Challenger disaster - Essay Example

Activities carried out in programs that do not have established good house keeping conditions are also unsafe, as is the lack of maintenance of equipment. Finally, where the workers have not been prepared or have not been trained on how to respond to incidents like employee injury, fire, and spills, the working conditions are unsafe (Ohnysty 57). The training and education of the employees on the manner in which to conduct their activities in safety aids, in the minimization of exposure risks, and this is a critical element for all complete health and safety programs in the workplace.

The training must involve how to carry out the activities safely, as well as ensuring that they comprehend the hazards inherent in their jobs on a day-to-day basis. It also needs to provide workers with information that covers how they should protect their fellow co-workers and themselves. However, safety is not achievable via reliability alone. Some systems in the workplace cannot be made safe from failure, especially where continuous availability is required. Lack of recovery procedures, fault tolerance, as well as lack of redundancy provisions, makes the activities performed in these conditions unsafe.

In addition, systems in the workplace that are less sensitive for quality induced uncertainty or reliability prediction errors are also unsafe (Ohnysty 59). Finally, systems that do not have failure detection, as well as avoidance and correction of common causes of failure lead to unsafe conditions of work because of low system level reliability. 2. What responsibility did the engineers at Thiokol have to their company versus the general public and the astronauts on that flight? Understanding the code of ethics for professional technologists is a convention among professional technologists.

It aids us in explaining why technologists cannot merely depend on private conscience during the practice of his/her profession (Ohnysty 68). This is in spite of how good their private conscience may be, which means that technologists must integrate what the engineers’ organization has to say concerning what the technologist is required to do. What the conscience tells one to do in the absence of a particular convention is not what the same conscience would tell one to do with the presence of the convention.

Where the code of ethics is a morally permissible convention, it guides a technologist as to what to expect reasonably from one another. It is essential to know the code of ethics so as to know, for instance, whether as a technologist to weigh simply safety with disregard to the manager’s wishes or to give preference to safety issues against the wishes of the of the company. The code of ethics provides a guide on what to expect the other members of their profession to aid them to do. If prioritizing safety first were part of being a technologist, the technologists at Thiokol would expect their managers to support them.

For instance, if the managers had asked them to think, not as technologists, but as managers, the engineer should have responded that they were there in their capacity as technologists (Ohnysty 69). This would have been the response of a technologist, although the question would arise as to whether, overall, this would have been the right thing. Technologists are not merely the members of their profession but are also persons with responsibilities and cannot escape punishment,