and a place that was supposed to be safe at the time suddenly wasn't. The fact a safety shield blew off means they recognized that they went through the effort of identifying potential safety issues and implementing safeguards, but those safeguards were inadequate.
> Asking the grieving family to remove a picture of the hurt worker which depicts him in context of his work is a PR tactic.
The article doesn't say that the picture change was requested by spacex, only that it occured after the start of the family's legal proceedings against the company.
> But not talking about incidents is a PR tactic.
I mean in the sense that anything can influence public opinion, sure. But obviously what I am saying is that you're not supposed to take safety measures to improve your image in the public sphere, you take safety measures to ensure the wellbeing of your employees. A company that is serious about safety, instead of PR, will do what is effective (ie collecting evidence and making an informed, rational decision) instead of what is popular (doing something for the sake of being seen doing something which seems sensible to a person unfamiliar with the situation - like a lockout).
- krisoft 4y ago> There is a fundamental difference between "we have assessed the risk and here it is below some threshold where we are confident that no further safety measures are required" and "this place is safe, no accidents can happen here." But that is not what was asked in the comment. What was asked is how you know if something is unsafe. > A lockout would have done nothing. You state that very confidently. Do you have insider information you are privy to? Computers controling valves can go bad. Valves can stuck open or closed. Open wider than they were meant to. Open faster than they meant to. You take a diagram of the aparatus and go through all the possible way a valve can misbehave on all possible computer controlled valves and ask: “what would be the consequence of that?” You realise that there is a possibility that a system in question goes rapidly to a high pressure state. You then ask what harm that might cause? You realise that it might blow parts of. Or at least you are not confident that it can’t. So you ask an engineer what is their mitigation for that. If they say “oh we just know it is dangerous, we would never stand by the pipes when the test is running” then you ask them to employ a lockout system. Look. I don’t know anything more about the test they were running than what is written in the article. You are assuming that he was in a safe place, but suddenly it was not a safe place anymore. How does that happen in your opinion? Did the pressure just suddenly teleport in? It is a ton of work to validate control software. Much easier to just stand in a place where even if the controls go haywire you will be okay. I’m reading the same sentence differently from you. To me it means that he shouldn’t have been there during a test. (And also the test shouldn’t have blown up the valve.)