The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters | Date: 28 April 2011, 07:20
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The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
By Charles Perrow
* Publisher: Princeton University Press
* Number Of Pages: 388
* Publication Date: 2007-03-26
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0691129975
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780691129976
Product Description:
Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In The Next Catastrophe, he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness.
Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their size to minimize damage and diminish their attractiveness to terrorists. He focuses on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--and shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow reveals how the threat of catastrophe is on the rise, whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. Along the way, he gives us the first comprehensive history of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect us.
The Next Catastrophe is a penetrating reassessment of the very real dangers we face today and what we must do to confront them. Written in a highly accessible style by a renowned systems-behavior expert, this book is essential reading for the twenty-first century. The events of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina--and the devastating human toll they wrought--were only the beginning. When the next big disaster comes, will we be ready?
Review
This book proposes a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness...Focusing on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--he shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures. He also provides the first comprehensive history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect U.S. citizens.
(Natural Hazards Observer )
Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks have exposed the U.S.'s vulnerabilities to natural and unnatural disasters. What should be done to prevent such catastrophes in the future? Acclaimed sociologist and systems analyst Perrow, addresses this question...The book is written in a highly readable prose that is accessible to general audiences. Indispensable for undergraduate/graduate collections in disaster management studies and risk assessment studies, and extremely useful for environmental studies and environmental sociology.
(T. Niazi Choice )
The Next Catastrophe is an important and far-reaching book that, in arguing for the reduction of vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure to natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters, tackles issues of high significance to us all. It must be hoped that the readership of this book includes not only researchers and industrial safety practitioners but also executives along with politicians at all levels and that its message is acted upon.
(David M. Clarke Risk Analysis )
Review
The Next Catastrophe is the work of the master at his formidable best--a dazzling array of learning, perspective, good sense, and, above all, command.
(Kai Erikson, Yale University )
Summary: Superb, Crystal-Clear, Speaks Truth to Power
Rating: 5
Amazon destroyed this review in error and I failed to keep a file copy. This is a reconstructed review--not nearly as good as the original--nothing I can do about it.
----------reconstructed review-------------
This book is a learned essay, and I immediately discerned (I tend to read the index and bibliographies first, to understand the provenance of the author's knowledge) that the author has excelled at both casting a very wide net for sources, and at distilling and presenting those sources in a useful new manner with added insights.
Key points:
Natural disasters impact on 6 times more people than all the conflict on the planet.
Industrial irresponsibility, especially in the nuclear, chemical, and biological industries, is legion, and much more potentially catastrophic than any terrorist attack. Of special concern is the storage of large amounts of toxic, flammable, volatile, or reactive materials outside the security perimeters--this includes spent nuclear fuel rods, railcars with 90,000 tons of chlorine that if combined with fire would put millions at risk.
The entire book is an indictment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which the author says was designed for permanent failure (at the same time that it took over and then gutted the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)).
The author focuses on how concentrations of people, energy, and high-value economic targets make us more vulnerable than we need to be. Dispersal, and moving small amounts of toxic materials (just enough just in time, rather than a year's supply on site), can help.
The author outlines five remediation strategies:
REDUCTIONS of amounts
TRANSFERS from outside the wire to inside the wire
SUBSTITUTION (e.g. of bleach for chlorine)
MIND-SET SHIFT to emphasize public safety and regulation over profit
REFORM of the political system, where federal laws now set CEILINGS for safety rather than floors (one of many reasons we have 27 secessionist movements in the USA--the federal government is insolvent and abjectly corrupt and incapable).
We learn that post-9/11 we have spent tens of billions on counter-terrorism to ill-effect, while completely neglecting rudimentary precautions and protections against natural and industrial disasters that will inevitably turn into catastrophes for lack of competent organizations.
The author emphasizes that complex systems will fail no matter what, but it is much more dangerous to the public if the government and the industrial executives refuse to do their jobs. The author coins the term "executive failure" to describe top leaders who deliberately decide to ignore federal regulations on safety, and describes a number of situations where near-nuclear meltdown and other disasters came too close to reality.
The power grid, PRIOR TO deregulation, is treated as a model of a system that developed with six positive traits:
1. Bottom-up
2. Voluntary alliances
3. Shared facilities at cost
4. Members support independent research & development
5. Oversight stresses commonality interdependence
6. Deregulation is harmful to public safety
The author sums up the enduring sources of failure as:
ORGANIZATIONAL -- flawed by design (pyramidal organizations cannot scale nor digest massive amounts of new fast information)
EXECUTIVE -- deliberate high crimes and misdemeanors, seeking short-term profit without regard to long-term costs to the public safety. "We almost lost Toledo." Buy the book for that story alone.
REGULATORY -- the corruption of Congress, now known to be legendary.
The author tells us that globalization has eliminated the "water-tight bulkheads" within industries and economies, meaning that single points of failure (like the Japanese factory making silicon chips) can impact around the world and immediately. The author prefers to nurture networks of small firms, and this is consistent with other books I have read: economies of scale are no longer, they externalize more costs to the public than they save in efficiencies.
The book ends with an overview of the Internet, which is not the author's forte. He notes that our critical infrastructure is connected to the Internet, but I like to add
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