We watched the HBO series, Chernobyl.
I was reminded how the pressures to prioritize cost and schedule above safety and legality, and to lie about it, are always present everywhere.
I saw it many times in my engineering career, where I was often the lone engineer in a meeting of managers who often had an (understandable) single minded focus on budget and schedule. It is very hard to speak up, in a room full of more powerful officials, with a message they don't want to hear. Fortunately, I generally reported to enlightened, supportive managers, even when other parts of the organization pressed me to compromise safety.
I also have to say that I never saw any of that in the nuclear industry when I was engineering nuclear power plants: If anything, the opposite. Perhaps that was because I worked for a major engineering firm, that was all engineers, top to bottom. But then, my first nuclear plant project ended when the client ran out of funds.
Scott Adams wrote in "The Dilbert Principle," that engineers tend to be risk averse, because they have done the risk/reward analysis. The risk is public humiliation and the deaths of innocent thousands. The reward is a Certificate of Appreciation, in a handsome plastic frame.
By contrast, profit driven managers are by nature entrepreneurial risk takers, because, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
But the same carelessness of harsh reality is ever present with all of us: Every time we exceed the speed limit, check our phone while driving, fail to take time to signal, roll through a stop sign.
It is why California still has thousands of seismically hazardous buildings, which most cities and owners are doing nothing about. It is why Oklahomans put mobile homes in tornado alley. It is why those two Boeing 737-Max aircraft crashed. It is probably why that new bridge in Florida collapsed, and why a lot of crumbling old bridges may, too. It is why the space shuttle Challenger exploded. It is why Volkswagen built diesels with emissions test cheating systems. It is why the US is doing nothing about climate change.
Indeed, ironically, it is why we turned from nuclear back to fossil fuels - because it is easier to ignore the future global catastrophe of climate change, than the clearly serious, but, with the one extreme exception of Chernobyl, soluble costs and problems of nuclear power, without which, there is no hope of preventing catastrophic climate change.
It is easy to point fingers at Communism, and pretend we are different, but profit (and greed) driven free enterprise Capitalism is as much or more susceptible to the same pressures. Corporations that exist, not to provide a service or a product, but only to make a profit, and that will not continue to exist if they do not make a profit, have even more incentive than faceless government bureaucracies to prioritize cost and schedule.
Democracy is no bar to secrets and lies. The pressure to get elected, or re-elected, clearly takes precedence over truth.
Try to find out what the actual problem was with that bridge that collapsed on a roadway at Florida International University: The documents are all secret. It is all tied up in litigation. Maybe, someday, some version of "the truth" may come out, but if that is in a court of law, it will be so spun by lawyers that engineers will be unable to learn technical lessons.
It is easy to imagine that we would have the courage to speak up, speak out, when we see wrong decisions being made. But it is rarely clear cut. The Chernobyl disaster was not caused by any one, single, big obvious wrong decision, but by multiple smaller, decisions, that each, on their own, could have been overcome. Each on its own could be rationalized. And just speaking up is often not enough. Speaking up is one thing. Being heard is another. Those who do are often ridiculed as alarmists, exaggerating "worse case scenarios" (that will never happen). Those who speak up out of turn are simply not invited back to the key meetings. They are not promoted to positions of responsibility. The choice to commit suicide (or, at least, career suicide), while probably not being able to fix the problem anyway, is a very hard choice to make.
It is human nature, everywhere, to live (and die) in denial of facts we don't wish to face. As Pogo said: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
