Has it always been this way? I can't imagine it has. As I see stories of the water in Flint, the massive gas leak in SoCal, the water contamination in Sacramento, the Navy boat that breaks down and gets captured by the Iranians, etc...I find that I just say, "Oh yeah, right out of Atlas Shrugged." When I actually study the details of some of these follies (in my engineering work) I see a commonality. There's always just a long line of errors building up to the disaster. I look at it and think, "How can there have been nobody who said, 'Hey...wait a minute.'" Then, often it's that there is a total abandonment of engineering principles. That troubles me a lot. So many of these things are not complicated to prevent. Our society is going through a very strange phase where engineering is ignored, citizens put in harms way by bureaucrats who don't seem to really care. The head water guy here in Sacramento was asked on the news, basically, "Why did you let poison water flow out to the population for so long?" With a perfectly straight face he says, "To save money." But, it actually cost more to poison the water, vs. the previous method.

WTH is going on?