Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies
"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 systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk - complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling - this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©1999
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., ©1999
Case studies (form)
x, 451 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
9780691004129, 0691004129
41482272
Abnormal blessings
Introduction
Normal accident at Three Mile Island
Nuclear power as a high-risk system: why we have not had more TMIs ... but will soon
Complexity, coupling, and catastrophe
Petrochemical plants
Aircraft and airways
Marine accidents
Earthbound systems: dams, quakes, mines, and lakes
Exotics: space, weapons, and DNA
Living with high-risk systems
Afterword
Postscript: the Y2K problem
List of acronyms
Originally published: New York : Basic Books, 1984