Sadly, this doesn't really surprise me; I've heard similar horror stories about Marshall. They share a large amount of the blame for both Space Shuttle disasters. For Challenger, I guess you could blame Thiokol (now ATK) for their "innovative" O-ring design and for their insistence that flaws discovered with this design early on were no big deal. You can also credit many of the engineers at Marshall for finding these problems unacceptable and protesting about them, but in the end, nothing was done to fix the problem and Marshall was responsible for oversight of the SRBs.
With Columbia, again, there's blame to go around, but safety issues surrounding chunks of falling foam was Marshall's responsibility. And again, there were good engineers at Marshall who knew about this problem (actually, since STS-1 everybody knew about this problem, or at least should have known) and there were people who were very concerned about it and trying to get managers to address it, but in the end, again, nothing was done.
I look forward to the day when shuttle is retired and I don't have to hold my breath every time the damn thing flies, although I'm beginning to believe Ares I is not an improvement. Why oh why can't we just put the Orion on a Delta IV Heavy and call it good. It seems to me it would be much safer AND we could save tons in NRE costs. Is it perhaps that NASA has to keep all their contractors happy and give companies like ATK a slice of the pie for their SRBs?