There are something to be learned with the Tragedy in Santa Maria

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about the tragedy at the nightclub Kiss in Santa Maria, Brazil. From the viewpoint of project and risk management, Ricardo raises points and makes us think, so that accidents like this never happen again.

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Episode transcript

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Speaker 1 (4s): Hello, everyone. Today's is a very, very sad day in Brazil everybody's morning for the tragedy that happened in the South of Brazil in a disco, a were more than 230 lives, where, where killed in a fire. And it's, it's very first, it's very hard to see this, the families and everybody completely destroyed by this Tragedy. But at the same time I was driving and thinking, say, look, why is this can happen?

We are in 2013 and why such a basic set of mistakes and how we as project managers can learn from what happened in the disco in Santa Maria first, now, or the news, our covering what happened. There are only one emergency exit. Mmm. The security people were not training for this kind of event. So, and then we see a lot of very basic things that if we plan in order to prevent this strategy will not be happen.

We need to happen. So it's very, so if we look back at the construction, only one exit, so our people license one place with only one, and then you put security people, a base load on the news at taling that the people cannot leave without pay in the middle of the fire. So the lack of training, I was looking the people in the emergency trying to destroy one wall to get access to this with a lot of passion, a lot of desire to destroy, but people get killed so easy if they don't have air to breath.

So there is no time to do that. So the emergency response, so its a lack of small events that drove us to this terrible results. And if we see the project of the event of that day, that project that started something like midnight up to 5:00 AM how the people evaluate the risks of using devices that produce a fire inside of a completely close it environment.

This is almost unbelievable how people do not think about that. The group, the band could use any order device to raise attention and to do something fancy, but they decided to use fire to demonstrate and this kind of pure a technical effects. And this is start at everything added with the lack of training with only one next is it. So people start to get crazy, trying to understand.

So for us as project manager, we are building like in my life, we are building roads in the most remote places. We need to think that the bridges can fall. We need to think that the building's can collapse. We need to understand this. We need to understand that we need to prevent and prevention is far more easy. So it's very, very important. We are facing every two, three months a Tragedy or it's a nice school in Connecticut or its the hurricane or its this tragedy in the disco Brazil we need to stop and try to learn and try to sell, see how we can handle this kind of Tragedy in a better way, how we can spend it.

I don't know if it's greatness. I don't know if it's a lack of time. I don't know if it's the crazy deadlines that everybody puts into the life, but people are forgetting to analyze the risks and to prevent them and the more deeper Wei and the cost, its not extremely high. It's some payable with and you have now more than 230 lives of young people that everybody's seen on the Niels.

Everybody is shocked saying how this can happen. The last huge fire in Brazil wasn't the sixties. When we are in 2013, this right now is just unacceptable. And I don't want to find a guilty because the guilty will not bring back those lives, but we need to find ways of understanding this and bring it up is through our projects today to make sure that this kind of thing I think will not happen again, never to Bei that Brazilian people in Spain, the bait that these families are paying.

It's just unbelievable. It's just unbelievable. So I want to dedicate this podcast to this people and at least let's learn a new, if that is and that's project managers, we need to be responsible for thinking about this and drive in this into our organizations. When we do projects like this, I hope you enjoyed this message and my condolences to the families and see you next week with another five minutes, be on podcasts.

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There are something to be learned with the Tragedy in Santa Maria

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