Special Report: Japan engineers knew tsunami could overrun plant

This event is a good example of people’s tendancy to minimize risks.

The situation is not new and there will still be numerous major issues like this disaster because guys at managerial positions are enable to take the right decision to protect people and their environment.

That “disaster” was all about probabilities and there was a x% chance that a earthquake would occur, a tsunami would arrive and tens of thousand of people would die. Some managers were aware of it even if they may have turned a blind eye to it.

However the decision taken was not to do anything to prepare for this worst case. So the decision was not to spend 200 million usd to avoid a 300bn usd disaster with a probability of x%. Maybe for economic reason, maybe because the guy who was in charge to take the decision was rather an optimistic guy.

What i want to highlight is that there is a structural issue in the way we are currently taking our decision to prepare or not for the bad case scenario. No matter if we have the figures in front of us that show that the risk is there we can still opt for not being prepared.

This is clearly no longer an acceptable behavior and all these guys responsible for operating massive infrastructures such as high speed trains, power plants, airports, tunnels, seafront cities should be specifically trained to read statistics and minimize potential risks.

The concept is not that easy to explain, hope it’s clear enough.