Learn from what goes wrong

I’ve been following the news of the recent floods in Vermont and upstate New York quite closely. The area received a summer’s worth of rain in the period of a day a few weeks ago.

The photos are shocking of course, but I’m drawn to the story because during the summer of 2011, my family accidentally wound up seeing the aftermath of flooding in the same area. Hurricane Irene blew through and, in the initial reports (looking just at the coast), it hadn’t seemed to cause too much damage. So after the storm was gone, we started driving from Pennsylvania toward Maine as we’d planned, taking the inland route instead of I-95 up the coast, just in case.?

We soon learned that this was a big mistake — the inland damage was far more extensive than the initial reports had suggested. As we got to upstate New York, we kept getting detoured around closed roads (and eventually couldn’t turn around as the flood waters kept rising and more roads were closed). At one point we drove on a bridge over an absolutely terrifyingly high river. Seeing that, we decided to stay put if we could, and wound up staying at a hotel that mercifully agreed to check us in for a night despite its entire basement being flooded and the plumbing being compromised. The next day in Vermont we found small towns with their downtowns and old bridges just washed out.?

More than 30 bridges were destroyed in Hurricane Irene. But reports a few days after this summer’s floods found that only a few bridges were destroyed this time around. As they rebuilt after 2011, engineers made certain changes, like limiting the number of large support piers in the rivers — which tended to block the debris that can come down from the hills in a flood. The pressure of built up debris would then cause the bridges to fail. This summer, there was more give and more of the bridges held.

The region certainly has a lot of rebuilding to do this summer as well, but at least fewer towns are completely cut off from rescuers and supplies (as happens when a town’s main bridge comes crashing down). I thought the smart rebuilding was a great example of learning from what went wrong. No one can ever predict exactly what will go wrong in the future — there’s that adage about generals always re-fighting the last war — but water does tend to behave the same way in similar circumstances. Better-designed bridges changed the outcome.

Few of us really like to look at what goes wrong in life. In work contexts, mistakes can be embarrassing, so people just want to move on. And it does make sense to look forward. But if mistakes and crises and emergencies can be looked at more analytically, without focusing on blame, there can be a lot to learn.?

I know my family learned not to take a road trip after a hurricane! During the summer of 2021, after Hurricane Ida hit Pennsylvania, we waited to start a planned drive north until we were certain the roads were open. The trip went a lot better!??