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At 2:53 am on 22 September 1993, the Sunset Limited, Amtrak's only trans-continental passenger train, plunged into Big Bayou Canot fourteen miles north of Mobile, Alabama, killing 47 passengers. Eight minutes earlier at 2:45 am, a towboat, pushing six barges and lost in a dense fog, unknowingly bumped into Big Bayou Canot Bridge, knocking the track out of alignment, causing the train to derail and plunge into the mucky waters of the bayou. Blame for the accident was attributed to negligence on the part of Amtrak, CSX, Warrior and Gulf Navigation, the United States Coast Guard, and the National Transportation Safety Board - all major players in a series of complex parallel organizational subsystems that suddenly interacted in unintended and unpredictable ways. The case illustrates the difficulty of assigning responsibility in situations that are managerially and technically complex, especially when these situations deal with highly emotional and sometimes disastrous events.