I have just been having a read of "Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies" by Charles Perrow.
The blurb on the back reads:
"Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety- building in more warnings and safeguards - fails because sytems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernabyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk - complex versus linear, and tight versus loose coupling - this book provides a powerful framework for anaylzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them."
** Well worth a read, especially if you are familiar with the work of Ulrich Beck and his ideas of the Risk Society.
Note: I was recently reading about the Exxon Valdex Oil disaster and how it was caused by jealousy (see River pilot's jealousy linked to massive oil spill) but after reading this book I can see how it was not simply the fault of the captain (i.e. human error) but was the result of a 'normal accident' due to the massive complexity of the global oil system. The added 'safety' precautions made it more unsafe due to the increased complexity of the system and therefore more likely to fail.
Thus, the failure was not the pilot's fault as such, nor was it due to the inability of humans to design systems that are foolproof, rather Charles Perrow suggests it is simply a result of the increased complexity of our human systems and that failures will occur in multiple and unforeseen ways that are virtually impossible to predict. He explains this well on pages 5 -8 of his book here using an everyday example of someone having a 'bad day' and being late for an job interview.
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Comments always welcome !!!
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