This was clearly under specced, and that's why we have spec for such things, to prevent this.
The UK has so much good design in all the systems where humans are concerned, from clear signage to walking surfaces, plus checks and balances to provide for redundancy, that you start taking it all for granted.
India on the other hand - I'm of Indian heritage - is a chaotic hellscape where life is cheap. I have an apartment there and recently smooke started pouring out a water pump, somebody mentioned it on the Whatsapp group and eventually someone went to investigate and found it burnt out. You can see so many problems here:
1) Response time slow 2) Problem not treated urgently 3) No electrical cut out 4) No temperature cut out
Basically the sort of thing that you would find sixty years ago in the UK, a malfunctioning device can simply carry on malfunctioning to the extent that it could cause a fire in an entire apartment block. The UK is not immune from this - see Grenfell fire where bad cladding caused many deaths - but we have a full-scale public inquiry and legislation and a lot of very pissed-off people in comparison.
The person I was visiting lived in a student dorm / residence hall at the time. They had special fire doors in the middle of most long hallways, they were wired up to the fire alarm system and would magnetically shut down if an alarm was raised. When shut, they separated different parts of the hallway from each other and prevented the fire from spreading, and you had to hold them open if you wanted to pass through. There were also some extremely strict rules around what electric devices you were allowed to have, with staff being authorized to enter people's rooms with notice and do compliance checks.
Here in Poland (which is an EU country presumably following all EU-mandated safety rules), the regulations in such buildings are usually along the lines of "do whatever as long as you don't cause property damage and/or permanent changes, we might do a check if you do something really egregious and other residents complain." No fire doors of course, although smoke detectors and PA systems for alarms do exist.
I’ve seen, heard, and experienced people doing their job just barely enough to reach a stage of “it works,” popularly known in the colloquial term as, “Chalta Hain.” This is more prominent in works such as the ad-hoc stage creation, pop-up kitchens, and the like.
This incident is sad, and I hope people learn from it and will prevent the other 100 such accidents.
My Condolences.
i can think of two aircraft accidents in the past 15yrs that could have been avoided (at least the second one if they learned from the first incident and if safety was a priority). I'm talking about the Mangalore airport accident in 2010 and the Calicut airport accident in 2020. Both have tabletop runways and i believe both planes skidded off the runway under poor weather conditions. if they learned something from the first accident, they would have deployed countermeasures (something like an arresting mechanism to stop the planes from skidding off. i forgot the technical term for it).
when i was a kid, i remember hearing about rickshaw accidents frequently. most of the time, these rickshaws pack 10-15 children when 5 kids could barely sit comfortably.
i'm sure i can think of many more examples showing lack of value for human life.
I don't think arresting mechanisms are common, and they require extra space to install them. The crew having the training and authority to divert to an alternate airport when it is wet and they are overweight is probably a better focus.
> most of the time, these rickshaws pack 10-15 children when 5 kids could barely sit comfortably.
Of course, it's also important to avoid criticizing poor people for being poor. What were the alternatives? It would be much safer for each kid to be in their own family SUV, as is common in the US, but this increase in child safety is due to increased wealth, not increased virtue.
My experience in seeing how electrical and gas lines are handled casually in Pakistan is the same. For instance, there was a huge transformer enclosure with no doors on it and bare bus bars anyone could easily reach in and grab, a transformer for high-voltage AC to low voltage step down, serving a 300 unit apartment building, with children playing football in the parking area right next to it.
It's not really an India specific problem but really more widespread throughout many south asian developing nations.
In cities like Delhi, good electricians, plumbers, welders can make $1k+ a month - most of it tax free since they usually work in cash.
Yet, they will never buy any safety equipment for themselves. I’ve seen welders use cheap $5 sunglasses instead of buying protective visors.
There are new apartments coming up in my area, each of which is priced north of $500,000. Yet the laborers working on them don’t have even good quality plastic buckets or wheelbarrows to haul stuff around - they make do with burlap sacks and weave baskets.
It probably explains why I've seen offshore teams verbally abused and oppressively micro-managed by their managers, to extents that treatment would be illegal in the West.
I'd feel anxious if any life critical sector or even piece of software was developed from any of the large Indian consultancies I've had the displeasure of working with. As this attitude manifests itself almost every time sometime is delivered.
There's a shrew of threads on HN about poor, contaminated pharmaceuticals from India e.g. eye drops. The UK governments website on drug recalls have a large number of Indian manufactured products.
A qualified technician, to handle the rig, would cost X.
A stage help would cost 0.1 X
Indians are cheap and many in job roles are not qualified or care about their job.
I am 100% sure that this sort of accident happens all the time, and some temporary workaround is used to repair the issue.
Also, no one has any idea about anything close to a "safety margin".
If I were on the job, as an engineer, I would make sure that the ropes and slings are atleast 100% more than calculated values.
A trained bus driver carrying school kids in Jaipur, a state capital city of over 6M, gets paid $200/month.
A security guard in the same school would get paid $125/month.
The income for a mid career middle management professional in a good job would be 30-60x higher.
Imagine getting paid 50x higher than your maid or bus driver or grocery store worker. Now imagine how that would rot your social structure
Do you think the business generates enough surplus to be able to afford the safety margins & additional expenses you’re talking about?
> If I were on the job, as an engineer, I would make sure that the ropes and slings are atleast 100% more than calculated values.
Let’s pause and reflect for a minute — why is it that you (or someone similarly qualified) are not employed designing stage rigs, and instead doing whatever it is that you do? Chances are the answer comes down to economic productivity (and lack thereof).
I'm not saying this is universal and of course everyone gets the bias free opportunity to execute on their own merit, but this has been my observation.
It’s wild I went this long thinking there was something inherent to Chinese culture that gave rise to this. I don’t think it’s Indian, Chinese or Asian culture. I think this is what happens when people aren’t paid enough to care.
Then there’s Japan, where caring too much even though you are paid too little is kind of a cultural thing.
This is what happens when economic development selects quantity over quality. And IMO it's the right choice, especially for large countries. Nevermind not being able to pay for for quality in the first place (lack of qualified skill), when you're at the bottom of the ladder it's long term better to trade safety/lives for more/faster progress. The aggregate societal and human gains that can be afforded from growing income almost always trumps loss from chabuduo. Especially for large countries like India and PRC with so much (bluntly) disposable bodies, you want to throw everyone into the mixer because with that many bodies, it's important to seperate wheat from chaff in terms of human capita as soon as possible and harness them - otherwise potential gets squandered on massive scale. It's not just construction. It's important to manufacture lots of things because even if you make lots of shit, you'll also discover the great makers who makes things that are internationally competitive. Or spam lots of academic papers, because even if most of is hack fraud, it's also maximizing for gems that raise ceiling on top end. Countries grow by learning and improving via doing a lot, even if most of it is not good.
India certainly has a long way to go on this front. It feels very reminiscent of the US circa the gilded age roughly a century ago (Eg: look up worker safety in manufacturing, or fire safety scandals in NYC from back then). I’m sure Europe had a similar story. A society that is experiencing real and somewhat sustained growth for the first time is going to learn some hard lessons through the process, and then be forced into improvements to prevent the ugly side-effects. But the growth engine must first get going, before what seems like “overheads” can be paid from the surplus — and it likely will take a few decades. But you’d be surprised at the extent to which culture can change in a couple of generations (and how many bedrock cultural behaviors are relatively young).
[fn] This is crucial for learning the right lessons, and inspiring the right response. It is certainly a solvable problem, it’s important to look at history to understand how other societies solved the problem after similar growth pangs.
I might even agree with that argument, if it was true. I’m not above saying that it’s worthwhile for a society to sacrifice slaves in order to grow. Empirically, that was an effective strategy. But I wouldn’t want to live in a society with slaves. And that’s the level at which this argument must be reduced to, because someone who dies with no recourse due to their society’s goals is little more than a slave.
The question is, are you absolutely certain that the suffering you’re referring to is a requirement of industrialization? I’m not qualified to answer that, but it would be interesting to hear whether you feel it’s true.
Developing nations like India need their own time to move through similar processes. There still needs to be people lobbying, doing the work of organizing, and changing the way things work. But it's going to take decades, and maybe even centuries, like it did for other nations.
One of my relative killed 2 girls drunk and driving in a village and got away with it. Every time I think of that, it traumatises me :'(
I have no idea to reconcile that as a whole, and generally understand how lucky I am. But it just feels like things will never get better when the most basic (to me) of values is missing.
like whatever you predict the moral of the story would be, its the opposite toxic thing
There definitely needs to be a culture change wrt safety, but a massive increase in economic productivity is necessary to drive investment in safety.
I am never ever in my life going to those places. Death lurks in every corner of their infrastructure.
And you'll have to pardon me for drawing a connection between the plummeting standards in Western construction and the foreign workers - predominantly Indian - flooding this sector. It's not a coincidence.
Reading all the comments about India, low pay and the value of life makes one wonder.
The Post Office Scandal in the UK that's popular in HN shows the value of life and justice in UK. Pretty sure that everyone involved was well paid - the Post Office Heads, the Software company etc No one bothered to do the right thing. Is it the British culture ?
The Engineers at Boeing surely are well paid and should have a 'culture of safety' and 'value human life'. But Boeing seems to be in news for safety issues that don't fit the American Engineering culture. Software issues that killed 346 people in 2 crashes in 2019 - Source Verge Boeing planes are still flying. Doors flying off now.
Tesla - Keep reading comments about Tesla crashes and the lack of responsibility. Tesla keeps selling in record numbers. Other day read about Tesla employees spying on camera of customer's car. American love for Voyeurism.
Can you call this lack of concern for safety a part of American culture ? Tesla and Boeing are Big Listed American companies.
What's the issue here - lack of decent pay ? Or that Americans obviously don't value life considering how easily Americans take lives as per all the news that one reads.
Point being blaming an accident like this on a certain people and their culture is easy. It's quite common to see this subtle racism on HN.
Why are bigger incidents in other countries not a failure of their culture when these are done by bigger institutions and companies.
I guess more people should start making these out of band requests to catch poorly managed events before a tragedy happens.
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/...
In big cities, like the one this is in, the population / ambulances ratio if woefully inadequate.
As an engineer, I can say with full conviction that Indians don't give a damn about maintenance and maintainability.
Be it software or hardware or services or what not. We tend to focus on completing the work for that moment.
Also, in this particular case, the location is a studio, and more likely than not, you would not even find any records of maintenance / guidelines / qualified personnel.
Apparently money does make people do stupid things.
enjoy that "get back to the office"
I might be tempted to perform elaborate stunts, but at what cost?
We should remember that we're human during these strange economic times.
You love to see it
You can make an impact without having to make an impact.
