Part one of this series set out the communications findings from the 1993 bombing that were already written down and accepted before 2001. This part takes up the narrower and harder question of what the published investigations actually establish about radio performance inside the World Trade... [...]
The accident that began at about four in the morning on Wednesday 28 March 1979 at Three Mile Island Unit 2, on an island in the Susquehanna River south of Harrisburg, damaged roughly half a reactor core and killed nobody. What it did do, over five days, was put a [...]
Every major multi-agency incident review in the United States since the 1970s has said some version of the same thing about radio interoperability, and the recommendations have been adopted, funded, and then found missing again at the next incident. Even though the technology improved across... [...]
On the evening of Saturday 31 July 1976, thunderstorms stalled over the upper Big Thompson drainage in the Colorado Front Range and put something close to a foot of rain in about four hours into a narrow canyon that had US Highway 34 and a river at the bottom of [...]
On 13 April 1970, about fifty-five hours and fifty-five minutes into the third American lunar landing attempt, an oxygen tank in the service module of Apollo 13 failed and the flight became a rescue. What the air-to-ground tape records from that point is not panic but procedure, because NASA had... [...]
Piper Alpha was destroyed by gas explosion and fire on the evening of 6 July 1988, about 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen, and 167 men died. Two of them were crewmen of a rescue craft; the other 165 were among the 226 people on the platform that night, of whom [...]
The hurricane that came ashore at Galveston, Texas, on the evening of 8 September 1900 remains the deadliest natural disaster in United States history, and the death toll is still published as a range rather than a number. Part of what happened there was meteorological and part of it was... [...]
Shortly after eleven o'clock on the night of 25 July 1956, two liners with radar collided in fog south of Nantucket, and over the following eleven hours something close to 1,660 people were taken off a sinking ship by vessels that had been strangers to each other an hour earlier. [...]
On the morning of 6 December 1917 a railway dispatcher named Patrick Vincent Coleman stayed at a telegraph key a few hundred yards from a burning munitions ship and sent a warning up the line before the ship exploded and killed him. The story is told constantly in dispatch training, [...]
Chain Home is usually remembered as the radar that won the Battle of Britain, and that description gets the hardware approximately right while missing the part that mattered. Individual stations produced ambiguous estimates of range, bearing, height and formation size, each one carrying its own... [...]
