Idiots point of view on the Colonial pipeline shutdown
I am not an expert in the movement of Fuel in the US, but in the tech industry we always are supposed to have backup plans. The issue I see here is a failure to think. The company computers were hacked causing a shutdown on their transportation business. So in good planning what would be the backup if the system failed.
What happened to the old way of moving the fuel around? Trucks and rail. We have looked for so many efficiencies in society at the expense of reality that failures do happen. Most backup transportations just do not exist or will cause failures in other areas of transportation. I am sure there are drivers that would move fuel assuming they have the correct credentials for the premium it might pay over the loads they are currently running. So why doesn’t Colonial and other midstream transporters shift to manual methods. Ultimately the reason why is they no longer have viable plans for total failures. This may be a good for shadow of how fragile our failing infrastructure is becoming. I am not talking about the Infrastructure that the Administration wants to fix by building roads, repairing airports and if we get lucky grid issues but most of this is controlled by private industry.
I know that manual systems will not move as much of the normal system but it may help reduce the fair the consumers are having that shortages may be indefinite. A few days ago the news said most of the east coast was ok with surplus yet as of today their are reports of shortages in many of the states. Even Florida is having shortages even though we are supposedly not dependent on this source for gas.
So why did I call this the Idiots point of view. Simple we should be able to move materials the old methods and should have plans for this type of failure but someone seems to have thrown out all of those alternatives because they must believe that systems never fail. That is an Idiots thought. So now what? We wait until the government steps in and what are they going to do. we cab wait for he company pays the ransom. But, what needs to be done now is companies like these in all industries need to start looking for how humans can take back control of broken systems.
More food for thought what happens when ATM processes are shutdown and consumers can not get to their cash. Many banks have come to rely on electronic transfers and ATMs and they have closed many of their retail person to person locations. So how do you stop people from panicking when they can not get to their cash.
Welcome to the reality of system failures maybe automation needs limits too.
#HumanJobsMatter
Just as I finished writing this the news said Colonial is trying to get fuel flowing by manually controlling the flow. Shouldn’t they have been talking about this day one or two to remove some of the fear and panic they have created? Or is the fear in the media just helping prepare us for the inflation they keep talking about.