Session 2: The discussion

E Hambly

You talked about multiple causes and trigger events. One conclusion I've drawn from the number of situations that have multiple causes is to draw the conclusion that everything we look at has got one thing wrong with it. It only takes a second fault and we have a problem so that in a way you can have it without multiple causes.

D.Blockley, University of Bristol.

There are some very famous accidents have occurred from just a single cause. I can think of a major bridge that collapsed just because someone calculated the average shear stress by taking the complete cross sectional area of the steel beam instead of just the web area, which of course we know we should do, the bridge failed just because of that mistake. That is relatively rare, normally it is a complex problem.