They are with us all of the time, constant reminders of the complex technological world we live in. Most often, we don’t hear or see them and consequently pay little or no attention to them. That is until something happens.
But what if nothing happened? What if everything was normal? Worse yet, what if this scenario happened over and over again. Now, they would be considered nuisances and something to be ignored.
The bottom line is they should not be ignored. They were put there for very important safety reasons. Certainly you would not ignore that annoying beep of a low battery in the smoke detector in your child’s bedroom, and probably you would contact your mechanic soon after your car’s check engine light illuminated. Unfortunately, there have been some disastrous results when alarms were ignored.
As reported in the Washington Examiner in July, the National Transportation Safety Board blamed faulty track circuits for the crash of a Red Line train that killed nine people in June 2009 when it slammed at almost full speed into a stopped train. It cited the rail line for “the continued use of uncrashworthy rail cars, safety testing rules that were not followed, and alarms that were ignored.” As to the crashworthiness of the cars, the front car where the nine people died was damaged so severely that only about 16% of its available space was survivable.
A few years ago a near miss involving three trains was caused by problems with the rail company’s automatic safety alert system. Furthermore, alarms numbering 9,000 per week in the operations control center were routinely ignored. Another finding by the NTSB stated that the company experienced about 3,000 alarms per week indicating vacant rails when a train was indeed there on the tracks. Considering them minor alarms, the company automatically had them deleted after 60 seconds.
And who hasn’t heard about the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people when it caught fire and exploded this past April? According to a recent news report in The New York Times, the emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated said a worker who was on the rig at the time of the disaster. He told government investigators that the general safety alarm was routinely set to inhibited to avoid waking up workers from false alarms during the night. Other workers “described repeated failures in the weeks before the disaster including power losses, computer crashes, and leaking emergency equipment” as stated in the report.
It has been said that many of us have become desensitized to the sights and sounds of alarms because often there appears to be no reason for their activation. We tend to hang around after it has sounded really expecting that it’s a false alarm. Not until we smell the smoke or see the fire do we hurry to the exits.
Some of the reasons people ignored alarms were highlighted in an article published Feb. 28 in the Digital Journal: They don’t want to be interrupted. The remote possibility of a fire is not a good reason. People want to avoid anxiety feelings that would be prevalent if a real danger existed. Finally, many people can’t perceive how fast a minor fire or event can turn disastrous.
The bottom line is you can’t afford not to heed the warning of an alarm because you have no way of ascertaining the final outcome.
Paul Milo
Editorial Director
[email protected]