Risky Biz Preparing for Disaster

From Barbara Eggleston, retired Engineer.

At breakfast today, 2011, my husband Dick read to me from the Wall Street Journal of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s disaster plans which called for one stretcher, one satellite phone and fifty protective suits.

After breakfast I felt compelled to write this story. I was an older kid in Indiana. My father and I were at the small train station in Lafayette waiting waiting for my grandmother to arrive. She would have taken the train from Los Angeles to Chicago and from there to where we lived. A train was racing through the station, a freight train.

All a freight train meant to me was that it had to go by before my grandmother’s train would arrive. I didn’t see the train as an integral part of a great nation’s industry. I only saw the large, black and exciting train taking many minutes to go by. Then it stopped.

Dad took me on a walk along the tracks to the end of the pavement. It was to relieve our boredom. As we turned around and walked back to our car he looked at a freight car that was open exposing large cardboard boxes inside that held televisions. He started to talk.

“I wonder if any of the boxes have damaged televisions. The problem is that you can’t afford to pack the televisions so well that none of them get broken. And at the same time you can’t afford to break a lot of televisions. So the manufacturer has a decision to make: just how well should he pack the televisions. This decision process is very important in industry….Do you understand?”

I nodded, yes. As I have gone through life, I have very often recalled his little lecture. And I have added other things he said which amount to: mistakes will happen. You can’t avoid that mistakes will happen. Mistakes don’t mean that you stop trying to do something.

You try to plan for mistakes. You try to predict mistakes. And you must also understand that you may not predict some of the mistakes. But you don’t stop what you are trying to do.

As I approach the ebb of my life I feel more keenly the significance of what he said. Dad got into emergency preparedness soon after The War. I have a copy of one of the invitations. It was from the White House.