Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

St Francis and the deluge.

I heard about the the St Francis dam failure when I was living in Los Angeles in the mid 1980s.  At Southwest we routinely fly up and down the west coast and I recalled the disaster from a public television show I had seen decades ago.  After many trips I finally located the canyon and the location of the dam site and could easily follow the track of the flood some 50 miles to the Pacific.  I point this out occasionally to the pilots I fly with and no one has heard about the second worst disaster in California history, next to the great earthquake and fire in 1906.  The dam failure in 1928 is considered one of the greatest civil engineering failures of 20th century American history.


Disasters can sometimes create what I discussed last week as a “community of sufferers.”  Manmade disasters based on pushing technology to its limits or by being careless with design or construction are particularly anguishing because the technology being deployed is generally designed to enhance the human condition.  In addition, no one is intentionally trying to screw up.  There is an overwhelming tendency to assign blame and hold a human being or group of people accountable.  In the case of the St Francis dam failure that someone was the chief engineer of the Los Angeles water system, William Mulholland.  For those of you who watched the HBO series Chernobyl, you saw who got blamed.  

Although we still have failures of this type, reference the 737MAX, we have generally mastered most of these classic engineering problems.  In the Information/Social media age we are confronted with a new set of challenges.  Back in Air Command and Staff College where I attended in the mid 90s we were all given laptops and some weird primitive web browser that has long since vanished.  The dawn of he Information Age and all that this entailed for Air Power was all the rage among Air Force academics.  We had some tech guru come down lecture us how the internet was going to make nuclear fusion a reality by the start of the 21st century among other things.  Being a curmudgeon before my time I said “Bullshit at the speed of light is just faster bullshit.”  

The internet and social media are generally designed to improve the human condition, and make money.  Is there a catastrophic failure in store for us in the brave new world of instant communication and hypersonic bullshit?  If so how bad will the failure be and who if any will be held accountable.

Due to a design flaw nearly 500 people died in the middle of the night as a raging deluge swept towards the Pacific.

Posted at 37000 feet and 650 miles per hour over the Great Plains.

4 comments:

  1. Good questions!

    Auto-pilot fully engaged, right?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Deadheading in the back.:)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Steve,
    Thanks for the memory. The old brain hasn't died yet. I suddenly remembered where I had heard the name William Mulholland. Years ago I watched Chinatown with Jack Nicholson - https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/the-water-fight-that-inspired-chinatown/ and he was mentioned in the movie. Also, I liked in Frankfurt's book on pages 20 and 21 where he talks about the pride some of the old craftsman had, that they didn't cut corners just because their work wouldn't be seen. My Dad did a number of different jobs, but one was as a carpenter and he was a stickler. I can remember him completely redoing work where someone else put sheet rock over window framing that wasn't square and consequently the window wouldn't go up or down smoothly. I remember my uncle who supervised concrete installation for the highway department had a whole section of highway torn up because the mixture wasn't the proper consistency when they poured it. They even offered him money to look the other way, but he knew it would have been weaker and a greater risk to motorists, so he did the right thing. That's always the best thing to do, but for both of them it didn't make them popular, but I'm proud of them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm reminded of the essay by W.K. Clifford that inspired Wm James's famous "Will to Believe"-https://www.mnsu.edu/philosophy/THEWILLTOBELIEVEbyJames.pdf - "The Ethics of Belief" - http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf


    Clifford said it's always wrong to believe anything on the basis of insufficient evidence, and offered an example of shoddy workmanship on the part of a corner-cutting shipbuilder: "...he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales." And so, the moral is that rationalizing less than the best possible construction is morally unforgivable. Doesn't matter how "sincere" you are in your rationalization.

    What would Harry Frankfurt say?

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.