Originally a comment by James Garnett on It’s not about being a disruptor.

Sort of a side-note, but: it’s practically a truism among those of us who are involved in dangerous activities that it’s “never the gear that fails”. That is, it’s human miscalculations that lead to accidents and death. It’s not snapped ropes or slipped gear or failed parachutes, it’s almost always a bad decision somewhere along the line. Of course, yes, sometimes it’s failed gear, but it happens so rarely in our highly regulated and tested worlds that the exceptions just serve to prove the rule. There’s an entire publication dedicated to analysis of climbing accidents in North America that is published each year, “Accidents in North American Mountaineering” and time after time after time it’s a bad human decision that leads to the accidents. Even when the gear fails, it is usually traceable to a bad decision, like the death of Todd Skinner in October, 2006: Skinner, a famous Yosemite pioneer climber, died when the belay loop on his harness snapped, on a climb just before which he acknowledged that his harness was over-worn and dangerous and should be replaced. Yes, the harness failed, but the real failure was Skinner’s decision to risk one more climb on a piece of safety gear that was past its usable lifetime–and he knew it.

Similarly, the real failure here was Rush’s belief in his own opinions at the expense of the certification of the gear that he was using. After SAR missions, we hold debriefings in which we try to determine what decision was the trigger that led to the callout. What human decision started the chain of events that led to us being out in the field trying to rescue a person, or worse, trying to recover a body? There is always something. The skier who decided to make tracks in the backcountry even though he knew that NWAC has predicted “extreme avalanche hazard” in the skier’s preferred area, perhaps. Or the climber who decided to climb one more time on a rope that had suffered too many factor-two falls and was beyond its usable life. Or the amateur submariner who didn’t understand materials science who thought that those people who did were all Chicken Little.

The fact is, reality doesn’t care. Reality doesn’t give a dry fart about anyone’s bloated opinions of themselves and their presumed expertise. At the risk of introducing levity where perhaps there shouldn’t be any this soon, I like to tell my mountaineering students (when I had them, as I don’t teach those classes at the moment) that reality is like a cat: we conform to its ways, it doesn’t change to fit our expectations.