REGISTER

John Aitken BE, MIEEE, AMIRSE

Director Aitken & Partners Consulting Engineers

The Sydney North Shore Times recently related a tale which should bring a chill to the spine of communications and signals engineers. I quote:

Police say the series of events began at 3.00 pm on April 9 when the man visited a patient at Royal North Shore Hospital, St Leonards.

As he was leaving, he saw a Chubb safe in one of the hospital offices.

He placed the safe and a key locker on a hospital trolley and towed them to his car.

He tied a rope around the safe and the trolley and tied them to the car bumper. He then towed the trolley along the Pacific Highway until the wheels fell off the trolley.

The man got out of the car, unhooked the trolley and tied the rope to the safe, dragging it another 400 metres as sparks flew off the roadway.

When he reached his home unit, he hired an angle grinder and cut the backing plate off the safe. Lane Cove police went to the home unit after the man's neighbours had complained about the noise.

They found the man in a distraught state who told them he had found only $20 in the safe after he had finally opened it.

Police said it cost the man $50 to hire the angle grinder.

Communications and signals engineers are known and respected for their thoroughness and careful planning. They do not act on impulse but plan and design systems which are robust and have "fail-safe" operation and redundancy built in.

None the less, the unforseen does occur. It may pass un-noticed, it may be identified as an incident or it may become a disaster. The impact is nearly always determined by the timing. If confirmation of this is needed one need only refer to Mr Nock's book "Historic Railway Disasters" or any issue of the "Aviation Safety Digest".