RE: Value added (or lost) by technical communication?

["Bonnie Granat" <bgranat -at- granatedit -dot- com>]

There's always the classic Three Mile Island memo, too, if you can find it
online (known as "the Michaelson Report," I believe). 

Excerpt from http://www.earthhealing.info/CH.pdf:

"Many months before the TMI accident an Oak Ridge National Laboratory
engineer named Michaelson had written a memo warning that this precise
situation was possible and that a nuclear cooling system that was boiling
dry could be mistaken for one "going solid" if control room operators relied
on the pressurizer level reading. This memo, which later became known to
accident investigators as the Michaelson Report, received only cursory
attention at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal
government's nuclear watchdog, and was passed on to nuclear utilities
without any urgency. James Floyd, Unit Two Operations Supervisor did not
know about the Michaelson Report until two or three weeks after the
accident."

I had a copy of the memo as part of the class materials at Northeastern
University when I got my master's in technical and professional writing back
in 1995. It was fairly short (maybe six paragraphs that one would definitely
call an understatement that did not arouse the appropriate concern). There
was no warning in it.

Bonnie Granat
http://www.GranatEdit.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> techwr-l-bounces+bgranat=granatedit -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com 
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+bgranat=granatedit -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l
> .com] On Behalf Of Dan Goldstein
> Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 9:04 AM
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: RE: Value added (or lost) by technical communication?
> 
> Like these?
> 
> <http://poetslife.blogspot.com/2006/03/poor-documentation-costs.html>
> 
> <http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/>
> 
> <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20041019/ai_n
> 11485316>
> 
> <http://www.iddmagazine.com/news/22645-1.html>


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