Owning up to our misbehaving systems: The complex and multifaceted assessment of failure

Water system failures, whether or not system hydraulics plays a central role in their occurrence, can have huge economic and human costs. Yet such costs are seldom comprehensively evaluated when systems are designed, operated and maintained. This is in one sense understandable since the associated costs are borne by a wide variety of stakeholders, ranging from system owners and users, to tax payers and inconvenienced third parties who must in some way accommodate the resulting interruptions and disruptions to their life or businesses. Moreover, the associated costs of failure often propagate outward from their location of first occurrence, creating a wide range of cascading consequences that are sometimes substantial yet difficult to trace, complex to evaluate and possessing ambiguous terminations. There are subtleties and ambiguities too, since not all failures are human disasters, and some initially bad consequences can have unexpected benefits, particularly when the resulting lessons lead to better ways of designing, operating or rehabilitating systems. This paper explores in a preliminary way some of this vexing and fascinating ground with the sole goal of provoking a greater discussion and possible consideration both of these essential (and sometimes problematic) systems and how they can at times misbehave.