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CEP: Spotlight on Safety - The Importance of Considering the Highly Improbable (a.k.a. Black Swan Events)

Spotlight on Safety
February
2013
Louisa Nara

Improbable does not mean impossible. As engineers, we tend to consider improbable things that have happened, and discard or minimize the improbable things that (to our knowledge) have not happened. Many times when the question "can this occur?" has been asked during a hazard analysis, the response has been " this is not a credible scenario" - when in reality, it just has not happened...yet.
 

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