Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies Revised ed. Edition

by Charles Perrow (Author)

63 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0691004129

ISBN-10: 0691004129

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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.

The first edition fulfilled one reviewer's prediction that it "may mark the beginning of accident research." In the new afterword to this edition Perrow reviews the extensive work on the major accidents of the last fifteen years, including Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger disaster. The new postscript probes what the author considers to be the "quintessential 'Normal Accident'" of our time: the Y2K computer problem.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Hang a curtain too close to a fireplace and you run the risk of setting your house ablaze. Drive a car on a pitch-black night without headlights, and you dramatically increase the odds of smacking into a tree.

These are matters of common sense, applied to simple questions of cause and effect. But what happens, asks systems-behavior expert Charles Perrow, when common sense runs up against the complex systems, electrical and mechanical, with which we have surrounded ourselves? Plenty of mayhem can ensue, he replies. The Chernobyl nuclear accident, to name one recent disaster, was partially brought about by the failure of a safety system that was being brought on line, a failure that touched off an unforeseeable and irreversible chain of disruptions; the less severe but still frightening accident at Three Mile Island, similarly, came about as the result of small errors that, taken by themselves, were insignificant, but that snowballed to near-catastrophic result.

Only through such failures, Perrow suggests, can designers improve the safety of complex systems. But, he adds, those improvements may introduce new opportunities for disaster. Looking at an array of real and potential technological mishaps--including the Bhopal chemical-plant accident of 1984, the Challenger explosion of 1986, and the possible disruptions of Y2K and genetic engineering--Perrow concludes that as our technologies become more complex, the odds of tragic results increase. His treatise makes for sobering and provocative reading. --Gregory McNamee

Review

"[Normal Accidents is] a penetrating study of catastrophes and near catastrophes in several high-risk industries. Mr. Perrow ... writes lucidly and makes it clear that `normal' accidents are the inevitable consequences of the way we launch industrial ventures.... An outstanding analysis of organizational complexity."---John Pfeiffer, The New York Times

"[Perrow's] research undermines promises that `better management' and `more operator training' can eliminate catastrophic accidents. In doing so, he challenges us to ponder what could happen to justice, community, liberty, and hope in a society where such events are normal."---Deborah A. Stone, Technology Review

"Normal Accidents is a testament to the value of rigorous thinking when applied to a critical problem."---Nick Pidgeon, Nature

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Product details

Paperback: 464 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press; Revised ed. edition (September 27, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691004129
ISBN-13: 978-0691004129
Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 63 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #138,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in Books > Engineering & Transportation > Engineering > Industrial, Manufacturing & Operational Systems > Health & Safety
- #24 in Books > Science & Math > Technology > Safety & Health
- #150 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Safety & First Aid

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A brilliant analysis.

April 18, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This book is an expatiation of Murphy's Law. The author argues that complex systems are vulnerable to failure and that failures are unpredictable because, in complex systems, the way failing components fail synergistically is inherently impossible to foresee.
The Challenger explosion, for example, has been blamed on a number of lapses in human judgment. But once one thing on the shuttle failed - I this case the O-rings on the solid rocket booster, an unanticipated cascade of failures followed. Similarly, the accident at Three Mile Island resulted from a faulty alarm which was known to be faulty, and was therefore ignored even as temperatures inside the containment dome were skyrocketing. The failure of a component, coupled with human misinterpretation of the failure. led to a cascade of bad events and wrong decisions.
Perrow emphasizes that these events might be attributed to human error, but the humans involved have not seen this sequences of events before, such a cascade of related failures was never anticipated, and the humans have no way to understand what is happening. So "operator error" is an illusion.
This book was written before the astounding disaster of Fukushima, but that series of catastrophes certainly fits Perrow's paradigm. Perrow is pessimistic about nuclear power. The fact that we haven't had more reactor disasters, Perrow says, is because the devices haven't yet had time to express themselves.
Any social scientist, physical scientist, or policymaker should read this book.

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Dr Bob

details the risk inherent in a highly complex systems, but a lot of theory and stats make it dry

September 19, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Interesting book that shows how highly complex systems with significant inherent danger, such as nuclear plants, oil tankers, and many others, can fail catastrophically due to their complexity, no matter how many safety measures are put in place. In fact, the safety measures can increase the risk of catastrophic failure. On the downside, one is ground down by the barrage of theory and statistics, which as the book goes on, gets even drier, and more theoretical. Mixed bag.

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J. Hoeler

Author assumes the world won't change and people won't get appreciably better at running highly complex systems

June 29, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The book is dated. The author makes many dooms day predictions about the nuclear and commercial aviation industries that didn't pan out given the last 30 years. Author assumes the world won't change and people won't get appreciably better at running highly complex systems.

Certainly not a page turner. Only managed to get through the first 65%. Glad I rented, as it certainly wasn't worth owning. Initially got the book having found it in the foot notes of "Command and Control."

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Daniel Curtis

Insightful framework, poorly-supported political conclusions

August 13, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Perrow provides an insightful framework for understanding the complex systems we live with every day and the ways they fail. Unfortunately, he spends his conclusion trying to make policy recommendations that aren't actually well supported by his own framework.

I highly recommend nearly all of this book for anyone that will be designing, operating, or criticizing complex systems. Aside from poorly explained comments on nuclear criticality accidents and naval nuclear reactors, the earlier chapters of the book are technically quite sound, and Perrow's framework is a good starting point to think about how to make complex systems as safe and resilient as possible.

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Laurie LM

Read this. March 2011, TIMELY Emergent Properties

March 19, 2011

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I read this 12 years ago. TOday, March 19, 2011, nuke disaster in Japan, more timely than ever. Perrow introduced me to tightly coupled, complex systems like nuke plants. I gravitated to his understandable explanations of the matrix of complex v linear and loose v tight coupling. Example of linear-tight is a bakery, and a University is complex-loose. Nuke plants are complex-tight. I agree with him that no amount of added safety features can be economically installed to make nuke plants safe. Either because there are emergent properties that can never be anticipated ( E.P. Chlorine is a toxic green gas, Sodium is a reactive gray metal. Combined they are table salt, partly responsible for life on earth, but you could NEVER have predicted that before hand from the starting ingredients) and or the cost $$$$$$ is prohibative. Case in point, the back-up generators for cooling Japan's now melting down nuke plant were on the ground to protect against typhoons from disabling them, but the tsunami got to them. But as per Perrow, even if there were tertiary back-ups up higher, another, additional unanticipatable flaw, might have emerged anyway.

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