Shut Down the Grid

Walter Peck uses formal authority to order the containment grid shut down despite specialist warnings, releasing every captured ghost into New York.

Governance fails when authority, technical understanding, safety documentation, and incident ownership are split across mutually distrustful actors around an opaque high-stakes system.

The Ghostbusters also built an unregulated and overloaded system, so the lesson is socio-technical fragility rather than simply that regulators should defer to operators.