My one… the Titanic didn’t get all their lifeboats out. A problem they had was that crew were used to putting lifeboats in the water then people in the boats… these ones you filled and then had to lower inexperienced passengers 70 feet into the sea. In pitch black.
Even in the modern day, more people die because of lifeboat malfunctions than have been saved by lifeboats.
It’s just tough to design a system that barely ever gets used which then has to be used by a bunch of panicking people in the midst of a frantic emergency with the ship bouncing around. People messed up using the lifeboats and people died because of the lifeboat malfunction. So they designed automated safety systems, then the systems malfunctioned in the physical chaos of the ship sinking, so they added to the systems, but then it was complicated enough that it was hard to make sense of. And so people made mistakes and then people died. Or also the now complicated automatic systems could malfunction in other ways during the emergency. So then they tried just doing lots of training so that people would know it backwards and forwards, and people started dying in training accidents.
It’s just tough. When the ship is sinking, bad bad shit is going to happen.
Yep, panic is the most dangerous thing you have to deal with and when a crowd goes, it goes. It really is an impossible problem