Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology
Author: James R. Chiles
List Price: $15.95
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ISBN: 0066620821
Publisher: HarperBusiness (01 September, 2002)
Sales Rank: 7,344
Average Customer Rating: 4.52 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Understanding system safety
This books is a fascinating introduction to the topic of systems safety and why large scale technology fails. Covering systems as diverse as space exploration, offshore oil drilling, aircraft, chemical processing plants and the nuclear power industry, it is full of interesting examples of how small, apparently insignificant factors, can coincide and bring down the entire system, often with great loss of life and huge financial cost. As our technologies become more complex and widespread, we must become more sophisticated in our approach to maintaining their safety, and learning from past disasters is the first step in this process. This book provides a string of interesting past-disaster lessons. Although not as theoretically in-depth as Perrow's "Normal Accidents" or Sagan's "Limits of Safety", the book is very readable and will be of interest to the novice as well as those who have read Perrow and Sagan, simply because of its colourful and diverse examples and interesting discussion.
Rating: 5 out of 5
You Don't Need to be an Engineer to Love this Book
Let's face it: our lives are dominated by technology. Luckily we rarely have to give it all that much thought. However there are those times when technology fails us. Planes crash, disasters like Bhopal happen, let's not forget Three Mile Island adn the Space Shuttle too. What happened? How about similar disasters and problems throughout history and little known disasters such as oil rig blowouts? How did our fail safe world fail?The book Inviting Disaster attempts to answer those questions and does so in an entertaining and informative manner. Written by an engineer who understands hot to communicate with everyone, this book is a fun read with anyone with an interest in this topic.
I have absolutely no experience in anything mechanical, but came away after reading this book much better informed. In addition to the mechanical explanations, Chiles provides very informative glimpses into history. He's a good engineer, a good historian, and a good writer.
Rating: 4 out of 5
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! Similar Products
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