[.ca] Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology; ... (ISBN 0066620813)

From Amazon.co.uk:
Inviting Disaster, by technology and history writer James R Chiles, is an unusual book: it appeals to the prurient desires that keep us riveted to highway accidents, while knowledgeably discoursing on the often preventable mistakes that caused them. At its heart are the colourful stories behind more than 50 of the most infamous catastrophes that periodically chilled the advance of the industrial age, both those well remembered (the 1986 Challenger explosion, for example) and those now largely forgotten (a 1937 gas explosion at a Texas school that killed 298). But along with lively depictions of these deadly devastations and white-knuckle calamities--the Maine battleship, Apollo 13 and Three Mile Island among them--Chiles offers an informed analysis of the unfortunate chain of events that brought them about. And by grouping like incidents to show how fatal "system fractures" eventually developed through a combination of human error and mechanical malfunction, he also suggests how we might sidestep such tragedies in the future. In so doing he fashions these spectacular accounts of failed planes, trains, ships, bridges, dam s, factories and other conveyances and facilities, into a cautionary tale about the progress we are making to "learn the way of the machine (and) act before an otherwise routine day rises to disaster". --Howard Rothman

interesting but haphazard:
This is a very interesting and quick read. It starts out terrific with a riveting telling of the collapse of the WTC towers, a north sea oil rig, and 3 mile island. But somewhere halfway into the book it starts to get muddled. The stories mix and match and some paragraphs don't make sense no matter how many times you read them. He also begins lecturing on systems failure as much as (or more than) telling stories. This guy knows how to explain things, but I get the feeling the 2nd half of the book was rushed to completion and/or an editor went insane. A strong point is in lots of good examples of near-misses and times when things went right in bad circumstances. Lots of good stories and lessons here but structured poorly so some parts you have to fight through.

How did this get to publication??:
Let me first mention how poorly this book has to be written for me to actually sit down and type up a commentary. This is without a doubt the worst written book I've read this year (and I read an enormous quantity of non-fiction each week). The book is divided into chapters which ostensibly focus on one major engineering catastrophe. But instead of fleshing out the problems associated with the cardinal disaster of each chapter, the "author" jumps to another seemingly unrelated engineering disaster. In the chapter on the Three Mile Island disaster, instead of saying something ot the effect of, "the valve failed... and was critical to the build-up of disaster" the author jumps back to the invention of the safety valve. This would not be terribly unusual except for the extent to which the vignette is unrelated to the chapter as a whole. Towards the the end of the first 1/3 of the book, you can almost sense when the author's attention span is going to fail and you are going to be thrust at Mach 3 into the wall of a distracting incidental anecdote several hundreds of years preceding the topic at hand. I am not saying that the reader would not like background information on things, but the organization or lack thereof, is in a word "maddening." I am not kidding. I promised I'd give the book a fair chance but I get to mad at the poor writing and lack of editing to continue. In a chapter dedicated to the Challenger disaster, the author juxtaposes the disaster of a blimp earlier in the century. This would not be a problem, had the author discussed the blimp disaster then compared it with the challenger debacle. Unfortunately, the author's misguided writing style presents both incidents simultaneously. One paragraph is about the old airship, the next about the challenger then one about the blimp, then one about the Challenger... It seems like nothing now, but you will go nuts reading it. You never get your bearings and by the end of the chapter, should to be determined enough to actually continue, you really don't come away with anymore understanding of it than you would from watching a news clip about the decline in the population of birds of prey in Northern Minnesota. Then, there are the cryptic sentences which, at best, are serious editorial lapses, at worst, a sad commentary on the state of education in this country. Because I thought I might have suffered a temporary stroke and lost the ability to read I started to mark these sentences as they flew by. I hoped that I could test later on if it was halting prose or if I had suffered an aneurysm. Page 52, "Come inside the beige paneled control room at TMI-2, eight seconds after the valves slammed shut an block off the steam making pipes." **What???** Then the one on page 167, "The flight attendants spelled each other at the job of hanging onto the captain, though they believed the man was probably dead by now." What am I missing? The whole book reads like this. How did this clunker get into publication? If any of my student had handed me this piece, I'd have failed them on the spot.

Interesting Reading But Not Technical:
If you were expecting to find technical understanding of how best to improve a plant, don't buy this book. If you want a qualitative understanding of why disasters occur, this is the book. For a quantitative, engineer's perspective, refer to "Managing Risk and Reliability of Process Plants," by Mark Tweeddale. I found this book very insightful and easy to read. After reading this book, I was encouraged to go on to more technical text. After reading this book I decided to make it a career goal NOT to be one of the engineers who designed an oil plateform where the controls could be shorted out by sea water with the fill-valves open on failure. Dumb!

Excellent General Introduction to Systems Safety:
'Inviting Disaster' is a compelling and easy to read book. It is an introduction to accident theory for generalists, and is as interesting (perhaps more so) to nontechnical people as it is to engineers and the like. James Chiles discusses several major accidents (Challenger, Three Mile Island, Ocean Ranger, etc.) in well executed chapters with substantial background from previous precursor accidents or incidents. One reviewer seems to believe that this is a flaw, but I disagree. The reviewer seems to believe, for instance, that the R101 (a dirigible, not a blimp, as the reviewer wrongly states) is totally irrelevant to Challenger. In fact R101 was the Challenger of it's day, and the social, managerial and technological pressures that ultimately led to the R101 disaster ultimately led to Challenger as well. Chiles ties this theme together in a seamless manner in chapter after chapter. This book is not a rigorous technical analysis of the individual disasters with the engineering and math associated with formal inquiries and technical (AAIB, NTSB, etc.) investigations. What it does better than any of the technical inquiries could ever do, though, is make a clear a compelling case for the problems that led to each of the accidents covered, treating man-machine interface issues with particular grace. I have long been associated with the more technical aspects of accident investigation and safety systems, but have to say that while there are more technical accounts available for all of these accidents, if you are looking for an entry level (but complete) overview of accidents and systems safety, you can't go wrong with this book.

A must read!!!:
This book was really great. I think its a must read for any engineer. The author highlights disasters throughout the modern era, and points out the attitudes and other factors that have lead to them. The thing that got me the most was his discussion of various space disasters, including challenger, and how engineers need to do more than just "send a memo" when they believe lives are at risk. In any case, I think its a most worthwhile book for anyone who works with technology.