Roland Perry said:

In article , Chris Game
writes
The faults were generally reported as 'unrelated'. Do you know
better?

I haven't seen any reports that used the word "unrelated".

The Energy Minister's comments on the BBC on Friday.


For example:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3190405.stm

That report is entirely consistent with a theory that the second fault
was triggered by the first. It even includes the expression "chain of
events".

The simplistic journalist's term 'Chain of Events' doesn't imply one
event caused the next in the chain, it merely means one followed
another. As yet there's no 'theory' to connect the two.

My point is that if they're not related (i.e. with a common cause)
then it's stretching the idea of co-incidence a bit to imagine two
events happening within seven seconds.

This point came up in the Three Mile Island enquiry, where apparently
unrelated systems failed at the same time, the cause eventually being
traced to design faults. The kind of reliability calculations that
people thought protected them against disaster were thus found to be
wrong (systems that were thought to be independent weren't, and
probabilities therefore couldn't be multiplied together).

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Chris Game chrisgame@!yahoo!dotcodotuk
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