It's a story I'd only stumbled across a few years ago myself. It (and numerous other technological disasters) make for fascinating reading.

I very highly recommend Charles Perrow's work, particulary Normal Accidents and The Next Disaster. Perrow himself died just this past November.

https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3APerrow%2C+Charles%2C&...

I've been clipping similar stories, under a set of themes which I find related:

- Risk

- Accidents

- Technological Debt

- Techology as Debt

- Manifestation -- this is the notion of manifest vs. latent phenomena, perceptibility, and awareness. See Robert K. Merton among others.

- Denial. Itself one of the stages of grief, which seems more generally a response to a change in worldview and/or an invalidation of previously reliable models.

- Motivated asset inflation. The desire to sustain high levels of valuation of extant assets (real property, IP, technological mechansism, rents), often through activities which decrease net social welfare. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937, is fascinating reading in this regard. Stern doesn't quite fully make the case, but he sets the board for the final mate. NIMBYism, Merchants of Doubt, "fake news", and numerous other phenomena can be tied to this.

In whole, the narrative, if it is valid and holds, undermines many of the sacred cows of technological optimism and property-based market economics.