When All Else Fails

As you will probably be able to guess from this commentary, one of my other hobbies is amateur radio and emergency communications.  The following paragraph is a summary of a May 25, 2011 news report, FEMA Administrator Calls Amateur Radio “The Last Line of Defense”,  that appeared on www.arrl.org web site.

At a May 3, 2011 Federal Communications Commission forum on earthquake communications preparedness, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate described Amateur Radio operators as “the ultimate backup, the originators of what we call social media.”  He went on to say “I think that there is a tendency because we have done so much to build infrastructure and resiliency in all our other systems, we have tended to dismiss that role ‘When Everything Else Fails.’ Amateur Radio oftentimes is our last line of defense.” and   “we get so sophisticated and we have gotten so used to the reliability and resilience in our wireless and wired and our broadcast industry and all of our public safety communications, that we can never fathom that they’ll fail. They do. They have. They will. I think a strong Amateur Radio community [needs to be] plugged into these plans. Yes, most of the time they’re going be bored, because a lot of the time, there’s not a lot they’re going to be doing that other people aren’t doing with Twitter and Facebook and everything else. But when you need Amateur Radio, you really need them.”


The same can be said about the power industry.  We have done so much to build its' extensive infrastructure, reliability and resiliency that we cannot believe that it will even fail.  However sophisticated our systems get, they have failed in the past and will fail in the future.  The probability of failure is 1.00, the only question is when the failure will occur.  Tokyo Electric Power has had a hard lesson in the true probability of failure.  As we make systems more robust and reliable, nothing bad happen for long periods and we get bored, forget the reasons things have been done a certain way, slack off on maintenance on equipment that is never needed, and stop paying attention to the planning and training for the "could never happen" incidents.

The recent news reports on the Air France 447 flight data recorders seem to show the potential problems with suddenly dumping control of the aircraft on the pilot when the advanced flight control systems that actually do the flying of today's aircraft get confused due to "could never happen" failures.  We tend to place the operator in the same position by expecting him to correctly handle the situations that exceed the bounds of the automatic controls provided.

Are you prepared to respond "when all else fails"?