Always Double Check
I trusted the new junior engineer while working on a 30,000-tonne ship. I believed that he had done his work properly and not been lazy. I’d checked everything he’d done before then for the past month, but that day I decided he was trustworthy enough, so I didn’t double-check. It turns out he had left a job half done and hadn’t bolted a sea strainer down more than a few turns at each corner, yet still tagged everything in correctly.
I got the shout over the radio to open up the hydraulic valve and, within half a minute, got flood alarms across the entire compartment (roughly 200m²), the censors for which were at about a half a meter’s depth. Both of us got the reaming out of a lifetime and threats of being fired, demoted, castrated, and even defenestrated from the bridge window—rightfully so.
It took me until midnight to fully pump the place out into the bilge tanks because the junior engineer bailed on me. So yeah, I nearly flooded and sank a 30,000-tonne tanker due to misplaced trust. The junior engineer got his comeuppance a few weeks later, by being noticeably drunk on watch.
Story credit: Reddit / inevitable_dave