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First, I don’t think anybody thinks it couldn’t have been avoided, if they had kept power to the station. I think it could have been avoided if the backup power trucks had made it on time and been hooked up.

But ‘subject matter expert” doesn’t mean “expert” on the situation at hand. I would be very surprised to find that the engineers on-site didn’t know the basics of hooking up power to their pumps, or that they would have needed a retired engineer to tell them that they could break a hole in a wall without breaching the containment.

It seems likely there is a good reason they went through all the trouble of running new power lines from offsite, rather than airlifting a generator. It isn’t likely because they were stubborn either. Nor is there any real reason to believe that, having power back, they would have the pumps running if it was as easy as this expert claims. More likely there are things preventing his solution from working, things he has no knowledge of because he is not at the site.

It is fun to imagine that everybody is incompetent, except those who are far removed from the situation. Once in a while it is true, and that is a sad thing when it happens.

I am a trouble-shooter by trade, and I know that I can often step into a situation and recommend a solution nobody has thought of. When I do so, I often go through a list of 5-6 things they already DID try before I get to something they didn’t think about. And even that’s because I have certain expertise that isn’t widely shared. If the team was made up of people with my subject matter knowledge, it is unlikely I would be that helpful, except sometimes a fresh pair of eyes not tainted by the current thought process can help.

We are WAY past the time when the people at the station would be ignoring rational ideas for fixing their problem. But every person watching this has said “Gee, if they could just hook up power to the pumps and get them running again!!!”. That’s not really a “wild, out-of-the box” kind of input that you’d expect them to be surprised at.

But it seems like you really think that the entire nation of Japan, the entire working body at Tepco, has sat around for over a month, and none of them ever thought “Hey, what if we just hook power right up to our pumps?” Well, I don’t.