BUSINESS AND TRAINING: MIKE'S MESSAGE
47
Learning from other
people’s mistakes
The readers of this column (both of them) will know that
one of my management principles is to learn from other
people’s failures and our own successes.
By Mike Muller
The benefit of this approach is that it encourages me
to talk to people from interesting places and, where
possible, to visit them.
In that spirit, I disembarked at Pisa Airport in Italy recently on
my way to a small conference organised by the International
Water Association — one of the more useful and practical of
the international groups in the water business.
When I enquired at the airport railway station about tickets to
Livorno where the meeting was being held, the guard threw
up his hands in horror. “Haven’t you heard?” he asked. “There
has been a great disaster, a flood, people killed!” Since I had
just come off a plane I had not heard. Worse was to follow:
“So, there are no trains and we do not know when they will
be able to run again.”
And indeed, all trains had been cancelled. But TrenItalia
did provide a bus, which eventually dropped everyone off
outside Livorno Station, much of which was clearly under
water. A big thunderstorm overnight had dropped 250mm
of rain in the coastal hills in a period of a couple of hours.
The resulting flash floods had overwhelmed the local
drainage system in some places.
Five of the nine people who died had drowned in their
basement flat when a local stormwater canal overtopped and
submerged the building in a sea of mud, just down the road
from my hotel. I was able to watch the recovery efforts for the
next three days as I walked past to the conference venue and
to get a sense of what had happened.
It is a common story: local drainage systems had not been
particularly well maintained. But the killer, quite literally,
www.plumbingafrica.co.za
seems to have been the fact that a large new shopping
complex had been opened upstream, surrounded by
thousands of square metres of parking. That may well have
produced the extra peak of runoff that caused the worst of
the damage.
Given this background, I was pleased to see that the City of
Joburg and the professional engineers of SAICE got together
last month to organise training workshops on implementing
the city’s stormwater regulations — even if it is seven years
after they were promulgated.
One of the provisions of the regulations is that developers of
‘major projects’ must take particular measures to ensure that
the rate of stormwater runoff is no greater after construction
than it was before — quite a challenge. But that is the kind of
action needed to prevent disasters such as that in Livorno.
Mike Muller
Mike Muller is a visiting
adjunct professor at the
Wits University School
of Governance and a
former Commissioner
of the National Planning
Commission and Director
General of Water Affairs.
Of course, we know that the performance of buildings and
drainage systems is only as good as its maintenance. So,
we should not forget about the floods in Gauteng a couple
of years ago that also drowned a number of people on our
highways — the evidence was that blocked drains did
not help!
The key issue, though, is that regulations are only as good
as compliance. And, as the people of Livorno remarked,
we should not take compliance for granted. In many
parts of Italy, the Mafia in and out of government decides
who complies with what. The danger, in South Africa, is
a similar combination of impunity and unwillingness of
authorities to take action when they should. Hopefully we
are learning, even if it is from our own mistakes as well as
those of others. PA
November 2017 Volume 23 I Number 9