{"id":15397,"date":"2014-10-01T15:13:54","date_gmt":"2014-10-01T22:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=15397"},"modified":"2014-10-01T15:22:09","modified_gmt":"2014-10-01T22:22:09","slug":"loud-beeping-noise-is-distracting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=15397","title":{"rendered":"Loud Beeping Noise Is Distracting"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the things that strikes me in so many news stories about preventable disasters\u00a0is that the decision-makers not only had all the information they needed to take correct and timely preventive action, they were specifically warned when red flags started to wave.<\/p>\n

George W. Bush and 9\/11 is often cited as the modern-day example, but it keeps happening. Like right up to today.<\/p>\n

Ebola guy<\/a>, for example. When this man\u00a0first visited the hospital in Dallas, two days after he became ill, a nurse asked if he’d been in West Africa\u00a0and he\u00a0said yeah, he’d just come from there. The nurse reported his response, but no one above her heard\u00a0the warning siren\u00a0and he\u00a0was sent home. He came back two days later, even sicker, and was finally diagnosed and quarantined. For a four-day period, then, he was suffering Ebola symptoms and was, according to the CDC, actively contagious. During those four days,\u00a0he came in contact with twelve\u00a0to eighteen\u00a0people, including five\u00a0children\u00a0(each of whom subsequently went to school).<\/p>\n

CDC officials are trying to contain panic by saying they’ve got a handle on it, but you and I know they must privately feel like\u00a0the fictional CDC Doctor\u00a0Goodweather on TV’s The Strain<\/em>, watching vampires breed like rabbits. If they can round up those\u00a0who came in contact with the Ebola patient after he developed symptoms and became contagious,\u00a0and isolate them\u00a0before they themselves begin to exhibit symptoms and expose others, good. If, that is, the CDC’s\u00a0assurances that someone with Ebola can’t give it to others until he or she exhibits symptoms are\u00a0true.<\/p>\n

The lack of internal communication at the Dallas hospital is bad enough. What about the\u00a0lack of coordination between the CDC and US Customs and Immigration? People can freely enter the USA\u00a0after stepping off\u00a0flights from Liberia? With all the information at our disposal about the spread of Ebola in Liberia and West Africa, it’s not as if we didn’t know\u00a0there\u00a0was a risk Ebola would\u00a0hop a flight\u00a0to the USA. Couldn’t we have put some controls in place before it\u00a0got here?<\/p>\n

The guy who jumped the White House fence<\/a> and made it all the way to the East Room? We’re now told he had run-ins with law enforcement and the Secret Service before the fence-jumping incident. Virginia police\u00a0arrested him this summer, finding in his car “a mini-arsenal of semiautomatic weapons, a sniper rifle and a map clearly marking the White House\u2019s location.” They let him go, but did alert the Secret Service. Then, just last month, Secret Service agents detained him in front of the White House. At the time he had a hatchet. They let him go, seemingly unaware of the earlier incident with Virginia police.<\/p>\n

And now we learn that the intruder alert system inside the White House\u00a0was on mute<\/a>!<\/p>\n

I was going to go on to cite other examples, but really, that’s enough, especially the detail about the intruder alert alarm being set to mute. You know what all this reminds me of? The classic story about the pilot who landed gear-up because he got distracted trying to silence the gear warning alarm.<\/p>\n

\"080325-F-3817W-002\"<\/a>
Figure 1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I studied safety engineering, we learned there are three basic ways to keep pilots from screwing up:<\/p>\n