...or Three Mile Island

I just returned from some major debauchery here (photos below).

Business, real business…as in closing the damn bars every night. My ass is worn out, plain and simple.

I usually don’t sleep well in hotels, but the Hotel Hershey is different. They actually have comfortable beds with all the down. I’m down with the down. I slept like a drunken baby, but like I said, my ass is trashed. I get up with these people about once a year, and trying to squeeze 362 days into 3, is a "crash and burn" situation if I've ever seen one. Did I tell you, my ass is dead?

Anyway, to get there, you fly into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant is, literally, at the end of the runway. There are no federal regulations limiting how close you can fly to it. If there were, they'd have to shutdown the airport. No can do.

Three Mile Island forced us to evaluate how groups of people react and make decisions under stress. Some believe the accident was exacerbated by incorrect decisions made because the operators were overwhelmed with too much information. Some believe it was operator error, without regard for the data. Much of the information from the sensors was irrelevant, misleading, or incorrect.

After the TMI incident, nuclear reactor operator training changed. Before TMI, operator training focused on diagnosing the underlying problem, apparently with bad data. Afterwards, the training focused on reacting to the emergency by going through a standardized checklist to ensure that the core is receiving enough coolant. The key is: You've got to keep the core cool. In my opinion, this is the opposite of thinking out of the box, but in some scenarios; thinking out of the box might not be the best thing. The Monkey Checklist, sometimes, might be a good thing.

It took the operators 16 hours to realize they had a major problem, because they had too much information. Right, wrong, or indifferent; they had too much information.

Too much information is something to think about. Sometimes, it's not a good thing.