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"The Sky is Falling!"--Mr. C. Little: building principles.

Article Excerpt
There is a fable about a character named Chicken Little who is plunked on the head by an acorn falling from a branch above. Being prone to panic, he announces to everyone he encounters that the sky (instead of the acorn) was falling. The panic spreads over nothing. Occasionally, we've had some sideways looks when we've forecast really dire problems that can result from mismanaged or misunderstood infrastructure. Last summer, one such predictable and wholly preventable incident happened to a camp in Wyoming. While not a client of ours, it's likely it's an organization much like any other camp, and it fell victim to "following the rules," without understanding the intent behind them or perhaps settling for "the way we've always done it."

The information we'll use for our discussion here was published in the June 6, 2007, edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The long and the short of the story is that an outbreak of gastroenteritis resulted from water supply well contamination. The first case of diarrhea, vomiting and cramps was reported on July 1, the last day of the one week session. The article says that camp "voluntarily closed at the recommendation of the Department...." three weeks later on July 20. The Health Department contacted 210 of the 277 people resident or who had come through the camp over a six-week period and found that 67 percent of those contacted reported symptoms. Further study revealed that folks probably contracted the illness by consuming water from an outdoor spigot or had roomed with an infected person.

Two relatively shallow...

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