> Yes, because it's obviously good for business to have your plant blow sky high
You know how this is - most often poor working practice has no immediate consequence. Perhaps a critical patch is installed a few days late, and the website does not get hacked, no adverse consequences most of the time. At some point someone will run the numbers, and conclude that good safety practice isn't that necessary. That's a recipe for disaster. Most everyone here should be familiar with the Challenger explosion and the runup to it.
> maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable.
That's the issue of fault-tolerant design. In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.
At some point someone will run the numbers, and conclude that good safety practice isn't that necessary. That's a recipe for disaster. Most everyone here should be familiar with the Challenger explosion and the runup to it.
That's a fair point in a sense, and I'm not arguing that it isn't beneficial to have some independent eyes looking at things and helping avoid bias. I would argue that it's not necessarily required to regulate that sort of thing and make it the job of government to try and prevent every possible contingency though. I think working to develop a voluntary certification process, something akin to ISO9001, where being certified would be a "badge of honor" and - eventually - all but a prerequisite to doing business, would be preferred.
In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.
That was definitely a sub-optimal design, for sure. I'd be curious to know the history of how that setup happened, actually.
OTOH, to play devil's advocate a little bit... how often do ammonium nitrate plants explode? One could probably argue that the industry actually is very safe if you look at it over the long-run. Or not... I don't actually have those statistics. Just a point of discussion.
You know how this is - most often poor working practice has no immediate consequence. Perhaps a critical patch is installed a few days late, and the website does not get hacked, no adverse consequences most of the time. At some point someone will run the numbers, and conclude that good safety practice isn't that necessary. That's a recipe for disaster. Most everyone here should be familiar with the Challenger explosion and the runup to it.
> maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable.
That's the issue of fault-tolerant design. In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.