6 Itty-Bitty Screw-Ups That Cost Millions To Fix

The explosion caused a wildfire that quickly spread to Coronado National Forest, eventually damaging 45,000 acres of land and causing $8.2 million in damages. Most gender reveal parties sort of fizzle out when the hosts run out of little genital-shaped cookies, but in this case it took 800 firefighters a full week to extinguish it completely.

Dickey had to fork up $100,000, and will have to pay $500 a month for 20 years before future restitution can be assessed, on top of being sentenced to five years' probation. We did the math, and that's definitely more expensive than buying a colored cake or, you know, just saying "It's a boy/girl." Anyway, it was a boy! Congrats. Try not to resent him for the next two decades.

The resulting fire engulfed over 121 square miles of forest and caused $37 million in damages, which the teen might be able to make a decent dent in if he mowed 121 square miles of lawns for the next 100 years. It also threatened hundreds of lives and stranded 153 hikers for a day. The boy (whose name was withheld, so we'll call him "Huge Idiot") was reportedly extremely sorry for his dumbass actions, and wrote apology letters to 150 of the people affected by the fire. Which was nice, but it's hard to write a nice letter to the forest (it resents the very paper it's printed on).

During the trial, the judge sentenced Huge Idiot to five years' probation and ordered him to complete 1,920 hours of community service with the U.S. Forest Service. As for his $37 million debt to the state of Oregon, the judge allowed the kid to set up a payment plan that could be suspended after 10 years if he makes steady payments, doesn't violate his probation, and refrains from burning down any more forests. Or commit any other crimes, but come on, that's the one we're all worried about.

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.

"Packing for shipment" and "distribution" were meant to be two separate activities, but the lack of an Oxford comma between them left that ambiguous. And since they're drivers, not packers-and-drivers, they argued that they were owed some serious overtime pay. Unleashing the full power of pedantry, they also argued that "distribution" clearly wasn't part of the list because all other activities were listed as gerunds ending in "-ing." We know a thing or two about lists and pedantry, and we have to agree.

Oakhurst initially won the case, but the drivers kept at it and won their appeal in 2018, to the tune of $5 million. The expensive grammar lesson did pay off ... sort of. In an impressively stubborn move, Maine fixed the issue while still refusing to use an Oxford comma in that section ... or any commas. The clause now reads:

It all started when JPMorgan's Chief Investment Office found itself in need of a new value-at-risk model -- something that calculates how much money a firm or portfolio may lose. This task was outsourced and assigned to a "quantitative whiz" who happened to no longer work at a company that makes such models. He devised a model that worked "through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another." Traders got carpal tunnel syndrome just by looking at it.

The employees who reviewed this Frankenstein of a model approved it, but recommended automating the process. The so-called whiz did no such thing. So when someone down the line made a mistake (dividing some figures by their sum instead of their average), this was amplified by the copy-pasting chain, making it look like some operations were less risky than they actually were. The end result? $6 billion in losses and an additional billion in fines. In the future, please only use Excel for its intended purpose: making it look like you're working when you're in fact reading Cracked.com.

While designing the submarine, some engineer used the right number, but put the decimal in the wrong place. No one noticed the error until construction was already well underway, and the sub turned out 100 tons heavier than it was supposed to. But Spain persevered. In a very literal example of sunk cost fallacy, they continued the project, but simply made the submarine 32 feet longer (at a cost of around $2.5 million per foot) in order to increase its buoyancy. Problem solved!

After the Spanish government spent years building the longer submarine, they came to realize it was too long. It no longer fits in its intended dock in Cartagena. Now the port will have to be enlarged too, while the total cost of the project grows to $1.2 billion -- almost double its original budget. If this trend continues, Portugal and France better watch their backs. They're about to be swallowed by the rapidly expanding Spanish Navy. And all because of a decimal point.

It's not a mistake to ping Christian Markle on Facebook Steven Assarian is a librarian. He writes stuff here.

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