May 18, 2010

We are back out again.  We have returned to Palmer for a couple more nights, this time with the mountain bikes and kayaks.  We are camped right across the street from the campground we stayed at last time because this one offers a bigger discount for one of our RV groups that we have recently joined.  We didn’t stay here last time because they weren’t open yet.

It is getting closer to summer and there are more RVs out.  Most of them still have Alaska plates, but there are a few outsiders here.  It is interesting to see our rig in this context.  Our trailer, which is huge by my personal standards, looks tiny.  Our one little sliding section looks like a joke compared to the units with four or five huge slides.  Most of these people have twice as much money in their tow vehicles as we have in our entire rig.  Some of the motor homes are more expensive than our condo.  I can only imagine how strange we will look full-timing in our cheap rig in the lower 48 with our Alaska plates.  The good news is that I haven’t seen anything that makes me regret my selections.  Sufficiency has become a bit of a driver for our decisions and what we have is clearly sufficient.

We managed to pack up, hook up, drive an hour, and set up in a reasonable time yesterday.  We seem to be getting more of a routine.  This allowed us to take advantage of a relatively nice afternoon by dropping the kayaks into Matanuska Lake.  We have never kayaked this lake so we wanted to try it.  It won’t be on our list of favorites.  The lake is too close to the highway so the noise is a little intrusive.  The lake is a little too accessible so it also shows the impact of people.  I can’t imagine what someone is thinking when they toss a beer can into a lake like this, but apparently many people find this acceptable. 

The shore line is also pretty steep.  I suspect it is a deep lake, formed by ancient glaciers.  For us, a steep shoreline makes it difficult to launch.  It is difficult to get into a kayak that is already afloat.  I prefer to be in just a couple inches of water with the boat resting solidly on the bottom.  I can even move a short distance on almost dry land for lakes with very shallow shores.  A whitewater kayaker who was working on some technique launched just after us.  He demonstrated an effective approach to the steep shore by starting about ten feet from the water’s edge and sliding down the shore into the water.  I have used this technique on shallower slopes, but would never try anything that steep with my relatively large kayak, especially when my camera is sitting in my lap.  He was still going to be faced with the challenge of getting out of the kayak, although that isn’t a big challenge if you are willing to get wet.

I fished a little.  We found huge schools of little fish almost making the water boil as they chased the huge hatch of bugs that covered the surface of the water when the wind wasn’t blowing.  They would chase my lure, but none of them were big enough to hook.  We found a group of six inch fish and I caught several of these.  I also found a couple of lone ten inchers that were very lively.  They both got off my barbless single hook.  I did not see anything that looked like a meal.

We only skied on Saturday.  The resort was closed again on Sunday due to weather.  Oddly, we were skiing in fresh snow.  It didn’t seem right to be skiing fresh snow so late in the season.  The snow was pretty wet, but when we hit lightly tracked stretches, it was smooth and creamy.  As it got tracked up, it was hard work.

I am haunted by the 60 Minutes coverage of the oil rig explosion in the Gulf.  The firsthand account brought back many memories of how people act when things aren’t going right.  It brought back many memories of the surreal nature of the unplanned events I have experienced, none of which ever approached the scope of this event.  I realized that I have spent a good deal of my working life in close proximity to catastrophic potential and have been close to disaster on a number of occasions.  It is funny how I was never afraid of working in harm’s way, but I can now summon a certain amount of fear. 

I think my experience in investigating incidents gives me a deeper understanding of what happens in these situations.  While I have witnessed numerous fires and chemical releases, I have also investigated many more, including small explosions and major flammable gas leaks that miraculously failed to find a source of ignition.  The one thing that has become apparent to me is that no corporation ever conspires to shortcut safety.  Instead, shortcuts are taken at low levels in the organization because people take chances in their attempts to deliver productivity, usually in the interest of their own advancement.  Managers may suspect shortcuts, but don’t want the work of investigating.  And they are enjoying the rewards of the financial success.  Executives happily put their heads in the sand, comforted by their lack of personal culpability.  Adding to the problem is the fundamental reality of business; everyone is there to make money.  This drive, this pressure, increases the likelihood of low level employees taking chances.  Most of these chances result in no catastrophe or even near catastrophe.  Most of these chances are undiscovered and inadvertently rewarded as business success.

I see this pattern confirmed in the oil rig disaster.  While it would sell more advertising if 60 Minutes could make the case for a conspiracy, the truth is that individuals took chances in response to the business pressures.  I don’t know how to prevent such behavior.  The business pressure is real.  A project that is bleeding millions per day isn’t a good environment.  No one is going to advocate slowing down.  Even the lowest level employee fears negative impacts to their job security.  We all have a certain tolerance for risk and we all are horribly inaccurate in our assessment of risk.  It isn’t a rare event when someone notices something and decides not to make a big deal out of it because they don’t think it will result in a catastrophe.  My understanding leaves me with a feeling of having been lucky rather than successful in managing catastrophic potentials. 

The accounts of the event also cemented certain memories for me.  I remember having my breath taken away so quickly and so dramatically that I ran up two flights of stairs, across a roof, and virtually slid down a ladder, hitting maybe every third rung, without taking another breath.  I remember flames shooting high into the air and people with specific emergency responsibilities failing to resist the distraction, leaving their critical posts uncovered.  I remember being so motivated to shovel gravel in an attempt to prevent hundreds of gallons per minute of firewater mixed with chemicals from reaching a creek.  And I will never forget the fear associated with the inability to account for one employee even hours after the event began.  Luckily, the employee had left on the first ambulance and we just didn’t have a count on the number of people taken away.

Not all human behavior is disappointing.  I have seen heroic acts.  One employee stepped back into a burning building to turn off equipment that was fueling the fire, a somewhat foolish act that minimized the damage and probably prevented the loss of a department’s worth of jobs.  I saw a co-worker make the seemingly simple determination to pull the alarm to begin evacuation while most of us were still trying to make sense of what was happening.  I still don’t have an answer for why I didn’t think to pull the alarm.  I have seen training and job knowledge kick in with swift isolation of leaking lines that were headed for certain disaster.  I have seen employees pick up fire extinguishers and prevent a small problem from becoming a big problem.  But when lifeboats depart, leaving people behind, I recognize that people are only reacting in situations and some reactions are going to be good, some are going to be bad.  No amount of planning is going to prevent people from reacting to a situation.

While I never feared working around equipment and processes with catastrophic potential, I am glad to be away from it right now.  Every industrial accident in the news over the last few decades has caused me to reflect.  This one is big and hits relatively close to home.  I doubt that this will be a big factor in any future decisions that I make in life, but I am glad to have taken the opportunity to capture my thoughts for potential future use.