I owe you an explanation.
Between October 17 and November 1, Safety Intel missed eight days in your inbox. Not because there was nothing to send. The issues were written, researched and sourced on schedule — they went up on the website and never went out as email. If you were reading along, you had no way to know they existed.
The cause was boring and entirely mine. The last step of publishing each morning ran through a single machine in my office. When that machine was asleep or signed out of beehiiv, the issue got built, staged, and then stopped one click short. I was traveling. Nobody was there to click.
What you missed
All nine are live on the site now, dated to the days they belong to. If you only read one, make it Donora or Sandoz.
Oct 17 — The Fire Was Under Their Feet — twelve firefighters, and a renovated cellar nobody had a record of. 23rd Street Fire, 1966.
Oct 18 — It Came Down on the School — Aberfan, 1966. A spoil tip everyone could see and nobody owned.
Oct 19 — One Valve, Twenty-Three Men — Phillips Pasadena, 1989. One of the most important stories in all of process safety.
Oct 22 — The Logs Said Clean — Didion Milling. The paperwork said the dust was handled.
Oct 24 — They Called It a Plane Crash — the Nedelin catastrophe, 1960, and the schedule pressure that lit it.
Oct 25 — Forty Hours on the Reef — the Princess Sophia, 1918. Forty hours to act, and nobody did.
Oct 26 — They Ran to the Back of the Building — a fireworks factory in Kosambi, 2017, and one usable exit.
Oct 27 — The Mill Said It Was the Weather — Donora, 1948. Twenty dead, six thousand sick, and a company explanation that held for years.
Nov 1 — They Saved the Building and Poisoned the Rhine — Sandoz, 1986. The fire brigade did everything right and killed a river doing it.
The part I am not going to dodge
This newsletter runs on one idea: failures come from systems, not from the person standing closest when it breaks.
Then my own publishing chain turned out to have exactly what I write about every morning. One undocumented single point of failure. No alarm when it failed. No backup for the one step that actually mattered. And the monitoring I had built to catch this told me the website looked fine — because that is all it was ever watching. It was never watching the part that reaches you.
Latent conditions, all of them, drilled into the system long before the week I happened to be away.
I have moved the send off that machine. Publishing no longer depends on one laptop being awake and signed in, which is the specific hole that put eight days of silence in your inbox.
Thanks for still being here.
— Rob
P.S. If your own operation has a step that only works when one particular person is at their desk, that is the same hole. Go find it before it finds you.