About Human Error

Big story in the Johannesburg media today was about a derailed luxury train in which three people lost their lives. In situations like this, you never get the whole story as "investigations" have to be done to establish the official course of the incident. In this case initial reports indicate that brakes were not applied on the stationery coaches when locomotive engines were being changed and the coaches rolled downhill and derailed at the bottom killing three people.

Despite the confusion that has been thrown in about signals not working properly (I am battling to understand how faulty signals can cause train coaches to roll downhill), the fact is that brakes were not applied to the coaches during the locomotive changes. This, we are told, was standard procedure. The question is why this was not followed at this time?

I guess we can ascribe this to human error. Sometime, human error is ascribed to those incidents in which someone simply did not follow procedures and regulations because they thought nothing would happen. Cutting corners without having any adverse consequences (and I am not by any account suggesting that this was the case here) creates bad habits which are only revealed when a calamity such as this one happens. This is why complacency should be guarded so much against. Cutting corners is never good.