Interstellar, Murphy’s Law & Safety

If you watched Interstellar you should heard the word “Murphy’s law”. It’s also in the trailer if you can remember. But if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t be afraid, you can still safely read this article!

Murphy’s Law states “If anything can go wrong, will go wrong”. Look into this phrase carefully and you will see that it is a very powerful phrase. Imagine what can go wrong around you, light bulb not working, air condition broke down, water tap leaking, rain seeping through bad seal, your car won’t start (only when you want to use it!), broken bike chain, and millions more. Even a comet could hit and destroy our planet. It is just a matter of time until anything ‘will’ go wrong.

How is the Murphy’s Law related to safety? Well, if you are a safety engineer, you may have sit in a HAZOP workshop and discuss about the various causes for ‘No Flow’ or ‘High Pressure’, and often enough, you will hear people say something like “That pipe couldn’t be blocked” or “The design is so robust that the high pressure can’t happen” or “No people will close that valve”. If you are not a safety engineer, you may also hear those phrases in the workshop too!

Now that you heard of the Murphy’s Law, do you want to rethink on that? Let’s look at the blocked piping example. Is it true that the pipe couldn’t be blocked at all? What if someone forget a wrench, gloves, or a helmet inside the pipe during construction? What if there is produced sand from the well and it build up inside the pipe? What if hydrates were formed? By simply say that it is impossible to happen, you could miss a chance to develop safety barriers and thus could lead to an incident in the future. The key message here is to think hard and look into every possible aspect when you really wanted to say that “This couldn’t happen” in a workshop.

It is true that we can’t design the system to prevent everything from happening like massive earthquake or EF5 tornado (of course these can go wrong and so it ‘will’ go wrong). The concept associated with the Murphy’s Law in safety is “Frequency”. The consequence of EF5 tornado is undoubtedly destructive but what is the frequency or likelihood of this happening on the Himalayas? Pretty low, right? The combination of consequence and frequency is called “Risk”. Each company has its own risk criteria and when a scenario create a risk level that meet the criteria, then you start working on how to prevent it or mitigate it consequences.

Last but not least, if you are a fan of Christopher Nolan, Interstellar is a must for you 🙂