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| View Larger Image | Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology
by James R. Chiles
| | List Price: | $15.95 |  | | 5 New starting at: | $13.68 | | 8 Used starting at: | $10.28 | | | | | Sales Rank: | 710107 | | Studio: | Collins | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 368 | | Publication Date: | September 01, 2002 | | Publisher: | Collins |
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Book Description
On July 25, 2000, a small piece of debris on the runway at a Paris airport caused a tire to blow out on an Air France Concorde during its take off. A heavy slab of rubber that spun off from a tire created a shock wave in a wing tank, which burst open and sent fuel streaming into an engine intake. As flames trailed two hundred feet behind, the aircraft rolled out of control. The crash killed all 109 people on board and 4 more on the ground.The tragedy of that departing Concorde is just one of many such chain-reaction catastrophes that have occurred as the world has grown more technologically complex and as our machines have become more difficult to control -- and more deadly. Now, in a riveting investigation into the causes and often brutal consequences of technological breakdowns, James R. Chiles offers stunning new insights into the increasingly frequent machine disasters that haunt our lives.The shocking breakup of the Challenger; the dark February morning when the Atlantic swallowed the giant drilling rig Ocean Ranger; the fiery PEPCON factory explosion in Nevada; a deadly runaway police van in Minnesota: Chiles tracks the causes and consequences of these system breakdowns and others, vividly demonstrating why the battle between man and machine may be escalating beyond manageable limits -- and why we all have a stake in its outcome.Chiles reconstructs moments of confusion and then terror as systems collapse, operators make fateful, sometimes incorrect choices, and disaster follows. He uncovers surprising links between past and present tragedies, such as the connections between nineteenth-century steamboat explosions and twentieth-century nuclear power plant failures. And he analyzes the numerous near misses that don't always make the evening news -- times when the quick thinking, heroic gestures, and expert actions of a few individuals have saved the lives of many, often just in time.Combining riveting storytelling with eye-opening findings, Inviting Disaster shows what happens when our reach for new technology exceeds our grasp, and explains what we need to know to survive on the machine frontier. |
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Inviting Disaster, by technology and history writer James R. Chiles, is an unusual book: it appeals to the macabre desires that keep us riveted to highway accidents, while knowledgeably discoursing on the often preventable mistakes that caused them. At its heart are colorful stories behind more than 50 of the most infamous catastrophes that periodically chilled the advance of the industrial age. There are 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 U.S. battleship Maine, 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, dams, factories, and other conveyances and facilities into a cautionary tale about technological progress. --Howard Rothman |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 36 reviews)
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Great Resource 
Excellent collection of information about failed quality assurance programs and human performance errors. Disasters discussed cover a wide range industries from construction to space exploration. If you are researching what causes disasters, this is the book.
March 28, 2008 | |
Interesting Stories, Important for Engineers but Hard to Distill Lessons From 
This is an interesting book consisting of a large number of engineering disasters and near misses. Each is treated with a brief investigative story explaining what happened and generally why. Most of the disasters are very large, such as the Piper Alpha and Bhopal and thus are the most dramatic and hard hitting. The Concorde on the cover is not a prominently examined example however, which was slightly disappointing to me being an aerospace engineer.
For the lay reader this is an elucidating set of stories that many will find intriguing. For the practicing engineer it is more a reminder of the importance of safety, considering failure paths, incorporating safety systems, designing within the constraints of human capability squarely in mind, etc. However it really is a book from a pop-interest TV show. Although subtitled "Lessons from the Edge of Technology" the lessons are the simplest kind that would be discovered on a 1 hour TV episode with commercials, such as after the Piper-Alpha incident revealing: sea water and electronics don't mix. It's not a good theoretical or reference source for learning about safety in engineering design, but is a good motivator for learning why it is important for engineers and regulators to know and implement such things.
December 29, 2007 | |
If you prefer depth over breadth, you won't like this book. 
Chiles gives a vivid journalistic account of various accidents and disasters. The writing style is easy and popular -he clearly intends to reach a broad audience. He generally does this job well.
The main weakness of the book is the absence of an overarching framework, or theory if you like, that could help the reader assimilate all this information, structure it, identify some concepts or themes that recur. Or at least explain to the reader why Chiles found this particular selection of accidents so interesting that they deserve mention in his book. Chiles is quite candid about this lack of purpose: "When I began this project some friends asked what anybody could boil out of the huge variety of technological disaster we've seen. I didn't know." (p277).
Therefore, the title's promise of "Lessons [learned?] from the edge of technology" never really materialises. The stories are told well, but the lessons remain fragmented and fuzzy. The book is not particularly useful in actual accident prevention work.
While generally well written, at times, particularly in the second half of the book, Chiles goes an association or two too far. More than once, I was left in a mild state of confusion. Other reviewers have also mentioned this problem.
The book gives a fragmented account of various disasters. If you prefer depth over breadth, you won't like this book. If you are interested in a popular account of various disasters, you may enjoy it.
But why not spend your time better reading truly fantastic books on the subject of learning from [bad] experience. Read Henry Petroski's To engineer is human, Aaron Wildavsky's Searching for safety, Daniel Maurino's Beyond aviation human factors, or some of the books by James Reason, Trevor Kletz or perhaps Scott Sagan. There is plenty to choose from.
April 23, 2007 | |
Essential reading for modern life
This book and Charles Perrow's "Normal Accidents" are required reading. We live in and around complex and dangerous technologies which fail for known reasons. Understanding the lessons Chiles presents will help you understand your world and survive it better, whether you're an engineer or just a potential victim.
August 05, 2006 | |
Mandatory Reading For Safety Professionals
Having read through this book twice in five years and beginning again is a refresher in keeping focused on safety. Anyone that has anything to do with safety should read this book. From a car tire vibrating to red smoke at a nitro plant, you will start thinking differently, logically. Being able to catch a pending disaster and stop it is key to survival. This book teaches us to slow down, don't rush designs, to calm down and think when we are faced when problems that do not make sense. I suggest reading the book, presenting the stories in meetings for discussion. It will increase the safety awareness in you life.
July 11, 2006 | |
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