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Notes -
Seconding Bhopal: I have to remind myself that it's not common knowledge outside of industrial safety or PlainlyDifficult followers, despite being the largest industrial disaster of the century by at least one and possibly two orders of magnitude.
((But then again, there's a lot of people who don't remember much about the Beruit explosion, and it rhymed with a couple other (distant) followers for big industrial accidents.))
Focusing too much on individual incidents can be tricky, though. Colgan Air 3407 has had a massive aviation impact and is part of the reason the commercial pilot shortage got so sharp so fast, but the reason it did and similar or larger incidents didn't. Is that because the action came about as a result of the multiple incidents all together? Or because the action had other, non-incident motivations? Does the distinction make sense in this case? If not, does it make sense in broader cases? Was Skyline Towers a warning for Willow Island, or were they two different aspects of a same underlying problem? Was Hyatt Regency uniquely dangerous, or just unusually obvious?
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