RPI sues after cleaner's error allegedly destroyed decades of research
timesunion.com
timesunion.com
This is unfortunately not taught everywhere apparently.
Long story short, some companies would have done exactly the same management for something that would cause Armageddon. In the 80s in Paris, a train crashed when some train driver thought he was helpful by responding to an alarm and fixing the brakes himself instead of calling maintenance, and actually turned off the brakes because a poorly design switch made it look like the circuit was open. Plot twist, he was found to be not guilty of anything because company procedure were not clear.
So a mere freezer probably went under the radar of management.
In this case, a power loss could have been accidental as well. What if a fuse went out, or some unrelated piece if equipment caused an upstream GFCI to trip ?
How can you trust a fridge and its power supply to protect 1M dollars for 20+ years, if 20 years worth of samples were destroyed? Power was just bound to be lost at some point in time, over a period of a few decades. (It even happens in datacenters)
And some UPS would cost up to 2000$ ? Up to 500 more for the warning system to send a text ?
IMO, functional safety should be a staple in university.
This very point makes the entire thing so ridiculous I'm not convinced this isn't the setup to outright fraud. Like a failing storeowner who starts making customers with children traverse the artisanal glasscraft section to get to the toy section. "Oopsies! You owe me $1M."
I can't say this is about money (it's a university), but suspect maybe this project was doomed anyway and now its coordinator is staging sabotage to save face.
The only thing that gives me pause is the thought that it's a little weird the cleaner was messing with the circuit breakers at all. The explanation offered makes little sense.
I’m pretty sure there are a lot of businesses that would lose a lot of money if staff members started flipping off random circuit breakers to various systems and pieces of equipment.
yes you can. It's called security, and it has been a booming industry since at least 4 decades. People will do stupid things because they think differently, have different things in mind,...
Never wonder "if" they will do it, but "when"
> if staff members started flipping off random circuit breakers
If they are accessible to them then they shouldn't cause damage.
Just lock the cabinet if nobody should touch them. A lock is 30$, isn't it? A tag with a phone number for maintainance is 5$ ?
> They put a sign on the fridge
So they knew they were 1 switch away from disaster, human intervention or not. I hope it had proper SIL rating, if they are mad now it failed.
Either humans are nice and well intentioned but stupid, and it's a shame to blame them when they just tried.
Or they're really evil, and then you need to protect the system from them.
Anyways, it's stupid to blame workers afterwards.
UPS should have been directly between the fridge and the wall, without switch in the middle. And it should have warned staff. If not, they had accepted the risk.
The fridge was also already malfunctioning and required maintainance (hence the temperature alarm)
So I'm surprise there was no monitoring whatsoever, just a sign, and now they are mad about its failure. It's not consistent.
They already had an alarm that was defective that tracked the fridge temp and would alarm when it went off. What would a battery backup would have done if the fridge itself is defective?
Battery backup isn't going to help when someone turns the sample storage fridge off. :(
Not the most scientific cleaners meet not the sharpest planners.
People do the damndest things. Critical stuff needs a little extra care put in place or some fool will inevitably do the thing-that-must-not-be-done.
Sometimes I have no confidence that a mature civilization is even possible if it's composed of human beings.
Of course it is, just takes some lawyers and PR to change the meaning of "mature"
It boggles my mind that humans have survived for so long considering how suicidal and self destructive we are as a species
The loss of the samples was an inevitability and regardless of who pulled the plug - a cleaner, a power cut or a faulty compressor they are solely responsible for the loss.
Assuming a cleaner would read a note attached to a freezer, given they no doubt have to see lab notes all over the place - and probably have instructions not to move or read the notes - is completely delusional.
IMO the blame falls squarely at the feet of the researchers and RPI and at worst the cleaning company should agree to terminate the contract (thus losing the $1.4 million per year deal they had).
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In hind sight it would have been better to pre-contact the cleaning company and make sure the cleaner in question understood the situation.
But that's only from knowing after the fact that the cleaner was hmmm... a friggin idiot. ;)
If the system was that vulnerable, area denial is step 1. Evacuation/remediation is step 2-3. Putting up a sign saying both "stay away" and "push this button" (that some Honduran or Dominican or whoever may not even be able to read in the first place) is well-intentioned but misguided. It's not the cleaner's fault they walked into a minefield. This wouldn't even be up for discussion if this were an open elevator shaft or arcing electrical panel. A problem existed-- fault is not attributable to whoever next encounters it.
Right now, I have a degraded zpool that's lost 3/6 disks-- one more failure and it's toast. Putting my NAS on the circuit connected to the light switch (no UPS!), then blaming my wife for destroying all of my life's work when she so much as walks into a dark room is just sadistic irresponsibility. Teenage girls do this shit. It's bully logic.
If she still turns it off anyway, you'd be forgiven for being a tad unhappy about it... ;)
Either he's really dumb, or he just doesn't care about the consequences and then makes up some bs excuse after. My money is on the latter.