Is Extreme Event Predictable?

Historically speaking, economic crises or disasters natural or man-made have never occurred in isolation. There have always been warning signals which, many a times, were not heeded

- Sonjai Kumar

Extreme events do not come out all of a sudden; their trend and information are always available through data points. However, those data points are often ignored and it is believed that nothing will happen, but that ignorance has been proven to be costly in the past. If any of those past extreme events are analyzed, it could be found that the vital signs were available but ignored, resulting in a disaster/crisis.

In the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, it was “overconfidence” about the ability of the ship not to sink keeping few lifeboats and that too for other sinking ships.

The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 in USSR was a combination of a design fault, safety system intentionally turning off, and safety negligence.

In the Bhopal gas tragedy in India in 1984 where thousands of people died and health of millions got affected due to the emission of a poisonous gas in the atmosphere, the prime cause was a reduction in maintenance expenses by the management, leading to poor upkeep of the plant. The Indian government and local activists argued that slack management and deferred maintenance created a situation where routine pipe maintenance caused a backflow of water into a tank, triggering the disaster. Union Carbide Corporation contended that water entered the tank through an act of sabotage.