The Silent Alarm

You've seen this before.

Someone on the ground knows something is wrong. They report it. The report gets acknowledged. And then... nothing changes.

In 1982, a worker at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal died after being splashed with phosgene. In 1983, there were 30 MIC gas leaks. Workers reported every one of them. Management acknowledged every one of them.

In late 1984, the vent-gas scrubber was turned off. The gas flare safety system had been out of action for three months. Tank E610 lost nitrogen pressure in October.

The warnings were in the system. The hierarchy filtered them out.

On December 3, 1984, 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas escaped in two hours. Between 3,800 and 16,000 people died.

This wasn't a failure of awareness. It was a failure of flow.

The workers who saw the cracks did their job. The information existed in maintenance logs, incident reports, complaints filed for years. But every layer it traveled through stripped away urgency until leadership received silence.

The Bhopal plant had eight shutdown devices. A safer operation would have required three times that number. But the real shortage wasn't equipment.

It was gates that forced bad news upward instead of letting it die in the middle.

You're not paranoid for suspecting your warnings get filtered. The Information Flow shows how to build gates that carry uncomfortable truths to the people who need to hear them.