2. Examples of Failures in Intra-Organizational Risk Transmission in Past Disasters

Diane Vaughan, The Challenger launch decision, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 155.

Diane Vaughan, The Challenger launch decision, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 309.

One of the authors has documented similar issues of the importance of synthetising and presenting complex data and empirical evidence to decision makers. In the run-up to the destructive Haicheng (1975) and Tangshan (1976) earthquakes in China, large sets of precursory data from hundreds of monitoring stations were recorded but the data was never collated into a central database and the Chinese at the time depended upon amateur staff manning individual stations to draw and report conclusions based upon that single station’s results. The Chinese seismologists have been sequentially analyzing each anomaly (levelling, geomagnetism, soil resistivity, earth currents, gravity, earth stress, radon, well water level). There was a diffuse understanding of an acceleration of the rate and amplitudes of anomalies and the Chinese experts have been gathering and debating for months in attempts to understand the accumulating data sets. While such “gut feelings” may explain the human drama of how scientists and decision makers prior to the catastrophic Tangshan earthquake were discussing and quarrelling over the growing feeling of incipient deadly risks, the experts apparently never made the step to quantify this impression of an imminent danger in the simple and transparent way provided by a coarse-graining approach of counting the total number of reported anomalies as a function of time [Didier Sornette, Euan Mearns and Spencer Wheatley, Revisiting the predictability of the Haicheng and Tangshan earthquakes, Symmetry 13, 1206, 2021]. We think that this could have made a big difference in convinging the decision makers about the imminence of the disasters [Euan Mearns, Didier Sornette, The Great 1976 Tangshan Earthquake: Learning from the 1966–1976 Chinese Prediction Program, Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2021].

Diane Vaughan, The Challenger launch decision, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 312.

Diane Vaughan, The Challenger launch decision, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 309.

Diane Vaughan, The Challenger launch decision, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 49, 149.