The Event That Didn't Happen

For more than forty years, John Munno's job was to stand between industrial facilities and the worst day of their lives. He walked turbine decks at two in the morning, climbed switchyards and offshore platforms, and sat across the table from the operators who swore a thing had always worked before. What he learned is the quiet law behind every disaster he ever investigated: none of them started big. They started small, and they started compatible. A melted sticker. A bathtub ring on a wall. Grey paint on a green door.

The Event That Didn't Happen is a risk engineer's memoir, told from inside the losses, the claims, and the site visits where a catastrophe is caught before it gets its chance. A gas plant in West Virginia, two weeks before it blew. A three-million-gallon tank in downtown Baltimore with a relief valve frozen open. A power plant chimney packed with forty feet of solid gasoline. A single word in an insurance policy worth three million dollars.

These are the near-misses that never made the news, because a risk engineer's product is strange: the disaster that does not occur. No one photographs it. No line item records it. And somewhere a dinner table is full because of it.

Also a working book about the craft

How to walk a plant and read what it is trying to tell you. How to price the worst day honestly, before the market has a reason to reprice you. How to write a recommendation that gets built instead of filed. How much insurance is really enough, and what survives when the tools change, from punch cards to AI.

Written for engineers, plant operators, underwriters, brokers, and risk managers, and for anyone who has ever wondered what really goes wrong before it goes wrong. Go and look.

Narrated with a digital voice. © 2026 John Munno. All rights reserved.
A production of Energy Risk Engineering.