NATIONAL
March 1, 2008 | From Times Wire Reports
A power failure that plunged large parts of the state into the dark this week was caused primarily by human error, the state's largest electric company said. Florida Power & Light issued a report saying that a field engineer was to blame for the failure, which affected more than 1 million people.
ENTERTAINMENT
May 28, 1994
Re Robert W. Welkos' article "Why 'Being Human' Misfired" (May 17): His portrait of why the film is failing to reach audiences is revealing of the business machinations of Hollywood, but not very telling about the movie. Welkos explains that when National Research Group asked people how they'd like to see a movie about a man searching for his place in the world, "only 2% of males over 25 said it was their first choice of a film to watch this weekend while 1% of males and females under 25 said it was their first choice."
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
August 24, 1998 | 4KEN REICH
Now, it seems funny. But for a few moments, it was anything but. Emerging from the swank Rio Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas early last Monday morning, I was shocked to find that my car was missing from guest parking, where I had left it the afternoon before. Obviously, it had to have been stolen. Mentally, I made plans to rent a car to get myself and my guests back to Los Angeles, where I would have to buy a new car two or three years early.
NEWS
September 17, 2008 | Najmedin Meshkati and James Osborn, Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of civil/environmental and industrial and systems engineering at USC, created USC's Transportation Safety Program in 1992. James Osborn, whose mother, Maureen Osborn, was killed by a Metrolink train in a 2006 grade-crossing accident, is an engineer and a rail safety advocate in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Friday's tragic Metrolink crash in Chatsworth, which killed 25 people, was not the only fatal rail accident last week. Less than an hour after the Chatsworth crash, a car was struck by a Metrolink train in Corona and the driver killed in a grade-crossing accident. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, 74 people have died in Metrolink crashes since 1999 in California. And in a total of 821 accidents, 90 people have died on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's L.A.-Long Beach Blue Line from its inception in July 1990 to July 2008.
NEWS
May 20, 1986 | WILLIAM J. EATON, Times Staff Writer
The chief designer of the Chernobyl atomic plant said Monday that he believes human error and not a technical failure led to the worst disaster in the history of the nuclear power industry. Ivan Y. Yemelyanov, a non-voting member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, also said in an interview with Western reporters that the Soviet Union does not build containment domes over its reactors because they do not guarantee safety and can lead to a false sense of security.
NEWS
October 3, 1992 | MELISSA HEALY, TIMES STAFF WRITER
A day after a U.S. Navy missile killed five Turkish sailors and injured 13 others during an exercise in the Aegean Sea, Defense Department officials said that a preliminary investigation points to human error, rather than mechanical malfunction, as the most likely cause of the accident. The episode occurred about 3 p.m. PDT Thursday as the aircraft carrier Saratoga was circling the Turkish destroyer Muavenet in a mock-hostile encounter on the high seas.