Normal Accidents
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''Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies'' is a 1984 book by Yale sociologist
Charles Perrow Charles Bryce Perrow (February 9, 1925 – November 12, 2019), or Chick Perrow was an American sociologist and a leading figure of organizational sociology. He spent most of his career at SUNY Stony Brook and Yale University as a professor of ...
, which analyses complex systems from a sociological perspective. Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems, and that accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.


System accidents

"Normal" accidents, or system accidents, are so-called by Perrow because such accidents are inevitable in extremely complex systems. Given the characteristic of the system involved, multiple failures that interact with each other will occur, despite efforts to avoid them. Perrow said that, while operator error is a very common problem, many failures relate to organizations rather than technology, and major accidents almost always have very small beginnings. Such events appear trivial to begin with before unpredictably cascading through the system to create a large event with severe consequences.
''Normal Accidents'' contributed key concepts to a set of intellectual developments in the 1980s that revolutionized the conception of safety and risk. It made the case for examining technological failures as the product of highly interacting systems, and highlighted organizational and management factors as the main causes of failures. Technological disasters could no longer be ascribed to isolated equipment malfunction, operator error, or acts of God.
Perrow identifies three conditions that make a system likely to be susceptible to Normal Accidents. These are: * The system is complex * The system is tightly coupled * The system has catastrophic potential


Three Mile Island

The inspiration for Perrow's books was the 1979
Three Mile Island accident The Three Mile Island accident was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor (TMI-2) of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, located on the Susquehanna River in Londonderry Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, Londonderry T ...
, where a
nuclear accident A nuclear and radiation accident is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as "an event that has led to significant consequences to people, the environment or the facility." Examples include radiation poisoning, lethal effect ...
resulted from an unanticipated interaction of multiple failures in a complex system. The event was an example of a normal accident because it was "unexpected, incomprehensible, uncontrollable and unavoidable".
Perrow concluded that the failure at Three Mile Island was a consequence of the system's immense complexity. Such modern high-risk systems, he realized, were prone to failures however well they were managed. It was inevitable that they would eventually suffer what he termed a 'normal accident'. Therefore, he suggested, we might do better to contemplate a radical redesign, or if that was not possible, to abandon such technology entirely.


New reactor designs

One disadvantage of any new nuclear reactor technology is that safety risks may be greater initially as reactor operators have little experience with the new design. Nuclear engineer
David Lochbaum David A. Lochbaum was the Director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). A nuclear engineer by training, he worked in nuclear power plants for nearly two decades. Lochbaum has written numerous articles and repo ...
has said that almost all serious nuclear accidents have occurred with what was at the time the most recent technology. He argues that "the problem with new reactors and accidents is twofold: scenarios arise that are impossible to plan for in simulations; and humans make mistakes". As Dennis Berry, Director Emeritus of Sandia National Laboratory put it, "fabrication, construction, operation, and maintenance of new reactors will face a steep learning curve: advanced technologies will have a heightened risk of accidents and mistakes. The technology may be proven, but people are not".Benjamin K. Sovacool. ''A Critical Evaluation of Nuclear Power and Renewable Electricity in Asia'', ''Journal of Contemporary Asia'', Vol. 40, No. 3, August 2010, p. 381. Sometimes, engineering redundancies which are put in place to help ensure safety may backfire and produce less, not more reliability. This may happen in three ways: First, redundant safety devices result in a more complex system, more prone to errors and accidents. Second, redundancy may lead to shirking of responsibility among workers. Third, redundancy may lead to increased production pressures, resulting in a system that operates at higher speeds, but less safely.


Readership

''Normal Accidents'' has more than 1,000 citations in the
Social Sciences Citation Index The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index is ...
and
Science Citation Index The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) is a citation index owned by Clarivate and previously by Thomson Reuters. It was created by the Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information, launched in 1964 as Science Citation Index ( ...
to 2003. A German translation of the book was published in 1987, with a second edition in 1992.See data of the book in the German National Library
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See also

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'' *
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'' *
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* Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do about It *
Paul Virilio Paul Virilio (; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018) was a French Culture theory, cultural theorist, Urban planning, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation ...


Literature

* Charles Perrow, (1984). ''Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies,'' * Charles Perrow: ''Accidents, Normal'', in:
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences The ''International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences'', originally edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, is a 26-volume work published by Elsevier. It has some 4,000 signed articles (commissioned by around 50 subject edi ...
, Elsevier 2001, Pages 33–38,
online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity, and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed as "on lin ...


References

{{reflist Aviation safety Nuclear safety and security Safety engineering Failure Three Mile Island accident Books about nuclear issues 1984 non-fiction books