What do a 17th-century Swedish warship, an opulent Chicago theater and a Kansas City hotel “skyway” have in common? All met catastrophic ends–and they have important lessons to teach today’s innovators.

Here is a list of the examined examples, along with reference links to Wikipedia (except for the AT&T crash).

• The Vasa sinking
• The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse
• The Iroquois Theater blaze
• The Eschede train derailment
• The Ashtabula Creek Bridge wreck
• The St. Francis Dam burst
• The Atlantic Empress/Aegean Captain collision
• The AT&T network crash
• The 1965 Northeast blackout
• The Concorde crash

We’ll take more in-depth looks at some of these and many other examples in future posts and articles.

Genesis says a pre-paid power account cannot be shut off over the weekend and instead customers just go into debt.

But a computer error has made it impossible for customers nationwide to top up their accounts over the weekend, so at 8am Monday some were cut off without warning.

(From TVNZ)

Cutting off a customer’s power is pretty significant, particularly during cold weather conditions. And on weekends, when customers may not have a chance to recharge their account balance. That is obviously, why company spokespeople seemed convinced that such a thing would not happen.

The mistake came as the utilities department switched to a new billing system that is part of Palo Alto’s broader SAP network, said Tom Auzenne, assistant director of utility costumer support services.

The double-billing was not a computer glitch but a human error, he said. It affected some “bank draft” customers who give the city their bank account numbers so their payments can be withdrawn automatically each month.

Yes, there is definitely human error here. It is worth noting though that similiarly to the recent utility billing case in Texas, customers with automatic bill pay transfers were affected by this.

About 130,000 customers in the Oncor service area, including 6,000 with TXU Energy, may have received an inaccurate bill last month, utility officials say. Bills could be unusually high or possibly low.

The error is blamed on an Oncor computer glitch that caused incorrect usage and billing numbers to get passed on to some of the 70 or so retail electric providers that get their power through Oncor lines. Oncor, which covers a third of Texas, says it quickly fixed the glitch.

(From star-telegram)

Some companies passed the errors on to their customers, who ended up receiving wrong bills. At that point the situation also turned into a bit of a customer service fiasco:

Officer Kovach said her bill jumped from its usual $230 to $386. She called and complained and was told that she would get a corrected bill in 10-12 days. But it never arrived. She called and asked what she owed but was never told, she said.

Then a second bill came, and it was even higher. She spent another 90 minutes on the phone, she said, and asked for a supervisor. The supervisor said the first bill didn’t get fixed because her original call wasn’t handled by a supervisor.

She remembers asking, “Can you guarantee me that you will not cut me off?”

“Well, Ms. Kovach, I can’t assure you that,” the supervisor said.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she replied. “Your computer messed up. It’s your error, and you can’t assure me that my electricity won’t be cut off?”

It sounds like the staff was not well equipped to deal with this issue and/or was not easily able to take control using their own computer system. This was particularly irritating for those people who had elected to pay their bills via automatic, electronic transfers, as wrong amounts ended up being paid automatically, sometimes more than once.

It would be interesting to get more technical detail that outlines the causes of the problems surfaced.

The lesson for consumers here is to (at least) pay close attention to billing summaries.