The Choreography of Avoidance

The HMI screen at 2:17 a.m. is a wash of flickering amber and the kind of deep, pulsating red that usually suggests a system is reconsidering its commitment to remaining in one piece. The night superintendent, a man named Marcus whose eyes have been bloodshot since the late nineties, is currently ignoring the ‘Low Pressure’ strobe on his console to focus on a half-eaten sandwich that looks as tired as he does. On the radio, Line 7 is screaming. They are 47 minutes behind their production quota for the shift, and the floor manager is already demanding to know why the steam flow has dropped. It is a familiar dance, a choreography of avoidance that defines more industrial facilities than any of us would care to admit on a LinkedIn post.

I’ve spent the last 17 years managing the digital reputations of companies that swear they prioritize safety above all else, and yet, the gap between what is written in the annual report and what is happening in the boiler room at three in the morning is wide enough to lose a freight train in. People like to talk about reliability as a series of checklists, but in reality, reliability is a psychological battle against the urge to just ‘make it through the shift.’ We are currently running a facility that is functionally held together by steam, prayer, and a collective agreement to pretend we don’t hear the whistling coming from the main header. It is the normalization of the abnormal, a slow descent where 87 percent of your alarms are ignored because they’ve been ringing for three years.

The Funeral for Obvious Truths

This reminds me of a particularly dark moment in my own life last month. I was at a funeral for a distant cousin, a somber affair filled with heavy silence and the smell of lilies that were slightly past their prime. During the eulogy, the priest made a comment about the deceased’s ‘unwavering punctuality,’ which was objectively hilarious to anyone who knew that the man had been late to his own wedding by 47 minutes and once missed a flight because he fell asleep in a terminal bathroom.

Operations just keyed the mic again. They want to know if they can push the boiler to 107 percent capacity just to finish the batch of resin. They don’t want to hear about the vibrations in the feed pump or the fact that the stack temperature is climbing into the ‘melt the sensors’ range. They want the batch. This is the ‘One More Run’ syndrome. It is the most dangerous phrase in the English language for anyone who works with pressurized vessels. It’s the belief that the physics of metallurgy will somehow negotiate with the demands of the quarterly shipping schedule. We treat the physical limits of our equipment like they are flexible suggestions, rather than hard laws of the universe that do not care about our bonuses. See example component integrity here: DHB Boiler.

The Cost of Honesty: Managing Denial

I once spoke with a lead engineer who had worked at a paper mill for 37 years. He told me that the hardest part of his job wasn’t fixing the machines; it was convincing the accountants that a $77,000 gasket was cheaper than a $7,000,000 catastrophe. He described his job as ‘managing the denial.’ He knew every leak, every hiss, and every tremor in the floorboards. He knew which valves were seized open and which ones were held together by 17 layers of heat-resistant tape. But he also knew that as long as the steam kept moving, the people upstairs would consider the maintenance budget a profit center to be raided. We have taught an entire generation of managers that downtime is a personal failure, rather than a necessary ritual of respect for the machines that feed us.

When you look at a high-performance system, like a DHB Boiler assembly, you realize that engineering discipline is actually a form of institutional honesty. You cannot lie to a steam drum. It doesn’t care about your political standing in the company or how many times you’ve won ‘Manager of the Month.’ If the chemistry is off, or the thermal stresses are uneven, the metal will eventually scream. The tragedy of modern industry is that we have become experts at silencing the human scream long before we address the mechanical one. We create cultures where the person who points out the leak is seen as a ‘negative’ influence on the team’s morale. We prefer the quiet, expensive lie of a slow failure over the loud, cheap truth of a scheduled shutdown.

The Annoying One in the Room

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Most corporate disasters start with a single person deciding not to be the ‘annoying one’ at a meeting. Imagine 27 people sitting in a boardroom, all of them noticing that the numbers don’t add up, but nobody wanting to stop the momentum.

– David H.L., Crisis Communicator

It’s the same in the control room. The superintendent knows the pressure drop is coming from a thinning wall in the heat exchanger. He knows it. But if he calls for a shutdown, the plant manager will spend the next 77 days making his life a living hell. So, he waits. He hopes the failure happens on the next shift. He hopes it’s someone else’s problem. We have built an entire economic engine on the hope that the bill comes due when we are no longer in the room.

He calls the floor. ‘We’re dropping the load,’ he says. The silence on the other end of the radio is heavy. It’s the sound of a thousand excuses dying at once. The floor manager starts to argue, bringing up the $177,000 worth of product that will be lost. Marcus doesn’t even listen. He just watches the trend line. He’s done being a character in the company’s fiction.

The Dignity of Maintenance

We often think of industrial accidents as sudden events, but they are almost always the conclusion of a long, boring story about neglected maintenance and silenced experts. We treat the ‘hero’ who fixes a broken pipe in the middle of the night with more reverence than the ‘boring’ technician who prevented the pipe from breaking in the first place. This warped incentive structure ensures that we stay in a state of constant, low-level crisis. It makes the job feel exciting, sure, but it’s the excitement of a gambler who knows they are eventually going to lose their shirt. I’ve managed the reputations of companies after the smoke clears, and the first thing they always ask is ‘How do we make sure people know we care about safety?’ The answer is always the same: you should have cared when it was quiet and boring.

There is a certain dignity in a machine that is well-maintained. It has a different hum, a different vibration. It doesn’t sound like it’s fighting itself. But getting to that point requires a level of vulnerability that most institutions can’t handle. It requires admitting that we don’t know everything, and that we are subservient to the physical realities of the equipment we operate. My mistake at the funeral was laughing at the absurdity of a false narrative, but perhaps the real mistake is that we don’t laugh more often at the absurdity of our daily work lives. We should laugh when we are told that ‘safety is our number one priority’ while being asked to run a boiler with 37 active bypasses. We should laugh because the alternative is to take the lie seriously, and that is how people get hurt.

The Silence After the Storm

By 4:47 a.m., the plant is cooling down. The silence is jarring. Without the constant roar of the steam, you can hear the birds starting to wake up in the trees outside the perimeter fence. The night superintendent is filling out his report. He doesn’t mention the sandwich. He doesn’t mention the 7 minutes he spent staring at the HMI wishing he was anywhere else. He just records the pressures and the times. He did the hard thing. He stopped the denial before the metal stopped for him.

Tomorrow, he will be called into a meeting to explain why the production targets weren’t met. He will sit there and listen to people who have never held a pipe wrench tell him about efficiency. He will probably just nod and wait for the meeting to end. But he knows, and the boiler knows, that they are still here to fight another day. And in this industry, sometimes that is the only victory you get.