Brady Heywood Podcast

A show about engineering failures and disasters. We examine the technical, human and organisational causes of failure, and explore why our decision-making is not nearly as rational as we’d like to thi…

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Piper Alpha - Trailer
On the night of the 6th of July, 1988 an explosion onboard the offshore Piper Alpha oil platform led to a raging inferno. There were 226 people onboard . What followed was an incredible story of the men who desperately tried to survive the disaster, and the 167 men who lost their lives that night…
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Announcement: The Brady Heywood Podcast is coming back
The Brady Heywood Podcast is coming back and the first episode drops on Tuesday 3 November. Instead of standalone episodes, we'll be doing limited series' where we cover one story or topic across several episode released weekly. The first series is Piper Alpha, one of the worst offshore disasters …
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Introducing 'Simplifying Complexity'
As you can tell by the title of this episode this isn’t a normal episode of The Brady Heywood Podcast. In today’s episode we introduce you to a new show that we’ve been working on called Simplifying Complexity, a podcast all about complexity science. Simplifying Complexity is all about understandi…
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Miami Bridge Failure - Part 3
In today's episode, we bring to a close our three-part series on the collapse of a pedestrian bridge in Miami, Florida, in 2018. In part one, you heard about the cracks in the bridge and how nothing was done about them. And in part two, you heard about the serious errors that were made in the brid…
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Miami Bridge Failure - Part 2
Today's episode is the second of a three-part series on the 2018 collapse of the International University Pedestrian Bridge in Miami, Florida. In our last episode, you heard how a pedestrian bridge under construction at the Florida International University collapsed in 2018 and killed six people. …
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Miami Bridge Failure - Part 1
Today's episode is the first of a three-part series about the 2018 collapse of the Florida International University pedestrian bridge in Miami, Florida. In this part, you'll hear how the signals which could have prevented the collapse of the bridge were ignored, leading to the deaths of six people…
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The Brady Review
Today's episode is a little different. It explores 'The Brady Review', a report Brady Heywood undertook on the mining and quarrying industry in Queensland, Australia. From January 2000 until the end of July 2019, 47 people lost their lives in the mining and quarrying industry in Queensland, Austra…
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The Pike River Mine Disaster - Part 3
CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains vivid descriptions of how the miners, who lost their lives in the disaster, died. Listener discretion is advised. In this final episode of our three-part series on the Pike River Mine disaster, we bring the story to a close. We examine what took place on …
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The Pike River Mine Disaster - Part 2
In part one of this three-part series on the Pike River mine disaster, you heard what took place in the minutes, hours and days following the methane explosion at the mine. In this episode, we’ll step back and look at the history of the mine. You’ll hear how the factors that led to the explosion d…
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The Pike River Mine Disaster - Part 1
CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains vivid descriptions of the moments that the disaster occurred. Listener discretion is advised. On the 19th of November 2010, New Zealand experienced one of its worst mining disasters when there was an explosion deep within the Pike River coal mine. Today’s…
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