[HN Gopher] The Derelict (2015)
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The Derelict (2015)
Author : EndXA
Score : 38 points
Date : 2025-01-17 12:46 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.damninteresting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.damninteresting.com)
| bell-cot wrote:
| From Wikipedia's account -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Morro_Castle_(1930)#Causes - the
| cause of the fire could be (in effect) an overheated storage
| locker full of oily rags.
| gwern wrote:
| I think OP makes a good case that the cause of the fire was
| probably the shortsighted poisoner, child rapist, human/dog
| murderer, embezzler, thief, and bomber who apparently had
| grudges against the captain who mysteriously died shortly
| before the fire mysteriously started at the worst time & place
| possible.
| bell-cot wrote:
| At least from Wikipedia's description - of the ship as a
| disastrously ill-designed firetrap, with lackluster officers
| and crew - there were an extremely large number of "worst
| times & places" for a fire to start.
|
| (BTW, you forgot to implicate the story's villain in the
| ship's poor design, weak cadre of officers, and the departed
| captain's slipshod safety training:)
| gwern wrote:
| That is the type of thinking I was criticizing. Your
| standard swiss-cheese complex-failure model doesn't apply
| when you are in an adversarial security setting.
|
| When you do a post-mortem on a complex failure, the outcome
| proves the accusation: "obviously the fire suppression was
| inadequate, because it didn't suppress the fire; QED". This
| sort of hindsight is fine for a regular failure, because
| the steps in the failure happening at all show that they
| had large probability of happening - if the fire
| suppression system let the whole ship burn down from a
| minor accidental fire in the writing room, it _was_
| obviously inadequate. (And so on for the other flaws.) But
| it doesn 't apply if you have an adversary, like a
| psychopath like Rogers. In security, you can have a failure
| which will happen once in the lifetime of the universe with
| random events - and which happens 100% of the time when
| there is an attack.
|
| Perhaps in reality the fire suppression method _was_ well-
| designed and adequate to the task... except that the
| attacker used an incendiary with its own oxidizer (the
| acid+powder) which _couldn 't_ be put out. Perhaps the
| 'poor design' wasn't so poor, and the attacker simply found
| the weak point. Perhaps the departed captain wasn't so bad,
| and it was the careful choice of poisoning him at the end
| of the shift to replace him with an officer near-delirious
| from sleep, so conked out he's asking if he's dreaming, and
| who couldn't even order an SOS until well after he
| should've. Perhaps the lack of fire alarm coverage in that
| one room wasn't a damning fault, because the attacker
| would've simply cut the wire before starting the fire if it
| had had coverage. (A random accidental fire cannot choose
| to ensure it goes undetected by cutting the alarm wire
| first. An intelligent attacker can.) And so on.
|
| When you are dealing with a technically sophisticated,
| patient, psychopathic attacker with zero remorse or concern
| for human life, who is an insider, and who has been casing
| the joint for months or years, and who will carefully wait
| for and arrange the worst possible circumstances, it may
| simply not be possible to harden the system against such an
| APT at acceptable cost and performance, particularly when
| the attacker is willing to put himself at mortal risk for
| hardly any apparent gain. (Notice that you aren't going on
| about all of the failures which let Rogers go through his
| whole life of crime - only about the ship. Why is the ship
| poorly designed but not society?) Most of society is like
| this: we cannot ensure zero crime or error or fault. There
| is no way to stop someone from, say, taking a kitchen knife
| and going out and stabbing people until the police shoot
| him, or from renting a truck and driving through a crowd of
| pedestrians before killing himself.
|
| So, the existence and likely culpability of Rogers
| completely changes the meaning of the post-mortem claims,
| and renders them a lot less credible given their naive view
| of all events as accidental and due to incompetence or bad
| design, rather than this extreme level of irrational,
| spiteful, self-destructive evil.
|
| > At least from Wikipedia's description
|
| The description which mentions barely anything about
| Rogers?
| bell-cot wrote:
| The article says that Rogers was a newcomer, who the
| captain had immediately made Chief Radio Operator. When
| normal practice would have been to make Rogers the
| Assistant to the longer-serving Alagna. On what are you
| basing your statement "[Rogers] apparently had grudges
| against the captain..."? The article is clear about
| _Alagna 's_ ongoing public disputes with the captain.
|
| I'll agree that Rogers' mental and moral fitness were
| dubious at best. But I see no mention of him being
| depressed, nor remotely suicidal. And especially in the
| 1930's, you'd need to be suicidal to set fire to the ship
| you were on, at sea, in 40-knot winds. What motive would
| Rogers have had to do that? His later behavior is
| obviously self-serving.
|
| I agree that things are very different when you're
| targeted by an A List adversary. But even _if_ such an
| adversary is present, the normal laws of physics are not
| suspended by Plot Fiat. Experienced marine engineer
| William McFee noted that the ship 's funnels were
| directly behind the locker where the fire started.
| Funnels clad in flammable materials, which would
| dangerously overheat if the boiler maintenance had been
| neglected. In an area with no fire detecting system. Then
| serious fire-fighting efforts were badly delayed, because
| nobody knew how to get the fire hose working. And
| Wikipedia notes that the ship was a fire-trap - with
| features such as broad wooden bypasses for the "fire
| doors", hidden above the wooden ceilings.
|
| If there's a closet full of oily rags in an old box
| factory, where the drunkard night watchman has passed out
| yet again, then no criminal mastermind is needed for the
| place to burn down. Though "criminal mastermind" does
| make a far more salable story.
| TomMasz wrote:
| This took an interesting turn. A sprinkler system might have
| helped but it's not mentioned as part of the changes in maritime
| regulations following the incident.
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(page generated 2025-01-19 23:01 UTC)