The only honest way to design a monitoring system for a hazardous site is to assume that part of it is already broken. Not "might break someday." Broken now, quietly, while the dashboard glows green. Every sensor drifts, every cable corrodes, every radio link drops packets, and every controller eventually hangs. The engineering question was never whether components fail. The question is whether the rest of the system notices, says so loudly, and keeps watching while you fix it. A system that cannot answer that question is barely a monitoring system at all; it is closer to a decoration with a power supply. The stakes are not abstract. Over nearly three decades, U.S. chemical safety investigators have examined close to 180 major chemical incidents that together produced more than 200 fatalit ...