Reminds me of a time I was the engineering lead on a project building a big radar and when they were flusing out the cooling water one day at the test site they found plastic debris in the lines. I ordered them to shut it all down and flush the lines and finally we figured out that we had a defective valve that had a plastic ball inside to control water flow but which had broken down. We knew the source of the plastic but the issue was that we had no way of knowing if we'd gotten all of the stuff out or if any of it would lodge into the cooling water piping for the high power transmitter. If it did, it could cause the transmitter to burn up, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment toasted.
We had to make a call and this was my first big leadership job so I went to the bigshots, VP of engineering on down they all said 'wow, that's a tough decision you have. Let us know what happens.' Thanks, guys. Lead from behind I guess. So it was all on me.
Knowing I could cook the transmitter and end my career, I said 'enough is enough, turn it on and let's radiate.' It was fine. But I aged five years in the meantime.