alt Hacker NewsReading the text it seems to me this is due to a very widespread issue in Spain and other southern European countries: people don’t care about the warnings because there are too many false positives.
That’s why people here, when they hear the fire alarm they just wait for it to go off: the probability that it is actually a fire is minuscule… but the alarm triggers a lot.
Not sure how to actually solve this… but I’m also not making excuses for what happened. High speed trains is not the same as a fire alarm in some office building, the people in charge should be held responsible somehow.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
> Healthcare: The constant sounds of alarms and noises from blood pressure machines, ventilators and heart monitors
> Amber Alerts: sent to cell phones as far away as [...] 15 hour drive
> "known to the state of California to cause cancer"
etc
https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB
See also a million USCSB industrial disaster postmortems
It just means that a false positive rate is as dangerous as a false negative rate. Just issuing a warning doesn't come for free when you are designing a security system.
Something similar is happening in my region after the flood that happened two years ago: The alarm was raised late; Now, even mild rain is triggering an alert.
Guess whats the consequence of that? Less and less people pay attention to the alerts.
To your point, a contributing factor here was the front train couldn't start due to either a minor or bogus "security" alarm. Whatever alarm that was, it wasn't worth triggering such a tragic accident.
The fix is to do things right every time, and if we're losing money to false alarms, spend more money to make sure the false alarms stop happening. Make it a new persons problem rather than just making someone "used to it" and start ignoring it.
> Not sure how to actually solve this…
fix the alarms? I only had one false fire alarm in my life. and thankfully zero real ones. it's possible.
do fire drills? if alarms get ignored, and you can't reduce the false-positive rate, then introduce fake alarms and monitor the response?
> That’s why people here, when they hear the fire alarm they just wait for it to go off
This literally happened to me last night, I was having dinner at my apartment, and suddenly I start hearing a smoke alarm, but not quite inside the apartment, I just kept having dinner thinking "bah, someone probably burned a toast".
Then it wont stop, I walk to door and hear people talking, still don't bother enough, wait a few minutes, then go out and my neighbor said "there are three fire trucks down there, I think it's a real one" hahhaha
The hallway was kind of hazy and smelled like burnt food, for sure... so I just grabbed my laptop and went out hahaa.
Because they don't get held responsible enough for bypissing procedures. Some system are too complex for fully automated operarions, and the human need to play along.
Safety culture is blameless, but only if everyone plays along.
Issue and enforce fines for every false positive alarm, and problem will solve itself.
The escalator failure in 2018 in Rome that caused severe injuries to 24 people was found to be partially caused by safety systems being disabled and overriden because they caused too many false alarms.
In a modern passenger rail control system[0], ignoring the warnings results in automated responses like dumping all the hydraulic pressure, setting all brakes at once. This will have two effects: (1) the wheels will slide on a fixed spot, grinding a flat spot, and (2) the operator will either require central control to remotely release the emergency brake state, OR the operator will have to continue at the safest (lowest) speed.
What I'm saying is: false positives should not be ignorable, and modern systems take that choice away (at least, just before the situation becomes unavoidable in worst-case analyses).
That being said, previous fatal accidents in Spain's high-speed rail have resulted in "primitive" uncontrolled areas between controlled areas. Those SHOULD NOT exist. You are essentially saying "lives don't matter that much here " ($/life).
[0] I work in rail safety.
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I'm a volunteer firefighter in rural NM. We have a commercial property close to us that repeatedly has false alarms on its fire alarm/smoke detection system, to the point where even the best of us are suffering from "the boy who cried wolf" feelings.
Because of this, I discovered that (apparently) NY Fire Department charges $5000 per false call on an alarm system directly connected to the dispatch system.
Somethng to think about.