MetroLink Diasaster (Wrongly?) Attributed to Engineer
17 Sep 2008 Quan Quach 4 comments 44 views
The Metrolink disaster that occurred in Los Angeles on September 12th, wherein two train collided head on, was initially attributed to engineer on board the passenger train. Apparently, the engineer was too busy sending a text message to heed a warning signal that would have prevented the entire situation. The tragic accident claimed 25 lives and officials are still trying to figure out how such an event could have even taken place (read news story here).
When I first heard the news on TV, I was immediately skeptical that the engineer in charge was completely to blame. Personally, I find it hard to believe that it was the engineer’s fault (entirely). There are just too many factors to consider. In my mind, it would take closer to a perfect storm of mistakes rather than a single blunder to cause a devastating train collision. The way the media portrayed the whole fiasco indicated that MetroLink wanted someone to take the fall for the egregious error. They were successful in blaming the train’s on duty engineer. Whether or not this engineer is exonerated, the stigma will still remain. The damage has been done (incidentally, the person who made the accusation, Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell, has resigned from her post).
Because of this incident, I feel that engineers in general have gotten a bad shake. The media has portrayed engineers as an irresponsible lot. But being an engineer myself, I feel that I need to defend engineers in face of this destructive accident.
A good system is designed to prevent single point failures. There should be fail-safes and fall backs in any good design. For instance, when you design a building, there are a lot of redundant forces to hold up the building in case one of the support beams break. Take for example, the World Trade Center. Even after an airplane slammed into it, the structures’ redundancy allowed it to stand tall. The real killer was all the fuel and fire that resulted from the impact, which ultimately doomed the structure.
Nuclear power plants are another good example. When a nuclear power plant is designed, a series of fail safes and redundancy are included so that when an average schmoe like Homer Simpson accidentally presses the wrong button, a nuclear melt down does not occur. A series of checks and balances are usually implemented into the design to prevent calamitous events from happening.
I don’t have intricate knowledge of the Metrolink system, but I would wager that there was much more going on in that scenario than was reported. To me, blaming such a monumental disaster on an engineer that did not heed a warning signal because he was sending a text message just does not add up.
4 Responses to “MetroLink Diasaster (Wrongly?) Attributed to Engineer”
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Yes I agree with you Quan..
Speaking of safety, engineers reliability is not the only factor. In this high economy era, many times the factor of economy defeats the factor of safety.
For example, some recent airplane accidents are caused by decreased factor of safety so that the factor of economy still has a nice trend.
If engineers have to take the blame, maybe because engineers don’t have the sufficient power to make the call.
Hi Putra
You make a good point. Engineers are sometimes constrained to such a point that they have to make decisions on safety/cost, which is unfortunate. Engineers will strive for the optimal design based on what have to work with, and as you mentioned, safety sometimes takes a backseat to functionality.
Quan
Hi Quan,
I’m just sad to what happened. I’ll tell you some story, in my country many positions that should be filled with engineers are not filled them. Some say engineers are expensive or the job can also being done by other people (whom sadly not from engineering backgrounds).
I am hoping this situations will change soon, for the better systems.
Putra
Quan,
I agree with the idea of a “perfect-storm” environment for such a catastrophe to occur. On that note, if you ever have some reading time — look at Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”. The book essentially addresses the “perfect-storm” idea for success. Thank you (and Dan) for the great MATLAB tutorials as they helped me produce my first fulling functioning GUI for NASA.