My teenaged nephew and I share a love of books about disasters – well, actually, my love is for books, his for videos; he’s not a reader. I’m not sure why he likes them – he has always had an inquiring mind and I suspect there’s some form of survival instinct rattling around in the depths of his brain close to his amygdala, whispering, “Dude, you got to be prepared!” And I suspect that’s right: one should always have a plan for when one’s destroyer goes down in the ocean and can’t send a distress signal because it was on a secret mission, and you have to float in shark-infested waters, watching your fellow seamen get picked off one by one… It has happened so it could happen again…
My love of disaster books is a little more about what fed into the disaster – the strategy, risk mitigation, change management of it. What choices did people make that, with 20/20 hindsight, were maybe a little questionable. What decision could have averted the disaster? Where did organizational culture – as in the Challenger O-ring situation – get in the way of prudence? What steps did people (the organization, the regulatory agency, the community) take afterwards to minimize the risk that such a thing could happen again? So yeah: “Dude, you got to be prepared” just on a different scale.*
I bet you didn’t know that America’s deadliest avalanche happened in the Cascades** between Eastern and Western Washington in 1910. Almost 100 men, women, and children died. To make it worse, they had been worried for over a week that it was going to happen but they were trapped and couldn’t get out.
1910 was an interesting period in American history: huge technological advances were happening, pushed forward by determined men with great wealth, who were determined to conquer nature – crossing deserts and mountains with railways; traversing oceans with unsinkable liners. Having an indominable spirit was a prerequisite. It’s always easy to have an indominable spirit when you’re sitting safely in your mansion, and not on the deck of the Titanic.
Snow was a problem for the railway. Even today, passes in the Cascades shut down during the winter because of snow – it’s one of the snowiest places in the U.S., bar Alaska. 1910 was a particularly snowy year. And the steepness of the mountains are partial to mudslides*** and – when it’s snowy – snowslides. The competitor’s trains, at that time, went through lower passes to the south where they were less prone to weather delays. But the risky Stevens Pass route paid off with the fastest express trains to Seattle.
In this case, the snowplows were overwhelmed by rate of snowfall, trains were backed up, other trains had broken down. It was so cold that trains that were stopped, waiting for traffic in front of them to move, froze to the tracks. Clearing tracks blocked by damaged trains and snow became more challenging than usual. Railway workers threatened to strike.
Two passenger trains were trapped in a manned station town near the top of the pass for over a week. Food and fuel ran low. They knew they were in a danger zone, had heard about avalanches hitting nearby areas, killing a man here, a man there. They debated hiking out – those who could, for there were children, elderly people, and at least one person with a broken leg in a cast – but heard about someone who tried it and got caught in an avalanche.
And then the worst happened. An avalanche swept away both railcars and the station.
The author brings the place and the characters – and the dread – to life. You get a good sense of what is was like in 1910 Washington, the newness of the Seattle area, the excitement and confidence that people felt riding the trains. You learn about the people traveling on the trains, as well as the men working the trains, in the station town, and the superintendent responsible for keeping the trains moving.
I felt for him the most: here he was, dealing with crisis after crisis. Winning little battles, finding ways to get people where they were going, to keep the mail running. And yet, so caught up in Could that it tended to overweigh Should. It’s a form of bias – Completion Bias – where you get so caught up in doing all the little things – that you miss the big picture. He wasn’t a bad person, it seems, or an arrogant person. He was doing his due-diligence, asking the engineer of the trains that managed to make it through for their assessments (one told him, it was the worst storm he’d ever seen in his 14 years on the Cascades railroad) – but his focus was on getting the trains through. And he lost sight of safely.
The problem actually started with the engineer – the Stevens of Stevens Pass – who had chosen this pass for the railway to run through. Similar to the later superintendent, Stevens was just trying to do his job and picked what seemed like the best of a terrible selection as the location for the railway route. His boss was not going to take No for an answer.
I notice this often in business: the executive at the top has a bold idea and doesn’t want to take No for an answer. The people charged with picking the best way to run the railway though an impassible mountain range or keeping the trains running through the worst snowstorm ever encountered on that route or [insert that crazy thing bold idea your C-level stakeholder has you doing that they just know will make a huge difference, huge! – thump table here – with no empirical data whatsoever but they are trusting their gut and so are repurposing all resources in service of it] do their best to satisfy the executive mandate. They juggle multiple priorities, work late nights, push and pull, and attempt to keep up employee morale. Recharging on small victories – track laid, a train moved, a feature built, a page released, an app launched – they lose track of the bigger picture: is this really going to make things better for the customer?
Given the choice, would the customer prioritize the risk of getting to Seattle on time over getting trapped in a snow-bound railcar in sub-zero temperatures with no food or fuel for fire, in an area known for avalanches for over a week?
Would you?
A great book, a great read. When I read it the first time, I couldn’t put it down. Give it a shot.
*It’s always a relief, when you are an adult, to find that you have something – anything – in common with a teenaged nephew. It gives you something to talk about in those long car rides that otherwise sound like, “Soooooo, how’s school?” “[Inarticulate grunt.]” “What classes are you taking this semester?” “[Shrug]” And it prevents one from having to bring up the subject of video games, which gets them talking ad nauseum, literally, and turns it into a one-sided conversation if they like different games than you do.
**I grew up out west. If you haven’t been there, you don’t know mountains. As a teen, I ventured East for summer school. A relative picked me up in Winston-Salem and drove me “over the mountains” to another relative in Nashville. We started uphill and then we were unexpectedly going down again. “That’s weird,” I commented, “when do we get to the mountains?” They told me, “Those were the mountains.” And I protested, “Those were foothills. Where are the mountains?” When you grow up in the shadow of Mount Lemon, Mount Shasta, Mount Baker, you have set expectations for mountains. These eastern mountains are pleasant and enjoyable but they don’t fit the western definition of mountains.
***You may remember hearing about a small mudslide in Washington that happened a few years ago. It may have seemed like just a little one because it took place in a small town but it was actually the U.S.’s deadliest mudslide: 43 people were killed and a town was wiped off the map. While the topography of mountain Washington has always been prone to slides, clear-cutting has made the mudslides worse in recent years. Without trees, the topsoil washes away and then there’s nothing left to prevent mudslides; so they get them where they didn’t before, although this area was know as “slide mountain” so the jury is still out on how much logging in the area may have increased the risk…
Change+Management 