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.

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.