Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies

Charles Perrow

Princeton University Press, Oct 17, 1999 - Health & Fitness - 451 pages

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.

Contents

• Abnormal Blessings: vii
• Introduction: 3
• Normal Accident at Three Mile Island: 15
• Nuclear Power as a HighRisk System Why We Have Not Had More TMIsBut Will Soon: 32
• Complexity Coupling and Catastrophe: 62
• Petrochemical Plants: 101
• Aircraft and Airways: 123
• Marine Accidents: 170
• Earthbound Systems Dams Quakes Mines and Lakes: 232
• Exotics Space Weapons and DNA: 256
• Living with HighRisk Systems: 304
• Afterword: 353
• The Y2K Problem: 388
• List of Acronyms: 413
• Notes: 415
• Bibliography: 426
• Index: 441

About the author

Charles Perrow is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. His other books include The Radical Attack on Business, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, and The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies; Princeton paperbacks
• Author: Charles Perrow
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, revised
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1999
• ISBN: 0691004129, 9780691004129
• Length: 451 pages
• Subjects: HEALTH & FITNESS / Safety; Medical / Emergency Medicine; Social Science / Sociology / General; Technology & Engineering / General; Technology & Engineering / Industrial Health & Safety; Technology & Engineering / Social Aspects