How Small Problems Snowball Into Big Disasters
The Three Mile Island disaster. Deepwater Horizon. The 2008 financial crisis. Chris Clearfield explains how these huge crises all started with small issues.
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Show Notes
The Three Mile Island disaster caused hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their homes. It absolutely dominated the news cycle. It led to a complete rethinking of nuclear energy. And it all stemmed from a plumbing problem, a valve that didn’t shut.
But the Three Mile Island accident isn’t the only meltdown caused by a seemingly small issue that snowballed into a gigantic disaster. To find out exactly how this happens, we talked with Chris Clearfield, co-author of “Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About it.”