Most Expensive Mistakes In All History - Part 3

Everyone makes

mistakes

, but even some of the smallest

mistakes

can have colossal consequences that end up costing an absolute fortune, so continuing with

part

s one and two, here are even bigger mistakes with price tags that will blow your mind. The Nan Fang Ao Bridge was an arch bridge linking two sides of Taiwan's Nan Feng Au Fishing Port, but the 460-foot-long structure was hit by a monumental catastrophe on October 1, 2019 when an unsuspecting oil tanker passed over it. . The entire bridge suddenly deformed and collapsed 60 feet into the waters below the tanker. It briefly looked like he was going to make it, but he was also sent hurtling toward the harbor as he fell.

Three transport ships were crushed under tons of falling steel and concrete, while another 500 were trapped inside the port. The collapse cost six fishermen their lives and another 10 people were injured, but the price of this crisis would soon increase even more because this bridge was only 20 years old. An investigation was launched into the cause of its collapse. At first many blamed the wind and rain from a typhoon that had hit the port several days earlier, but it was soon revealed that this accident had been going on for years. Rain and salt water had seeped into the anchoring mechanisms over the years, causing the metal and steel cables to rust in some places.

They were so corroded that cross sections revealed them to be only 22 percent functional and, to make matters worse, no inspections had been carried out on the bridge for over four years, it was soon discovered that poor management of the bridge was responsible for that these defects were not detected in the inspection reports that were conducted. After the catastrophic course, the accident ultimately cost the government more than 160 thousand dollars in compensation and estimates for a replacement bridge began at a whopping 16.8 million dollars, but that figure quickly rose to $29.3 million as more safety measures were implemented. put everything in place to ensure that a preventable disaster like this doesn't happen again, and speaking of preventable disasters, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons below.

Where was the Hubble mirror fiasco in April 1990 after decades of planning and work on the famous Hubble? A telescope worth $1.5 billion at the time was launched into space. It was designed to send images of distant stars and galaxies back to Earth, but there was only one problem: the images came out grainy, it was as if they had been taken. In a toaster, NASA finally established that the telescope's 7.8-foot primary mirror was actually the wrong shape: It had been built by the Perkin Elmer corporation and the problem traced back to a calibration problem in its mirror manufacturing equipment. mirrors, now to make a giant perfectly.

A lightweight parabolic mirror is no easy task. Pieces of borosilicate glass are first cast in a mold over the course of a week, then, for three months, the glass is rotated and cooled from a temperature of 1200 degrees Celsius to 650 degrees Celsius, finally the mirror is ground. and polished to an accuracy of 20 nanometers, which can take more than two years to complete, but a calibration problem at this stage meant Hubble's mirror was off by just 150 times the thickness of a human hair; It may not seem like much, but that's why the colossal $1.5 billion price tag NASA wasn't happy to replace the mirror because it was so impractical, so NASA designed a corrective lens for Hubble, a bit like glasses. correct people's vision, the corrective optics space telescope axial replacement instrument or costar for short was delivered and installed. in 1993 for a separate expedition, the costly mistake that led to the co-star's development ultimately set the entire project back another $50 million, but for footage that ended up being so clear, I'd say the solution is priceless.

Noaa satellite mishap in 2003, a costly operation at Lockheed Martin Space Systems really went wrong: NASA had tasked the company with working on the Noaa Prime weather satellite, a $233 million piece of space technology packed with instruments. meticulously calibrated, but disaster struck when workers were carefully converting the satellite into a horizontal position and the entire structure suddenly collapsed more than a meter off the ground, the damage to all those delicate systems was severe and an investigation was launched. complete about the mishap. Despite the presence of incredibly intelligent technicians and engineers, there was a serious lack of procedural discipline throughout.

At the facility it turned out that while the rotation cart used in the procedure was in storage, a technician removed 24 bolts securing the cart's adapter plate and all without documenting it, the team that used the cart did not check the bolts before moving the satellites. and bingo the multi-billion dollar destruction was born lockheed martin had to take advantage of the profits he had made and with a little help from the government they both paid the astronomical repair bill of 135 million dollars if I were the one paying that I think I would have fallen for The Bitcoin Bug When the Bitcoin cryptocurrency was first invented in 2008, very few people saw the value contained in the decentralized digital currency that hit the market worth just 0,000 cents per Bitcoin and it took a long time for people to tank up. , but the Englishman James Howell saw the potential of the coin, the avid worker downloaded the software and mined more than 7,500 coins in a short space of time, but in 2010 bitcoins were still not worth much, only eight cents each, so that James stored the code needed to spend the coins he had removed from an external hard drive and briefly forgot about it, but in 2013 he accidentally threw away the hard drive in what would turn out to be a very

expensive

spring cleaning, unfortunately for him. 2013 was the year Bitcoin really started to take off.

By April it had peaked at $220 per coin, making James' stash worth a phenomenal $1.65 million, but he realized his mistake too late and desperately began combing the nearby landfills and landfills in an attempt to recover the lost millions, but it was never recovered. the lost momentum to really rub salt in the wound on December 17, 2017, bitcoin prices peaked at an incredible $19,783 per bitcoin, which meant that somewhere in an English landfill an unsuspecting old hard drive in It was actually worth a staggering $148 million and by 2030 that price is expected to rise to $387 thousand per coin, meaning it could be worth around $3 billion.

Does anyone have a metal detector? I could borrow a magic bug. Al

most

everyone on the planet has heard of the incredibly successful Harry Potter fantasy book series, while these Stories from the Wizarding World have brought magic to the masses. Its success is a painful reminder of a big mistake made by several publishers. The first manuscript of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was conjured by author J.K. Rowling in 1995. It had taken her five grueling years to put down on paper what she had in her head, but that turned out to be the easiest

part

. Her literary agent approached several publishers who she would have thought would have been fighting for the chance to print it, but surprisingly 12 different houses rejected the manuscript before it finally ended up in Bloomsbury.

Initially, Bloomsbury printed only 500 copies, but by late 1997 demand for the book was so high that that number shot up to 70,000 copies, it became an international bestseller and was soon turned into a much-loved film series that only fueled Harry Potter fever in 2019. 500 million books had been sold worldwide and the entire Harry Potter franchise was worth a staggering $25 billion, while the series concluded that Harry Potter is still in very much the jewel in Bloomsbury's publishing crown. helping it raise over £162 million in 2020 alone – that's over $200 million. Oh wow, I bet the 12 editors who rejected that first manuscript must feel sick thinking about how much money they turned down.

Golden Ray Wreck at 2 a.m. on September 8, 2019. The crew of the South Korean MV Golden Ray that had been sailing along the Georgia coast suddenly called authorities. Their 656-foot-long transport ship was listing heavily and their attempts to board it had failed that afternoon. The ship carrying 4 to 200 Hyundai cars had capsized completely to port and was stranded on the coast of Saint Simons a year later in October 2020, salvage operations finally began to section and remove the massive ship from the coast. This involved a heavy lift vessel called vb-1000 using its massive 240 foot tall cranes to wrap a 400 foot long anchor chain beneath the wreck and gradually cutting it into eight sections.

Each cut was then lifted onto a barge, exposing all the sunken cars in the sea that had been trapped inside for more than a year. But as fascinating as these cross sections seemed, they did not expose why the ship had capsized. An investigation was launched which discovered that the ship had listed while at the dock loading vehicles; was well below its 7,000 car capacity, but rather than taking on additional ballast to stabilize the ship, the crew simply continued loading and eventually the ship self-assembled, but half an hour later, after a standard movement of 20 degrees, events took a turn for the worse and it became clear that the ship did not comply with regulations.

She established security codes for large ships, but left port anyway. This tremendously bad decision, coupled with the complexity of the wreck, led to a massive insurance claim of over $400 million, a figure large enough to give anyone a sinking feeling. Something about snow crab that Americans just can't get enough of its soft, tender meat causes customers to pay exorbitant amounts for a single serving, something that seafood restaurant chain Red Lobster tried to capitalize on in 2003, that year. They began to offer everything they can. -Promotion to eat crab for only 22.99. Their internal calculations determined that this price, which was only a few dollars more than their usual buffet of 14.99, was high enough to generate a tasty profit, but they were so wrong that it turned out that people were willing to pay 22, 99.

They were really big fans of the red lobster with snow crab. Profitable calculations assumed that customers would eat up to two garbage dishes plus other sides and main dishes, but in reality they were eating more than twice as much on average, this is because crab meat is not thick, so customers able Not only that, but crab is a tricky food to eat, meaning customers spent a lot more time at their tables, so they really got their money's worth. The red lobster in the other claw began to bleed the money they had inadvertently caused. A huge demand for legs, which are an imported item, caused the price of crabs to skyrocket, meaning that to honor the promotion, the red lobster had to continue purchasing snow crabs at increasingly exorbitant prices, while At the end of just one quarter, the company took a massive $3.3 million loss, triggering a cascading effect in which Wall Street analysts saw the mismanagement error and lowered its stock price, erasing a huge amount. of $400 million in company value, which will teach them to underestimate American appetite.

Ariana 5 flight 501 June 4, 1996 It was a dark day for the European space agency. It marked the launch of Europe's newest unmanned rocket, the Ariana 5, which was a predecessor to the super successful Ariana 4. It was loaded with 4 incredibly

expensive

satellites and managed to take off, but within 37 seconds something went wrong. terribly wrong at an altitude of 2.3 miles while traveling at the speed of sound the onboard computer pressed the shuttle's self-destruct button the rocket along with the four satellites exploded into an unrecoverable ball of smoke, fire and debris, the Europeans were understandably crushed, but I discovered that the entire crash was due to a simple coding error: the Ariana 5 reused the working software from its predecessor, the Ariana 4.

Unfortunately, the Ariana 5's faster motors exploited a bug that had not been found In previous models, the numbers the computers were processing were simply too large for them to handle, which crashed all the guidance and altitude systems, including the backup ones, the launcher turned abruptly and this broke theessential electrical links that triggered the self-destruct sequence. The small mistake cost the European space agency a total of 500 million dollars, including its incredibly expensive cargo which is a small mistake for man but a big mistake for humanity b-2 bomber annoying when it comes to aviation accidents None can compare to the 2008 disaster of the test flight of the US B-2 Spirit stealth bomber in this state-of-the-art machine was taking off from Guam's Anderson Air Force Base when suddenly the left wing began to descending dangerously unable to stabilize the craft, both pilots were ejected through the cockpit roof and the plane crashed and burned a few seconds later, fortunately both pilots survived but an investigation was launched into what had caused this high-tech bomber actually bombed and revealed that the planes exposed air data sensors had been flooded by heavy rain before takeoff, which meant that the air pressure readings during their pre-flight check were too high, so so the flooded sensors were recalibrated;

However, when the pilots turned on the sensor heaters, the water evaporated, so although the readings looked normal, they were actually too low. This incorrect data caused the onboard computer to display the incorrect airspeed, so the pilots attempted to take off at 153 miles per hour instead of the required 166 miles per hour to top it off, the poor air pressure readings from the sensor. They set the plane on a steep 30 degree upward pitch, at too high an angle and going too slow, the plane stopped immediately. and caused the inevitable accident, but the

most

serious revelation was yet to come in 2006.

The vulnerability of the sensor was discovered by the crew and maintenance staff, but no one thought to write it down. This communication accident came at a high price, as the plane had been valued at an abominable $1.4 billion (emphasis on the cedar fire fiasco when I bet the US military wouldn't mind this monumental mistake going unnoticed when the hunter rookie sergio martínez got lost wandering the wilds of southern california in october 2003 and was convinced he was going to die. in a desperate attempt to attract the attention of nearby rescue helicopters, he lit two small signal bonfires in the middle of the dry brush in the hills of San Diego, while the fire and the smoke it produced attracted attention.

It was not for a good reason that the signal fires were hastily made. accidentally caused a huge uncontrollable forest fire that was driven across the landscape by the strong Santa Ana winds, thanks to this it spread rapidly at a rate of 3,600 acres per hour, that is, more than 2,700 football fields of hills burned every 60 minutes at that time. It was finally contained on November 4. It had burned more than 270,000 acres (an area of ​​land roughly the same size as Hong Kong). 2,820 homes and buildings were destroyed and 15 people tragically lost their lives. Even today it is widely considered one of the worst forest fires.

In California

history

, despite this, Martinez was only sentenced to serve six months in a work release program along with 960 hours of community service, while his stupid decision didn't cost him that much. Insurance losses were estimated at just over $1 billion in total. about 1.48 billion dollars today even if his house wasn't burned down, I bet he moved out of California pretty quickly the Kursk catastrophe back in 2000 one of the worst peacetime submarine accidents in

history

had place off the coast of Russia the 18 thousand one-ton nuclear submarine Kursk was in the middle of a training exercise in the arid sea when, suddenly, a large explosion devastated the area, followed a few minutes later by an explosion still The 508-foot-long submarine was wrecked by the explosions.

The Kursk sank about 350 feet beneath the waves. Of the 118 crew, only 23 managed to survive the initial explosions and were left stranded in the hundreds. feet underwater but unfortunately international rescue teams were unable to reach them in time and All crew members died tragically when pressed to respond about the doomed submarine. Russian officials claimed it could have been caused by a collision with a foreign submarine or an old undersea bomb from World War II, but the truth eventually came to light. A Russian navy board determined that one of the Kursk's 65-75a super-heavy torpedoes was leaking and exploded in its breech due to faulty welding.

Like many torpedoes, the 6576 used hydrogen peroxide as underwater fuel, but this chemical compound can become explosive if it comes into contact with the catalyst, which in this case. It was the copper lining the torpedo tubes that caused the fuel explosion to cause a fire which then caused all the ammunition on board to detonate. It took 14 months to drag part of the submarine back to the surface in an expensive $70 million recovery mission, but it was nothing. Compared to the $1 billion it took to build the six-year-old submarine, today's money is a fortune of $1.76 billion. I estimate someone was fired for that welding mishap, probably on the next available torpedo tube deepwater horizon.

On April 20, 2010, a large explosion engulfed the deepwater Horizon oil platform, just 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The disaster claimed the lives of 11 workers and injured 17 others, but the worst was yet to come. Oil was spilling into the waters of the Gulf. From Mexico at an alarming rate of 60,000 barrels per day, enough to fill nearly four Olympic-size swimming pools with oil every 24 hours, the toxic black sludge contaminated some 1,100 miles of the U.S. coast and was quickly declared the largest oil spill in the world. history of humanity, but it could have been avoided the transoceanic platform that had been rented by the oil giant bp was placed on an oil well five thousand feet below the waves and another eight thousand feet under the rock bp had recently hired Halliburton contractors to seal the well on the seabed to temporarily shut off the oil supply, planned to use a nitrogen foam cement mixture for this, but both companies knew the mixture was unstable.

Three of the four preliminary pressure tests revealed that the mixture did not comply. industry standards, but the companies pressed ahead regardless, as natural gas and oil began leaking through the dubious cement seals, then a series of previous emergency safety mechanisms also failed, causing It meant the oil traveled to the deepwater platform's riser where it exploded on top of the devastating damage that sank the platform just two days later and left cleanup crews battling tides of black tar for more than three years. but the accident hit bp where it hurt most: initially they established a compensation fund of 20 billion dollars for those affected, but by the next year, the company had lost more than 63.4 billion dollars in legal costs and cleanup recovery and in a devastating blow the US government imposed on BP the largest financial penalty ever imposed on a single company to the tune of $20.8 billion in total, i.e. the staggering figure of 104.2 billion. dollars, it was just a small way to make up for their gross negligence, but hopefully it has taught them to clean up their act in the future. box office mistake netflix wasn't always the international streaming hit it is now in the days before tiger king stranger things and money heist netflix actually rented dvds throughout the united states through a mail system.

It was established in 1997 and became the world's first online DVD rental store, but it only had 30 employees and 925 titles available in 1999, they introduced a subscription service and managed to raise money. 30 million dollars in venture capital funding, although they were actually losing money, they felt confident enough in the business model to approach Blockbuster offering to sell them Netflix for just 50 million dollars, being the undisputed kings of rental Blockbuster home videos, which had 9,000 stores. and a market value of $5 billion at its peak turned them away, but it was a move they bitterly regretted a few years later when the world moved from video tapes to DVDs and online streaming.

Netflix adapted its business models. It wasn't until 2004 that Blockbuster launched Blockbuster online offering unlimited DVD rentals to compete with Netflix, but Netflix already had the lead online. Then in 2007, Netflix launched its own streaming platform that aired internationally in 2010. For Blockbuster, this was the death blow for very few people. They were no longer renting videos and DVDs in stores and their income suffered a serious drop. In 2010, they filed for bankruptcy and were found to be worth a fraction of their previous market value, just 24 million. Netflix, on the other hand, thrived when the world went into lockdown. In 2020, the national service was valued at a staggering $194 billion, more than 38 times the peak value of the blockbuster.

Alas, that is a mistake that is almost too painful to continue watching the Kobe catastrophe. Japan is no stranger to strong earthquakes because it is located on four tectonic plates that move and constantly clash. Some 1,500 earthquakes hit the island every year since the 18th century. Huge earthquakes with magnitudes of 8.6 have shaken the country so violently. that cities have been razed and lives have been lost, so now Japan's urban planners and engineers are constantly updating and On January 17, 1995, at 5:46 in the morning, a deadly magnitude 6 earthquake, 9 hit the Hanshin area in western Japan. Although it only lasted 20 seconds, the city of Kobe was decimated. 120,000 structures were damaged at least half of which had collapsed but, even more devastating, sections of the Hanchin Expressway linking Kobe and Osaka also collapsed onto the only reinforced concrete pillars supporting the expressway, When the damage was reviewed, it was discovered that this enormous elevated structure had been built almost 30 years earlier under incredibly outdated seismic provisions from the 1960s.

A modernization was scheduled to bring it up to date, but At the time the gesture was a little late, the damage to the hyokogen prefecture alone was estimated to cost a staggering $200 billion, although the area has now almost completely recovered. It is clear that no one in Kobe will ever make the mistake of taking earthquake regulations lightly again. Do you know of other catastrophically costly mistakes that could have been avoided? Let me know in the comments below and I may include it in a future video. Thanks for seeing you.