Ooops. Janitor cuts power to a laboratory to shut off a freezer alarm, decades of work destroyed

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WhatInThe

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Oooops. A janitor decided to cut power to a laboratory/freezer after they became annoyed at a beeping alarm. It wound up cutting off power to a lab freezer in which decades of experiments/work were destroyed.

https://nypost.com/2023/06/25/annoy...cientific-work-causes-at-least-1m-in-damages/

On one hand the janitor was ignorant and dumb for cutting off power to anything. I didn't realize cleaning involved the switches in breaker boxes. On the other the lab/building manager should have had better procedures and controls for environmentally sensitive experiments.
 

I worked in a company with many labs and experiments going on ....

IMO the situation can be remedied by when teaching a new person .........for example you share the "BIG" picture instead of you only need to know x amount to mop attitude.....
if you tell someone WHY something must be done it is more effective then telling them after a accident.

Something like alarm going off report to XYZ ... not giving them an option to temp mute it as it says in article..
Signs are frankly seldom read and freezers/ refrigerators often had many on them.
The janitor most likely has moved on an doubt the third party cleaning group has $$$ to compensate.
 

I heard about a hospital that finally moved into the 20th century with a newly installed array of computers to do billing, keep patient records, monitor temperature and humidity in certain critical areas, etc. One night the janitor notice all those computer running but nobody was present. After consulting the the head night nurse, they used all of the computer hardware expertise and decided to turn all the power to the room off at a breaker box specially installed for that room. Millions of dollars of computer equipment were fried as a result of not being properly shut down. Records and test results were lost as the disk drives crashed. Modern equipment has protections against this problem, but back then, not so much.
 
Remy said:
As someone who has mopped floors and emptied trash for a living, I guess he should have stuck to that. Lawsuit? Who's going to get sued?
Click to expand...
By the time lawyers get finished, everybody and his grandmother will get sued. In the US, there are 1,300,000 lawyers and they all gotta eat, so they will find anyone to sue.
 

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