In an era of conservationism and recycling, it is surprising to realize how inefficiently the products of human intelligence are treated. Failure analysis reports, for example, are almost considered to be throw-away documents, assembled for only a short attention span. Modem information processing tools could help change that situation. The flexibility provided by these tools is tremendous once the initial investment has been made. In the forthcoming age of continuous requirements for lean materials performance, military systems will continue to need the highest levels of reliability and efficiency. In a context where the majority of corrosion problems are a direct result of compounded human and organizational errors, there is scope for considerable savings to budgets by improving the process by which we learn from the lessons of the past.
Paradoxically, throughout the last fifty years, as the knowledge of corrosion mechanisms and control has shown exponential growth paralleling the advancements in computer technologies, the cost of corrosion has apparently remained steady at ˜4% gross national product (GNP) [1-3]. Reasons for the continued incidence of corrosion failures have recently been proposed along with new strategies for controlling this serious and costly problem [4,5]. It was concluded that, while the need to learn lessons is clearly one cause of the continued high cost of corrosion, the problem is compounded by the complex interaction between materials, environments and people. The scientific approach to corrosion control has traditionally studied the materials interactions with environments, but the human influences have received little attention [6]. In fact, the nature of human influence on corrosion failures has been largely undocumented.
In 1994, a major report by a Ship Structure Committee of the US Coast Guard stated that Human and Organization Error (HOE) in the design, construction and reliability of marine structures had not been addressed previously, even though it was the major contributor to lack of reliability [7]. This 1994 report surveyed literature across a broad range of industrial structures from conventional buildings and foundations, bridges, dams, airframes, nuclear power plants and offshore platforms. The report also signaled some disturbing themes:
That >80% of failures associated with structures are due to HOE. Other work had previously reported that HOE was responsible for more than 40% of the failures in military systems [8];
In “active” systems where human activities are present in all life-cycle phases, including the long term operating phase, the majority of the HOE occurs during the operating phases.
The seriousness of the effects that materials degradation, and particularly corrosion, has on the structural integrity of military systems is well documented, but, unfortunately, the details of these effects are often lost in the noise of maintenance activities. A good example in support of that statement can be found in a recent report on the corrosion costs incurred by the USAF that concluded that while the corrosion problems carried a big price tag, no computerized records of these problems or of the measures to reduce them were kept [9].
