Fukushima-Daiichi, engineering thinking in an ongoing emergency

The lessons learned from the Fukushima-Daiichi accident have focused on prevention measures designed to protect nuclear reactors and conventional crisis management methods. Although there is still no end in sight to the accident that occurred on 11 March 2011, the way in which engineering operations to secure the facilities have been carried out offers new insight into the capacity of organizations to adapt in situations that go beyond deterministic frameworks. In this article, we examine this extreme engineering scenario, which we call "engineering thinking in emergency situations".