Ebook: 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.;Cover Page; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Abnormal Blessings; Introduction; 1. Normal Accident at Three Mile Island; 2. Nuclear Power as a High-Risk System: Why We Have Not Had More TMIs-But Will Soon; 3. Complexity, Coupling, and Catastrophe; 4. Petrochemical Plants; 5. Aircraft and Airways; 6. Marine Accidents; 7. Earthbound Systems: Dams, Quakes, Mines, and Lakes; 8. Exotics: Space, Weapons, and DNA; 9. Living with High-Risk Systems; Afterword; Postscript: The Y2K Problem; List of Acronyms; Notes; Bibliography; Index.