Here are a few of the most easily preventable big disasters!
9 - S-80 plus The Spanish government
found out the hard way how expensive a misplaced decimal in calculations can be back in 2013 in
the construction of their S-80 Plus submarine! The construction company had everything nailed down,
or so they thought. While submerging the submarine was easy, the vessel had problems
coming back up again. And that was all thanks to a misplaced decimal point that no one had picked
up through the entire process. What happened? Because of this error in the calculation,
this meant that the submarine was about 100 tons heavier than expected. To fix the problem,
the design team added on a little bit of length at an additional cost of $16 million.
But this created yet another problem. The submarine couldn’t fit at its intended port.
So the port had to be dredged and reshaped, something that once again,
increased the costs. The government spent $18.6 million to do that part.
The submarine ended up costing $1.2 billion dollars, almost twice as much as the projected
amount! But at least it wasn’t a total disaster! 8 - The Hard Drive
This is the perfect time to talk about Bitcoin because it’s come roaring back in 2020! However,
it cost just a few pennies back in 2009. So having a lot of Bitcoin didn’t mean much to most people.
That’s the story of James Howells, a UK citizen. Howells began mining bitcoin back in 2009 on his
laptop. By the time he stopped, he had accumulated roughly 7,500 bitcoins. He had dismantled his
laptop and sold most of the parts on eBay. But he kept the hard drive in a drawer at home,
just in case Bitcoin did become valuable. But in 2013, he mistakenly threw the flash
drive away while he was moving! And that hard drive ended up in a landfill! By 2017,
bitcoin’s price was hovering around the $17,000 dollar mark which would have meant a $127 and
half-million dollar payday for Howells. But the fact is, there was four years
worth of trash dumped on top of the drive, making retrieval nearly impossible. Of course,
almost anyone will dig into piles of trash for over a hundred million dollars. But the
authorities simply wouldn’t let him do it! According to one official, unearthing huge
amounts of waste had far too many risks to the environment and anyone undertaking the task,
such as landfill fires and toxic gases. And there’s the most likely outcome that
the drive is ruined anyways after years of being buried under immense pressure!
7 - El Faro This cargo ship went down in October of 2015
in what’s deemed as the worst shipping disaster in over 50 years. In the unfortunate incident,
all of the 33 crew members passed away and none of them have ever been found to this day.
As usual, the blame game ensued in the months following the disaster but most of it was directed
at the ship’s captain. According to the Voyage Data Recorder audio, the captain insisted on
keeping the ship going to their destination, even though they were heading right into a category
3 hurricane. But the captain didn’t know that. It turns out that the captain had been relying
on a faulty weather update system that was at least six hours late. So when he thought they were
heading AWAY from the storm, the ship was actually going straight for the eye of the hurricane!
El Faro just couldn’t handle the storm because the ship had many safety problems that had been
ignored. For example, one glaring disregard of safety on El Faro was its poorly-maintained
lifeboats. Then there’s the poorly fixed cracks on the hull. The cracks alone meant they would
have done little against the raging Hurricane that was happening in the Atlantic ocean.
6 - Mars Climate Orbiter The Mars Climate Orbiter was launched into space
in December of 1998. This was just a few short years after the loss of the Mars Observer in 1993.
That big loss prompted NASA to look into cheaper ways to do space exploration. So NASA came up with
the much more conservatively priced Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Climate Observer
and launched them into space in 1996 and 1998. But after just 9 months of travel,
the $193 million dollar Mars Climate Orbiter was already destroyed! And it
was because of a simple preventable mistake. It turned out that the software controlling the
orbiter’s propulsion had a problem with the units of measurement. The engineers at the manufacturer,
Lockheed Martin, had expressed the propulsion force in foot pound seconds instead of in
newtons. That unit of measurement was customary with space missions.
So when engineers at NASA received the info, they assumed the calculations were already in
newtons. This contributed to the orbiter flying at a much lower altitude in the Martian atmosphere.
That essentially just destroyed it. A Simple error in communication meant that $327 million
dollars went up in smoke! 5 - Lake Peigneur
This is the deepest lake in Louisiana at 200 feet deep. But before 1980, it was just around
10 feet deep. What happened?! Beneath the lake, there was a salt mine that was in operation since
1919. There was prospect of oil and Texaco was doing exploratory drilling on the lake
back in 1980. And they knew about the mine. However, a simple mapping mistake led the
oil company directly above the salt mines. Their drill bit punctured the mine’s roof,
and that created a hole for the lake’s water to flow straight into the mine shaft!
Lake water rushed into the mine through the rapidly expanding 14-inch hole in the salt mine,
with a force ten times that of a fire hydrant! Fifty miners were racing to get out because
of the rising water! On the lake’s surface,
the world’s largest man made whirlpool was forming. Everything that was on the
lake at that time was lost in the sinkhole. A tugboat, a dock, another drilling platform,
a parking lot, and a big chunk of nearby Jefferson Island got sucked into the abyss!
Amazingly, no human lives were lost. Texaco had to pay a total of $45
million in damages for their miscalculation. That’s around $142 million in 2020 dollars!
4 - SNCF Trains With their revolutionary high-speed trains,
the French do command certain respect in the world of trains. However, you wouldn’t
have expected them to make the rookie mistake of buying trains too big for the available stations!
But that’s exactly what happened back in 2014. The National state owned company SNCF purchased
1860 new trains that couldn’t fit in a lot of stations around the country.
Out of the 8,700 stations, 1,300 were found to be too narrow for the new trains ordered!
It cost the French a little over €15 billion Euro for the new trains. So obviously they
had to make adjustments to the stations that are too small, at a cost of around €50m euros.
But how did SNCF make such a mistake? Before the purchase, SNCF had requested
countrywide platform measurements from RFF, which owned and operated the French rail network. Yep,
the national rail operators didn’t give the national train operators the right measurements.
RFF didn’t take into account the different periods that stations across the country were built. For
example, stations that were over 50 years old at the time were generally narrower than the newer
stations. Millions of euros could have been saved simply by double checking the size of the rails
by either company! 3 - Costa Concordia
The Costa Concordia disaster in 2012 would have seen the greatest loss of human life in maritime
history. Luckily, rescue operations swooped in quick enough and rescued most of the passengers!
But the total loss WAS monumental. What happened? The ship crashed into a rock formation coming
up from the seafloor! Interestingly, the area is known for the rocks, so it was almost a done deal
for the ship once it headed into these waters. In fact, the crew noticed the rock earlier on,but
a language problem between the captain and the helmsman drove the cruise ship
right into the rocks! The captain ordered a change of course but the helmsman steered
the ship in the opposite direction. The ship's owners, Costa Cruises,
said the captain had made an "unapproved and unauthorised" deviation in course. He sailed
too close to the island in order to show off the ship to the locals. This was something that
was EASILY preventable if he didn’t just sail without any help from the ship’s instruments.
The accident claimed the lives of 33 people, one of whom was a member of the rescue team.
And since the accident was in a protected area, the ship had to be salvaged as a possible oil
spill would have been catastrophic. The total cost of the whole disaster
happening including the cleanup, and compensation to passengers,
was estimated at around $2 billion dollars! Francesco Schettino, the ship's captain,
was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
2 - MV Rena October 2011 was
when New Zealand had their worst ever maritime environmental disaster! Rena was a container ship
that was heading to Tauranga from Napier when it hit a reef because of navigation problems.
The environmental effects were the main concern, as the ship’s cargo
consisted of 8 cargo containers of hazardous materials. Then there were the 1,700 tons
of fuel as well as 200 tons of marine diesel! So when the Rena went down, a spill was bound
to have monumental effects on the local environment. Four days after the incident,
a 3 mile long spill had formed immediately, putting lots of marine life in danger!
Things got worse as time went on. By January, Rena had split into two after being battered
endlessly by heavy winds. As a result, it released even more fuel into the already polluted waters.
The New Zealand government spent over $130 million dollars to clean up the mess.
Later investigations revealed that the ship’s captain had taken a short cut by sailing too
close to the coast. This was, apparently, to try and beat a deadline to reach the destination port.
That clearly didn’t work and the captain and navigation officer had to each serve
seven months in jail. 1 - Beirut Explosion
On August 4th 2020, Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut was rocked by a powerful explosion.
This explosion was so powerful that it registered as a magnitude 3.3 seismic event,
the most powerful non-nuclear explosion ever. The damage was far-reaching with estimates
placing it at least at $15 billion dollars. Up to 300,000 people were left homeless.
So what exactly led to such a devastating blast? No one quite knows how it happened.
But it’s known that a huge amount of ammonium nitrate was responsible for
the blast. But what set it off remains unknown. Roughly 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate was kept
at a warehouse after it was seized from a cargo ship back in 2013. Manufactured as little beads
that resemble cooking salt, ammonium nitrate is cheap to buy and usually safe to handle.
But storing it safely and properly is key. Ammonium nitrate detonates if it’s exposed
to intense heat and pressure. According to port officials,
they had made several court requests to have the ammonium nitrate removed.
An audit in 2015 found that almost 70% of the bags were torn open with ammonium nitrate spilling out!
Top political and security officials knew of the presence of the explosive substance for years
but for some reason, they ignored the requests. Here’s what’s next!