ADR-0041: Escalation text is curated and has an author, and the branch condition is not the escalation gate

Status: Accepted — amends ADR-0002, ADR-0006 and ADR-0026, all of which stand Date: 2026-09-10

Decisions

D-95 Escalation text is a Curated Escalation: written and reviewed by a named person at Curation, stored as a Corpus artifact, displayed verbatim with its origin visible

It remains Safety-Critical Content and is never styled as ignorable. What widens is the meaning of Extractive: displayed verbatim from a curated artifact whose origin is visible, where that origin is an SDS Section for everything else and is site procedure or Thai emergency services here.

The artifact type is enumerated and closed. A Curated Escalation may carry only escalation acts — call hotline 1669, evacuate, seek medical attention. It may never carry a hazard, PPE, storage or first-aid-step claim. Those still require a Source Span from an SDS or they are Not Stated.

D-96 The persistent hotline applies to both emergency flows; the gating condition before step 1 is Spill Response only

D-08 bundled two mechanisms. The hotline, persistent and tappable, stays on Spill Response and First Aid both — it blocks nothing and costs nothing. The evacuate-and-call condition that precedes step 1 is spill-shaped in its reasoning and in its wording, and applies to Spill Response alone. In First Aid, escalation is concurrent with the procedure rather than prior to it.

D-97 The branch condition and the escalation gate are separate objects with separate provenance

The branch condition is SDS content: it comes from a Source Span, it varies per document, and it is shown only where the document states one. The escalation gate is product behaviour: constant, authored, and now a Curated Escalation with a named reviewer. Where an SDS states no branch condition there is one procedure, no gate derived from a condition, and no invented condition of any kind.

What each amendment touches

• ADR-0002 — D-02 and D-03 stand. Every hazard, PPE item, storage rule, spill step and first-aid instruction still requires a Source Span from an SDS; none of that moves. What D-95 widens is the origin permitted for the escalation acts alone, and it closes the set so the widening cannot be reused for anything D-02 governs.
• ADR-0006 — D-07 stands entirely. D-08's ruling that escalation precedes procedure stands for Spill Response, which is the case it argued. Its application to First Aid is narrowed by D-96 to the persistent hotline, without the gate.
• ADR-0026 — D-54 stands: Spill Response is branches selected by a condition the SDS itself states. D-55's "a branch is never auto-selected" stands and is untouched. What D-97 removes is D-55's clause making the branch condition double as the escalation gate.

Context

The glossary makes this airtight rather than arguable. Safety-Critical Content is "any information that can change what a person wears, touches, or does in an emergency… It is always Extractive." Escalation is "directing the user out of the app to real help — calling hotline 1669, evacuating, seeking medical attention."

So escalation text is Safety-Critical Content by definition, must therefore be Extractive, and comes from no SDS. The curation spike said so plainly and nothing acted on it: "Directing a Handler to call 1669, evacuate or seek medical attention is product behaviour sourced from no SDS Section at all. Curation cannot record Provenance for it, because there is none to record." The spike also found that Section 13 supplies a notification obligation to the authorities, which is a different act.

What this text actually lacked was not a citation but an author. Every other piece of Safety-Critical Content passes through Curation under review. This was the only thing reaching a Handler mid-emergency with nobody's name on it. D-90 had already built the shape three days earlier for a different purpose: a Curated Explanation is written by a person, reviewed, stored, displayed verbatim, and is not from an SDS. A Curated Escalation is the same species pointed at an act.

The gate was fabricating a document's content to keep itself alive. D-55 made the branch condition double as D-08's escalation gate. That works for a document that states a threshold — Doc B's under/over 200 litres. Doc A states none, and the spike is explicit that "both shapes are legitimate GHS": one of two documents in the sample has no branching at all. With the two bundled, a document with no condition still needed a gate, so the app fell back to ADR-0006's authored "large, enclosed, or you are unsure" — a question no document asked, which Seam 2 then asserted nobody could bypass.

The ordering was reasoned from one case and applied to two. ADR-0006's Context argues entirely about a solvent pool in an enclosed space, and the condition it wrote is spill-shaped. Applied to First Aid it puts a gate between a Handler and the immediate action Section 4 states, in the exposure cases where seconds matter and where the call can be made alongside the procedure.

Decision

Escalation text becomes a curated artifact with a named author and a visible origin, limited to a closed set of acts. The persistent hotline stays on both flows; the gate before step 1 is spill-only. The branch condition is separated from the escalation gate, so a document that states no condition produces one procedure and no invented question.

Rejected options

• Make escalation text a third content category beside Safety-Critical and Conversational — rejected. It splits the content model to accommodate one case, and ADR-0012 exists precisely because a fuzzy third position invites abuse.
• Declare escalation text product furniture, exempt from the content split — rejected. It is the status quo written down rather than fixed: a screen could tell someone to evacuate with no reviewer and no record.
• Require an SDS Source Span for escalation — rejected as impossible. No SDS says "call 1669", and the honest consequence would be deleting D-08's ruling rather than satisfying it.
• Let Curation supply a branch condition where the SDS states none — rejected, and forbidden already. D-53 says a curator may not supplement safety content from outside the SDS "however much more useful the result would be", and this would invent the single most consequential field: D-54 says the branch condition decides which restriction applies.
• Drop the escalation gate entirely where a document does not branch — rejected. ADR-0006's argument does not depend on the supplier writing a threshold; a large acetone spill in an enclosed space is dangerous whether or not the sheet mentions 200 litres.
• Keep D-08 applied to First Aid unchanged — rejected, but recorded as a real option. The alternative was to say the ordering had been re-examined for First Aid and deliberately kept. It was re-examined and not kept, because ADR-0006 never argued the first-aid case at all.

This ruling may not be re-decided

If a change contradicts this ADR: stop and raise it. Do not implement over it.

Specifically: do not extend the Curated Escalation type to carry any safety claim beyond the enumerated acts — that is the loophole this ADR closes and the one someone will reach for when a PPE span is missing; do not restore the gate to First Aid; do not let a curator write a branch condition a document does not state; and do not ship a Curated Escalation without a named reviewer, because the author is the entire point of the artifact.

Consequences

What becomes easy. Every piece of Safety-Critical Content now has a traceable origin and a person accountable for it. The claim is uniform for the first time: nothing reaches a Handler that nobody signed.

What becomes hard. Someone must write and review the escalation text before the app can show an emergency flow at all, and it is site-specific — evacuate-and-call is The Plant's procedure, not a generic sentence. That is a real dependency on the site, and it is a smaller one than the binder.

A fifth once-per-Corpus artifact. After the Routing Threshold, the Escalation Trigger, the Routing Fixture and the Curated Explanation glossary. The sizing ticket blocked on this count now has its answer.

D-91 survives and is strengthened. No text the app displays is model-generated; that was already true, and the one piece of displayed text with no author now has one.

What is now closed off. Any emergency flow that asks a question no document asked.

Coverage

Upstream	Landed in	Evidence	Note
R-14	D-96	the hotline is in the source's design; what moved is the gate, not the number	ADR-0006 landed R-14 in D-08
R-44	D-97	one of two spike documents branches and the other does not, both legitimate GHS	the finding that makes the bundled gate untenable