Most times, trouble strikes when nobody is readily available to circumvent it. My example is simple, a real case scenario happened at a local lift station monitored by radio communication with a PLC on site. Communications went down one day around four o’clock in the afternoon. It seems this site was having radio problems from time to time due to conditions in the area. The time of day is significant, because most of the plant personnel end their shift around then. The operator reported the outage, and the supervisor wanted to have someone check it out. However, that would require a three hour call-in and overtime, which would cost approximately $120. It can wait until morning, he thought. As events unfolded, that lift station ended up malfunctioning overnight. The damage costs ran into thousands of dollars.
As it turns out, the communication failure was not due to site conditions, but a theft. The culprit had been tracking activity at the remote lift station and knew he would not be noticed on the property at that time of day. He was driving a truck, as many city workers do, and the lack of a city decal wouldn’t have been immediately apparent to any passersby. Within minutes he had broken in and removed everything of value from the station. Had remote monitoring been in place for the facility, alerts could have been sent that the door had been breached. Instead, it was written off as a radio comm fail and ignored.