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Cover of Normal Accidents

Normal accidents

living with high-risk technologies : with a new afterword and a postscript on the Y2K problem

By Charles Perrow

3.50 (2 Ratings)
54 Want to read4 Currently reading1 Have read

Publish Date

1999

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Language

eng

Pages

400

Description:

"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 which interact with each other will occur, despite efforts to avoid them. Perrow said that operator error is a very common problem, many failures relate to organizations rather than technology, and big 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. 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 [[Wikipedia][1]] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents "Wikipedia"