Disaster Analysis

How quantitative risk assessments became divorced from reality. The Challenger disaster reveals how numbers can mask human psychology.

How cognitive biases, organizational psychology, and human error transform theoretical designs into real-world disasters.

How psychological overconfidence transformed an advanced design into a death trap. The Titanic's story reveals how expertise can become a blindness.

The thermodynamics and mechanics of the Titan's implosion — what the debris field encodes about the failure sequence, why deep-sea structural failure has no intermediate states, and what the pattern of interface failures across engineering history tells us about where monitoring systems need to be focused.

The Titan submersible's structural health monitoring system recorded acoustic anomalies and permanent strain shifts across months of operations. The data described a hull in progressive failure. None of it triggered a halt. This is the record of what was documented, when, and what was done with it.

A three-part series examining the Titan submersible disaster through the lens of materials science, structural monitoring, and organizational failure — three interconnected analyses of a tragedy that was entirely preventable.

How OceanGate's foundational material choice — a carbon fiber pressure hull for deep-ocean use — combined with manufacturing defects, suppressed safety dissent, and a deliberately constructed regulatory void to set the Titan on an irreversible course toward implosion.

Exploring how the relentless pursuit of optimization in business can create catastrophic vulnerabilities, using the Boeing 737 MAX disaster as a cautionary tale.

The Price of Climate Risk Comes Due #

The Stark Choice Between Deregulation and Debt #