Podcast Intro

You’ve heard the phrase “failure is not an option”, right?  It’s usually part of a morale boosting movie-speech and all that jazz.  But we know that failure is absolutely an option. Hell, it’s always an option, especially if humans are involved.  Things can always go horribly wrong.

It’s not that we want things go wrong, not really. We don’t want people to die. It’s just that we are human; we like to watch things blow up, fall down, catch fire, crash, sink, etc..  When shit happens, sometimes it happens in fantastic, epic-fail fashion. It becomes the stuff of legends.  

The Hindenburg.  The Titanic. Hurricane Katrina.  Just these titular words are enough to bring to mind the entire horrible tragedy; or at least the bare bones of it.

But there are so many more historic, epic fails.  Some are quite old, nearly lost to history. Some nearly lost even to this history nerd, at least until I started the research for this podcast.  And if I do discuss the more infamous ones, I hope to bring out some details that you didn’t know, details that maybe got lost in the shuffle of the bigger picture.  

Or was it a perfect storm of tiny details, a foreseeable progression of bad decisions?  Was there a time or place where one minor change in the process could have stopped it all?