The framework · one of five quadrants
Q2 · The CoconutThe Coconut
The rare, high-impact event that was always coming, and was always going to be called unforeseeable afterwards.
The hazard was known. Its size was not. The event lands far out in a tail nobody had priced, bigger than anything in the record the defences were built against, and being possible was never enough to fund the defence.
How to spot it. Ask what the defences were sized against, then ask what the worst case on record actually is. The gap between those two is this quadrant.
Not sure this is your quadrant? Find your quadrant takes about thirty seconds.
Every event filed in Q2 The Coconut
0 of these are marked: filed here, but running another quadrant’s mechanism by the end. The paperwork never changed.
- Los Angeles wildfires2025Santa Ana winds drove two fires through Palisades and Altadena.
- Myanmar earthquake2025M7.7 on the well-known Sagaing Fault; unreinforced homes collapsed.
- Valencia DANA floods2024A known flash-flood phenomenon; the regional alert went out hours too late.
- Turkey-Syria earthquakes2023Twin M7.8 quakes; building-code amnesties left 13M non-compliant structures.
- Derna dam collapses2023Two neglected dams burst overnight after explicit published warnings.
- Maui / Lahaina wildfire2023A downed power line in dry grass consumed historic Lahaina.
- Al Haouz earthquake2023A moderate quake killed thousands because mudbrick homes had no survival voids.
- Pakistan monsoon floods2022Record monsoon submerged a third of the country built on floodplains.
- Champlain Towers collapse2021The concrete corrosion was documented years earlier, never repaired, and the tower pancaked overnight.
- Ahr Valley floods2021A known flood-prone valley; warnings came late and hazard maps underestimated it.
- Beirut port explosion20202,750t of ammonium nitrate sat unsecured for six years, then detonated.
- Vizag styrene leak2020A refrigeration failure released a neurotoxin over villages at a rushed restart.
- 2010 Haiti Earthquake2010Scientists forecast a 7.2 on the fault in 2008. Haiti had no building code. The quake came in 2010.
- Sichuan earthquake2008Known quake zone; tofu-dreg schools turned a tail into a certainty.
Filed elsewhere, behaved like Q2 The Coconut
These sit in another quadrant on the map. By the end they were running this quadrant’s mechanism.
- East Palestine derailment2023One overheated bearing derailed a hazmat train and forced a toxic burn.Filed as Q3 Engineered
- Baltimore Key Bridge collapse2024A ship blackout hit an unprotected pier and dropped the bridge.Filed as Q3 Engineered
- Icelandic banking collapse2008320,000 people ran banks worth ten times their GDP. All three fell in a single week.Filed as Q4 Where models die
- Air France Flight 4472009Three iced sensors handed the jet back to the crew, who held the nose up all the way down.Filed as Q3 Engineered
- Deepwater Horizon2010The failsafe was a blowout preventer. It buckled the very pipe it was built to shear.Filed as Q3 Engineered
- Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster2011Blamed on the wave. The backup generators sat in the basement, below a seawall long known to be too low.Filed as Q3 Engineered
- NotPetya (Maersk)2017A Ukrainian tax update froze a fifth of world shipping. One server in Ghana had lost power and survived.Filed as Q3 Engineered
- Grenfell Tower fire2017The cladding failed its fire tests. The Inquiry found the testing was manipulated, and a tower was wrapped in it anyway.Filed as Q1 Predictable
- WannaCry ransomware attack2017The fix shipped in March. In May the worm took 150 countries, on the machines nobody patched.Filed as Q3 Engineered
- Boeing 737 MAX MCAS crashes2018A single sensor could push the nose down. The pilots were never told the system existed.Filed as Q3 Engineered
- Morandi Bridge collapse (Genoa)2018The designer warned in 1979 that sea air would corrode the cables. 43 died when the bridge came down.Filed as Q1 Predictable
- PG&E bankruptcy / Camp Fire2019A worn hook on a tower unclimbed since 2001 killed 85 people and bankrupted the utility.Filed as Q1 Predictable
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