Small mistakes don’t usually cause big problems — unless the system lets them. This week’s Mistake of the Week comes from northwest China, where a simple water leak quietly turned an entire street into an ice rink overnight. The story isn’t about blame — it’s about design, detection, and why learning means looking past the person and toward the system.
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A forgotten water tap doesn’t sound like much — until it runs for nine hours, freezes overnight, and turns a residential street into an accidental skating rink.
In this episode of Mistake of the Week, I share a story from Lanzhou, China, where a woman’s solar water heater overflowed after she forgot to turn off the tap. With no automatic shutoff and no alarm, the system stayed silent as water spilled down the building and froze on the road below.
By morning, neighbors were navigating ice, the family was buying up all the salt in nearby shops, and a public apology video had gone viral. No one was injured — but shame arrived quickly, long before learning did.
This episode isn’t about forgetting. It’s about systems that depend on perfect memory — and what happens when they don’t notice problems early.
We’ll explore:
- Why small human slips can create shared risk
- How shame focuses attention on people instead of systems
- What mistake-proofing really looks like at home
- And practical questions we can all ask about water heaters, leak detection, and automatic shutoffs
The ice eventually melted. The neighborhood recovered.
But the lesson remains: learning starts when we stop asking who messed up and start asking why the system allowed it.
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Mistake of the Week: When Ice Shows Up — and Nobody Asked for It
This week’s mistake is about ice. And frankly, many of us are already tired of ice this February.
This story comes from Lanzhou, in northwest China — and it’s a reminder of how small, human slips can turn into major problems for a neighborhood.
A woman took a shower one evening and forgot to turn off the tap on her home’s solar water heater. That doesn’t sound dramatic. But the water kept flowing — for nine hours.
The heater’s tank sat on the roof of the building. With no automatic shutoff and no alarm, the system quietly did nothing. Water overflowed, ran down the outside wall, and pooled onto the road below. Overnight temperatures dropped to about minus eight Celsius.
By morning, ice had arrived — uninvited and unwanted. The street was a mess… had become an accidental skating rink.
The frozen road was discovered around 6 a.m. by the woman’s father, who gets up early to exercise. At first, he assumed the water must have come from someone else’s apartment. Eventually, he traced the ice back to their home.
The woman later posted an apology video that went viral. She apologized once for forgetting to turn off the tap — and then again for another consequence: her family had bought up all the salt from nearby shops to get rid of the ice. If you couldn’t buy salt that morning, she said, she was sorry about that too.
Her father scolded her harshly — not because anyone was hurt, but because he felt ashamed of her behavior.
That reaction is familiar.
But here’s the more useful question.
The real issue wasn’t the forgetting, the human error. It was that the system required perfect memory — instead of being designed to shut itself off or at least sound an alarm when something went wrong.
Shame focuses attention on the person. Learning, improvement, and preventing a repeat of the mess requires focusing attention on the system.
From a learning perspective, this wasn’t a failure of personal responsibility. It was a design failure. One missed step cascaded into a nine-hour problem because there were no safeguards to catch it early. No alert. No automatic response. Just ice — spreading, creating risk, and drawing attention.
That’s a lesson worth bringing home — literally.
Most of us have water heaters or appliances that could leak, whether from human error or simple equipment failure. So the better questions are practical ones:
- Would a leak be detected quickly?
- Would an alarm sound — or notify us remotely via an app if we’re not home?
- And if it alarmed, would the system shut the water off automatically?
In the end, the ice was gone from that community. The road reopened. Neighbors helped each other. The community recovered.
But the story sticks because it’s so ordinary.
We can focus on who should feel ashamed — or we can take responsibility for removing the ice and preventing its return.
That’s the mistake of the week — and the real opportunity to learn.
Thanks to the South China Morning Post for the original news story.