Oil refinery pipe lot rejection

Brief reference. One leaky pipe out of 600 led purchaser to condemn entire lot and demand refund. Tom characterizes this as "not the appropriate way to handle that problem." Used to contrast statistical reality of NDT with overreaction to single failures.

Through the thickness there can be flaws, but they're going to hydrostatic test this later. It keeps going down the line, and they do a hydrostatic test at whatever pressure they want. Still, the ends are the problem, because even in the hydrostatic test you have to grab it by the ends and make the seal. Sometimes people will cut off the ends, but most of the time they don't after they've done all this testing. Sometimes the problems occur at the end, and at this oil refinery, the leak they found was on the end. All this other testing — stress test, hydrostatic test, magnetic particle on the end, ultrasonic in the middle — has a high probability of finding something, but the probability is never one. There's always something that might get through. Out of these 600 pipes at this oil refinery they were building, they found one pipe and they condemned all the rest — all 599 brothers and sisters — and said we want our money back. Which was not the appropriate way to handle that problem.