Originally Posted by
Steve Cox
Hi Eric, my apologies, I wasn't avoiding your question. This thread though often moves much faster than I get to check the site, and just now found it several pages back. My examples have been plenty over the years. When I was in the military (EOD), I spent many years on the Utah Test & Training Range, where explosive propogation shelf life testing was/is conducted. Here are some:
1. On more than one occasion, when setting up for a test which involved sometimes weeks of painstaking placement of explosives, wiring, cameras and pressure transducers (all at the direction of the explosive engineers who devise the tests) we would be told by the engineers that all the explosives being tested were off centerline by several inches. But instead of simply moving the pressure transducers and cameras (the lightweight stuff) a few inches, we would have to manually move tons of explosives, and another week of work.
2. Another of our responsibilities was disposal of old inventory that was beyond its shelf life, this included all ICBM motors too. We knew where we were supposed to place the charges to initiate a safe burn, and on occasion, wound up in disagreements with the engineers "in charge" for where the shaped charge rings were supposed to be placed. Trouble was the engineers were not taking into account the fact that they had cross-section cut the explosive propellent in the motors leaving a void. This almost always caused a detonation instead of the desired burn (kind of like having 200lb on one side of a barbell and 25lb on the other). On these ICBM stage motors, we're talking about 10,000-30,000 pounds of explosives and the associated shock waves and overpressure from atmospheric focusing, which would travel across the lake and back to the city 30 miles away.
3. On one occasion, we had never been told of the hazards of internal static buildup within internal stress fractures of cross-sectioned propellent, even though the engineering and safety community had known for years. On one particular day, when trying to dispose of the propellent using the same "tried and true" procedures we always had used and were in fact in our manuals and approved guides, one of the boxes ignited and proceeded to set the rest on fire (6 tons worth). I wasn't on this particular operation, but did see the videos involving my friends and coworkers. We nearly lost 20 people that day, all of whom fortunately got away safely, and the resulting damages were over I believe $600,000 in vehicles and equipment, in 1990's dollars. All because those in the know never saw the need to distribute the information down because it wasn't deemed important to them compared to whatever else they were working on.
4. After I retired from the military, I spent about 6-7 years working in IT, providing network admin, network security and user support for a software development community. The software engineers and web developers were very smart and knowledgeable in their respective specialty. But they couldn't think their way through simple issues, and I was constantly having to reclose security holes they kept opening, especially on our web servers, because they couldn't figure out how to write anything without using the "full control/all" settings being in place. Twice the website was hacked, and our web developers could never figure out how, even though we kept telling them. And most of the time, they had no idea what time of day it was - and I'm not kidding on that. These are the same people who have no idea of how to do simple tasks or repairs around their house, and are incapable of following a simple instruction sheet for putting things together. I walked away from the IT world seeing that software engineers are some of the absolute dumbest and most clueless smart people I've ever known.