Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies [Paperback]

Having said all that there IS a wealth of good information and insight in this book when Perrow sticks to systems and their interactions. The book contains the finest analysis commercially available of the Three Mile Island near-disaster, and his insight about how to improve safety in nuclear plants was timely when the book was written in 1984, though many improvements have been made since then.

Speaking as a commercial airline pilot, I feel his conclusions and observations about aircraft safety were generally true at the time of printing in 1984, but now are miserably out of date. (The same is true of the Air Traffic Control section.) I believe that he generally has a good layman's grasp of aviation, so I am willing to take it as a given that he has a knowledgeable layman's comprehension of the other systems discussed. As an aside, he never gets some of the technicalities quite right. For instance, he constantly uses the term 'coupling' incorrectly in the engineering sense; this is particularly objectionable in the aviation system where it has a very specific meaning to aeronautical engineers and pilots.

The section on maritime accidents and safety is superbly written. Here I am not an expert, but there seems to be a high degree of correlation with the aviation section. His section on "Non Collision Course Collisions" by itself makes this book a worthwhile read. He presents very compelling information and reasoning until the very end of the section, at which point he suggests that since ships are now so big, large ships (especially supertankers) essentially should have no Captain, but should be run by committee. This is an invalid conclusion, and he offers no evidence or substantial argument to support that idea. Clearly, it is an idea hatched in his office and not on a ship (or plane.) There always needs to be a person in a place of ultimate authority in fast moving, dynamic systems, or the potential exists to have crew members begin to work at direct odds with each other, making a marginal situation dangerous. Ironically, in the very same part of the discussion where he concludes that there should be no Captain, he has hit upon the key to the problem. He mentions that he was pleased to see that some European shippers were now training their crews together as a team, and that he expected this to lower accident rates. He is, in fact, exactly right about that. Airlines now have to train crews in Crew Resource Management (CRM) in which each member of the crew has the right and obligation to speak up if they notice anything awry in the operation of their aircraft, and the Captain makes it a priority to listen to the input of others, as everyone has a different set of concerns and knowledge. In this way, the Captain becomes much less dictatorial, and becomes more of a final decision maker after everyone has had their say. It IS critical, though, to maintain someone in command, as there is no time to assemble a staff meeting when a ship is about to run aground, or a mid-air collision is about to occur. Many other well documented studies and books have come to this conclusion, and in the airline industry since CRM was introduced the accident rate has decreased dramatically.

Overall, if you have a desire to understand high risk systems, this book has a lot of good information in it; however it is woefully out of date and for that reason among others, I can only recommend it with reservations. A better and much more contemporary introductory book on the subject is 'Inviting Disaster' by James R. Chiles. Remember, this book was written over twenty years ago, and much has changed since then. There is knowledge to be gleaned here, but you have to be prepared to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I read this book when it was assigned in the 1980's as a mainstream text for graduate courses in public policy and public administration, and I still use it. It is relevant, for example, to the matter of whether we should try to use nuclear bombs on Iraq--most Americans do not realize that there has never (ever) been an operational test of a US nuclear missile from a working missle silo. Everything has been tested by the vendors or by operational test authorities that have a proven track record of falsifying test results or making the tests so unrealistic as to be meaningless.

This book is also relevant to the world of software. As the Y2K panic suggested, the "maze" of software upon which vital national life support systems depend--including financial, power, communications, and transportation software--has become very obscure as well as vulnerable. Had those creating these softwares been more conscious of the warnings and suggestions that the author provides in this book, America as well as other nations would be much less vulnerable to terrorism and other "acts of man" for which our insurance industry has not planned.

I agree with another review who notes that this book is long overdue for a reprint--it should be updated. I recommended it "as is," but believe an updated version would be 20% more valuable.