MF_James posted:

I thought someone was gonna launch into that sign somehow.

wesleywillis posted:

I grew up near the Welland Canal and like history stuff.

I've got at least three direct ancestors, possibly more, that worked on the construction of the fourth (current) canal. Two great grandfathers, one of whom was killed in a construction accident, and one grandfather. Possibly more worked on it, that I don't know about. Also some indirect ancestors worked on it as well.
During construction of the current canal, there were many fatalities. 137 total.
I think that ended up working out to an average of 1 death every two weeks of construction.
One accident, the collapse of one of the lock gates claimed the lives of 10 men.

Here are the stories of a few of the men who died during construction:
https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/news-story/8196392-fallen-workers-last-victim-of-gate-collapse/

https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/news-story/8195300-fallen-workers-worker-died-at-lock-6-gate-collapse/

https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news-story/8318740-fall-at-lock-2-results-in-fatal-injury/

http://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-welland-tribune/20171202/281771334516183

Lurking Haro posted:

Hicks got it in his face and he survived it just fine until he got killed off in Alien 3/whatever happened in Colonial Marines.
I think the comics also feature a few scarred people.

-e-
Also, Weyland-Yutani.
They probably just slap a fragile/do not drop sticker on a container with a Xenomorph in it.

quote:

Laki or Lakagígar (Craters of Laki) is a volcanic fissure in the south of Iceland, not far from the volcanic fissure of Eldgjá and the small village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. The system erupted violently over an eight-month period between June 1783 and February 1784 from the Laki fissure and the adjoining volcano Grímsvötn, pouring out an estimated 42 billion tons 14 km3 (3.4 cu mi) of basalt lava and clouds of poisonous hydrofluoric acid and sulfur dioxide compounds that contaminated the soil, leading to the death of over 50% of Iceland's livestock population, and the destruction of the vast majority of all crops. This led to a famine which then killed approximately 25% of the island's human population.

The consequences for Iceland, known as the Móðuharðindin or "Mist Hardships", were disastrous. An estimated 20–25% of the population died in the famine and fluoride poisoning after the fissure eruptions ensued. Around 80% of sheep, 50% of cattle and 50% of horses died because of dental fluorosis and skeletal fluorosis from the 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride that were released.

Lurking Haro posted:

Hicks got it in his face and he survived it just fine until he got killed off in Alien 3/whatever happened in Colonial Marines.
I think the comics also feature a few scarred people.

-e-
Also, Weyland-Yutani.
They probably just slap a fragile/do not drop sticker on a container with a Xenomorph in it.

SENSUAL DAD KISS posted:

Hmmm, I'm not sure he was alive long enough between the events of Aliens and the crash that kills him at the start of Alien 3 for the cardiac troubles to settle in from HF exposure. Actually having him delay from late-onset Xeno blood toxicity is a much better explanation than whatever they gave in the movie to handwave that away.

Speaking of HF, here's some old-timey OSHA.

quote:

Laki or Lakagígar (Craters of Laki) is a volcanic fissure in the south of Iceland, not far from the volcanic fissure of Eldgjá and the small village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. The system erupted violently over an eight-month period between June 1783 and February 1784 from the Laki fissure and the adjoining volcano Grímsvötn, pouring out an estimated 42 billion tons 14 km3 (3.4 cu mi) of basalt lava and clouds of poisonous hydrofluoric acid and sulfur dioxide compounds that contaminated the soil, leading to the death of over 50% of Iceland's livestock population, and the destruction of the vast majority of all crops. This led to a famine which then killed approximately 25% of the island's human population.

The consequences for Iceland, known as the Móðuharðindin or "Mist Hardships", were disastrous. An estimated 20–25% of the population died in the famine and fluoride poisoning after the fissure eruptions ensued. Around 80% of sheep, 50% of cattle and 50% of horses died because of dental fluorosis and skeletal fluorosis from the 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride that were released.

El_Elegante posted:

Was there ever a good report on the fire that collapsed I-85 in Atlanta last year?

Ornamental Dingbat posted:

I bet those skeletons all had really good teeth from all that fluoride.

Trabant posted:

Honestly, this is probably the most graceful way it could've gone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzPwYCvbAY8

Say Nothing posted:

untzthatshit posted:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46230496

Am I reading this right?

So it sounds like Boeing came up with a way to stop pilots from accidentally stalling the plane, like what happened in that Air France crash. But now the plane will just pitch downwards whenever it feels like it? Even in manual mode. And they failed to tell anybody that they added this "feature" to the new model.

untzthatshit posted:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46230496

Am I reading this right?

So it sounds like Boeing came up with a way to stop pilots from accidentally stalling the plane, like what happened in that Air France crash. But now the plane will just pitch downwards whenever it feels like it? Even in manual mode. And they failed to tell anybody that they added this "feature" to the new model.

Phanatic posted:

Enh...not really/sort of/yeah pretty much, in that order.

Plane's got two AoA sensors. If one of them breaks and shows a really high AoA, then the FCC will trim the horizontal stabilizer for a nose-down attitude. The pilot can ovverride this by adjusting the trim on his own, but if he stops doing that then the FCC will just keep trying. So he needs to pop the switch to cut out the automatic stabilizer trim system and just trim the thing on his own as needed.

Azathoth posted:

To understand why this was added, a little background on the Air France 447 crash. The plane was flying at a high altitude over the Atlantic when a problem with the airspeed sensors, probably ice blockage, caused the aircraft to stall. This disconnected the autopilot from full control (Normal Law) and put the aircraft systems into a state called Alternate Law 2. This caused the aircraft to be essentially in a minimal autopilot, with some systems still functioning to assist the pilot, but the pilot being in overall control of where the plane goes.

quote:

The crew reacted poorly to this change, and made excessive inputs on the controls that caused the aircraft to roll back and forth, and to climb very fast. To say that the crew panicked is not accurate, but he was clearly confused by what was happening. There were a lot of warnings going off initially, including the stall warning, but that ceased when Alternate Law 2 went into effect.

El_Elegante posted:

Plastic conduit is what was reported, but I don’t understand how many policies were violated that led to someone having unauthorized access and starting a fire there.

ToxicFrog posted:

It didn't stall at that point; it was still flying straight and level, it just had no airspeed indicators. It stalled when the junior pilot got confused and pitched the plane up.

The aircraft wasn't stalling when it entered AL2; the stall warning did sound when they started pitching up excessively. For whatever reason, this didn't stop Bonin from continuing to pull back on the stick basically until the plane hit the water.

Azathoth posted:

There's two competing narratives that I'm seeing, both revolve around the new system on the 737 MAX that pitches the nose of the aircraft down when it detects that the pilot is increasing the pitch of the aircraft to such a degree that it stalls the aircraft.

To understand why this was added, a little background on the Air France 447 crash. The plane was flying at a high altitude over the Atlantic when a problem with the airspeed sensors, probably ice blockage, caused the aircraft to stall.

quote:

This disconnected the autopilot from full control (Normal Law) and put the aircraft systems into a state called Alternate Law 2.

quote:

During all this, the sensors started functioning properly again, but the improper reaction by the pilot in pulling the nose up so steeply prevented the aircraft from returning to Normal Law immediately. Essentially, the aircraft was in such a state that it was outside the programming of the autopilot, so it handled some basic stuff, but relied on the pilot to get the aircraft back to a normal state. A consequence of this is that the warnings stopped sounding.

When the crew implemented the proper stall recovery procedure, to pitch the nose down, the aircraft returned to Normal Law, which made the stall warning system start working again, setting of a loud alarm. The pilot instinctively reacted to this by stopping the nose down pitch, which caused the plane to go back to Alternate Law 2 and stop the warning.

quote:

The plane then essentially fell out of the sky fully intact until impact, with all of the flight systems fully functional.

Azathoth posted:

The airline's narrative is that they and the crew were unaware of the system and so when the crew was presented with a situation where the system activated inappropriately, they lacked the necessary information to disengage the system and, as the system was specifically designed to not be able to be counteracted by pilot control inputs,

quote:

This emergency AD was prompted by analysis performed by the manufacturer showing that if an erroneously high single angle of attack (AOA) sensor input is received by the flight control system, there is a potential for repeated nose-down trim commands of the horizontal stabilizer. This condition, if not addressed, could cause the flight crew to have difficulty controlling the airplane, and lead to excessive nose-down attitude, significant altitude loss, and possible impact with terrain.

Runaway Stabilizer
Disengage autopilot and control airplane pitch attitude with control column
and main electric trim as required. If relaxing the column causes the trim to
move, set stabilizer trim switches to CUTOUT. If runaway continues, hold
the stabilizer trim wheel against rotation and trim the airplane manually.
Note: The 737-8/-9 uses a Flight Control Computer command of pitch
trim to improve longitudinal handling characteristics. In the event of
erroneous Angle of Attack (AOA) input, the pitch trim system can trim
the stabilizer nose down in increments lasting up to 10 seconds.
In the event an uncommanded nose down stabilizer trim is experienced
on the 737-8/-9, in conjunction with one or more of the indications or
effects listed below, do the existing AFM Runaway Stabilizer
procedure above, ensuring that the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches
are set to CUTOUT and stay in the CUTOUT position for the
remainder of the flight.
An erroneous AOA input can cause some or all of the following
indications and effects:
• Continuous or intermittent stick shaker on the affected side only.
• Minimum speed bar (red and black) on the affected side only.
• Increasing nose down control forces.
• IAS DISAGREE alert.
• ALT DISAGREE alert.
• AOA DISAGREE alert (if the option is installed).
• FEEL DIFF PRESS light.
• Autopilot may disengage.
• Inability to engage autopilot.
Initially, higher control forces may be needed to overcome any
stabilizer nose down trim already applied. Electric stabilizer trim can be
used to neutralize control column pitch forces before moving the STAB
TRIM CUTOUT switches to CUTOUT. Manual stabilizer trim can be
used before and after the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switches are moved
to CUTOUT.

Phanatic posted:

What you are probably thinking of is that the said, aforementioned complete muppet was pulling back so hard the plane was reaching an angle of attack that was beyond the realm of sanity-checking. The software in charge of setting off the stall warning looked at the AoA data and said "Whoa, there's no way that's right, the AoA data must be faulty," and stopped issuing the stall warning. Then, whenever Bonin would ease off on the stick and the nose would drop a bit, the AoA data started looking reasonable (still too high, but reasonable), and the alarm would go off again. So the actual effect of the alarm that was saying "Push the nose down, you loving idiot" was to make Bonin think "poo poo, I better pull back on the stick more!"

Sex Skeleton posted:

It's crazy that the FCC automatically cancels an alarm under those conditions. If the AoA goes bananas like that I would expect the alarm to stay on, because regardless of whether the sensor is functioning there is something wrong and the pilot needs to intervene. If the AoA is okay then the pilot should be required to manually acknowledge the alarm.

quote:

But trying to be clever is just asking for trouble.

quote:

these are generally known as “fourth generation” airplanes; they now constitute nearly half the global fleet. Since their introduction, the accident rate has plummeted to such a degree that some investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board have recently retired early for lack of activity in the field. There is simply no arguing with the success of the automation. The designers behind it are among the greatest unheralded heroes of our time. Still, accidents continue to happen, and many of them are now caused by confusion in the interface between the pilot and a semi-robotic machine. Specialists have sounded the warnings about this for years: automation complexity comes with side effects that are often unintended. One of the cautionary voices was that of a beloved engineer named Earl Wiener, recently deceased, who taught at the University of Miami....

Wiener pointed out that the effect of automation is to reduce the cockpit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high. Nadine Sarter, an industrial engineer at the University of Michigan, and one of the pre-eminent researchers in the field, made the same point to me in a different way: “Look, as automation level goes up, the help provided goes up, workload is lowered, and all the expected benefits are achieved. But then if the automation in some way fails, there is a significant price to pay. We need to think about whether there is a level where you get considerable benefits from the automation but if something goes wrong the pilot can still handle it.”

Phanatic posted:

I also think it's crazy that in Normal Law if you try to stall the aircraft, the stall alarms/stick shaker/etc still go off. Even though you're not stalling the aircraft. In other words, the stall alarms are themselves *modal*, they mean two different things based upon which mode you're in:

quote:

reduce the cockpit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high

jamal posted:

I don't think that's how it works. In this it's mentioned that the stick shaker works by mechanical feedback from airflow over the wings. So if stall alarms or the stick shaker go off, it's because the airplane is stalling, regardless of normal/alternative law.

Big Dick Cheney posted:

Am I missing something? This sounds very redundant

thatbastardken posted:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-14/ai-group-apprentice-dillon-wu-dies-in-unsafe-worksite/10429356


tl:dr first year metal working apprentice, employed by a company that is also a peak industry lobby group against things like 'unions' and 'workplace safety' is subcontracted out to a company with a known record of poor safety and dies alone welding in a confined space. now both companies are trying to avoid responsibility.

Nuclearmonkee posted:

Is it actually allowed for people to weld in confined spaces alone in Austrialia?

Like you'd have to get a permit and have an attendant and a supervisor for that in the US. One dude can be the attendant and the supervisor if he's qualified but you absolutely can't just climb into a silo or whatever by yourself and do poo poo.

luxury handset posted:

the same problem is present in healthcare, everything that could beep does beep and so much of what a nurse ends up doing is parsing through warning alarms to figure out which are important and which can be ignored

Sagebrush posted:

It's funny, because aeronautics has already figured this out with concepts like the "dark panel" where, when everything is going right, all the indicator lights are off, and something only illuminates when there's a problem. They just need to apply that same concept to other kinds of messaging.

quote:

A 2011 investigation by the Boston Globe identified at least 216 deaths in the U. S. between January 2005 and June 2010 linked to alarm malfunction or alarm fatigue. In 2013, The Joint Commission, the main accreditor of American hospitals, issued an urgent directive calling on hospitals to improve alarm safety. The ECRI Institute, a nonprofit consulting organization that monitors data on medical errors, has listed alarm-related problems as the top technology hazard in healthcare in each of the last four years.

In the face of growing nationwide concern about alert fatigue, Barbara Drew, the UCSF researcher, set out to quantify the magnitude of the problem. For a full month in early 2013, she and her colleagues electronically tapped into the bedside cardiac alarms in UCSF’s five intensive care units, which monitored an average of 66 patients each day. Mind you, this is just the bedside cardiac monitor, which follows the patient’s EKG, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation. It does not include the IV machine alarms, mechanical ventilator alarms, bed exit alarms, or nurse call bell. Nor does it include any of the alerts in the computer system, such as the Septra overdose alert that Jenny Lucca overlooked.

Drew’s findings were shocking. Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts. No, not 187 audible alerts for all the beds in the five ICUs; 187 alerts were generated by the monitors in each patient’s room, an average of one alarm buzzing or beeping by the bedside every eight minutes. Every day, there were about 15,000 alarms across all the ICU beds. For the entire month, there were 381,560 alarms across the five ICUs. Remember, this is from just one of about a half-dozen systems connected to the patients, each tossing off its own alerts and alarms.

And those are just the audible ones.

...

I spent a day in Seattle with several of the Boeing engineers and human factors experts responsible for cockpit design in the company’s commercial fleet. “We created this group to look across all the different gauges and indicators and displays and put it together into a common, consistent set of rules,” Bob Myers, chief of the team, told me. “We are responsible for making sure the integration works out.”

I sat inside the dazzling cockpit of a 777 simulator with Myers and Alan Jacobsen, a technical fellow with the flight deck team, as they enumerated the hierarchy of alerts that pilots may see. They are:

* An impending stall leads to red lights, a red text message, a voice warning, and activation of the “stick shaker,” meaning that the steering wheel vibrates violently. “The plane is going to fall out of the sky if you don’t do anything,” Myers explained calmly.
* Further down the hierarchy are “warnings,” of which there are about 40. These are events that require immediate pilot awareness and rapid action, although they may not threaten the flight path. Believe it or not, an engine fire no longer merits a higher-level warning because it doesn’t affect the flight path. (“Fires in engines are almost nonevents now,” said Myers, because the systems to handle them are so robust.) The conventions for warnings are red lights, text and a voice alarm, but no stick shaker. Impressively, the color red is never used in the cockpit except for high-level warnings — that’s how much thought the industry has given to these standards.
* The next level down is a “caution,” and there are about 150 such situations. Cautions require immediate pilot awareness but may not require instant action. Having an engine quit in a multiengine plane generates only a caution (again, my jaw drops when I hear this), since the pilot may or may not have to do something right away, depending on the plane’s altitude. A failure of the air-conditioning system — which ultimately can lead to a loss of cabin pressure — is another caution event. With cautions, the lights and text are amber, and there is only one alert modality, usually visual.
* The final level is an “advisory,” like the failure of a hydraulic pump. Since jets are designed with massive redundancy, no action is required, but the pilot does need to know about it, since it might influence the way the landing gear responds late in the flight. Advisories trigger an amber text message — now indented — on the cockpit screen, and no warning light.

For every kind of alert, a checklist automatically pops up on a central screen to help guide the cockpit crew to a solution. The checklists are preprogrammed to match the problems that triggered the alert.

And that’s it...

When I told the Boeing engineers about my world — not only the frequency of computerized medication alerts, but also the ubiquity of alarms in our intensive care units — they were astonished. “Oh, my goodness,” was all Myers could say.

Nuclearmonkee posted:

Is it actually allowed for people to weld in confined spaces alone in Australia?

Like you'd have to get a permit and have an attendant and a supervisor for that in the US. One dude can be the attendant and the supervisor if he's qualified but you absolutely can't just climb into a silo or whatever by yourself and do poo poo.

quote:

OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY ACT 2004 - SECT 21
Duties of employers to employees

(1) An employer must, so far as is reasonably practicable, provide and maintain for employees of the employer a working environment that is safe and without risks to health.

Penalty: 1800 penalty units for a natural person;

9000 penalty units for a body corporate.

(2) Without limiting subsection (1), an employer contravenes that subsection if the employer fails to do any of the following—

(a) provide or maintain plant or systems of work that are, so far as is reasonably practicable, safe and without risks to health;

(b) make arrangements for ensuring, so far as is reasonably practicable, safety and the absence of risks to health in connection with the use, handling, storage or transport of plant or substances;

(c) maintain, so far as is reasonably practicable, each workplace under the employer's management and control in a condition that is safe and without risks to health;

(d) provide, so far as is reasonably practicable, adequate facilities for the welfare of employees at any workplace under the management and control of the employer;

(e) provide such information, instruction, training or supervision to employees of the employer as is necessary to enable those persons to perform their work in a way that is safe and without risks to health.

(3) For the purposes of subsections (1) and (2)—

(a) a reference to an employee includes a reference to an independent contractor engaged by an employer and any employees of the independent contractor; and

(b) the duties of an employer under those subsections extend to an independent contractor engaged by the employer, and any employees of the independent contractor, in relation to matters over which the employer has control or would have control if not for any agreement purporting to limit or remove that control.

(4) An offence against subsection (1) is an indictable offence.

spog posted:

I am not sure what the system could do when a pilot was making a conscious effort to stall the plane, even when he wasn't supposed to be controlling it. How much power do you give automation over stupidity?