Examples of major industrial accidents in which sleepiness and/or shiftwork disorder may have played a part:

•    The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident, which occurred at 4:00 a.m. Overnight shift workers failed to respond quickly and appropriately to a mechanical problem that caused a near meltdown

•    Sleepiness is thought to be partly to blame for the nuclear plant disaster at Chernobyl, which took place at 1:30 a.m.

•    The Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill

•    The Space Shuttle Challenger accident (where managers at the flight center were known to be working irregular hours on very little sleep).

•    Thirty-two passengers were injured on March 24, 2014, when a Chicago Transit Authority train slammed into a station at the end of the line because the train operator had fallen asleep. She had been overtired after working a lot of overtime (Esposito & Rossi, 2014).

•    On February 12, 2009 a Continental airlines flight made a routine takeoff from Liberty Airport in Newark, New Jersey, but as it neared its destination in Buffalo, New York, the plane stalled, then crashed, killing everyone on board. The pilots had failed to properly respond to cockpit warnings that the plane was moving too slowly through the air, and in fact, the Captain actually raised the plane’s nose, slowing it even further. The accident report said that ahead of the flight, both pilots had long commutes and slept in the crew lounge instead of a hotel. Tiredness was cited as one of the factors in the crew’s failure to respond quickly and appropriately to the aircraft’s loss of speed.