Product Description: Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents introduced the notion of an ’organizational accident’. These are rare but often calamitous events that occur in complex technological systems operating in hazardous circumstances. They stand in sharp contrast to ’individual accidents’ whose damaging consequences are limited to relatively few people or assets...read more

Product Description: On February 20, 2003, the deadliest rock concert in U.S. history took place at a roadhouse called The Station in West Warwick, Rhode Island. That night, in the few minutes it takes to play a hard-rock standard, the fate of many of the unsuspecting nightclub patrons was determined with awful certainty...read more

Product Description: The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results  A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America...read more

When faced with a human error problem, you may be tempted to ask 'Why didn't they watch out better? How could they not have noticed?'. You think you can solve your human error problem by telling people to be more careful, by reprimanding the miscreants, by issuing a new rule or procedure. These are all expressions of 'The Bad Apple Theory', where you believe your system is basically safe if it were not for those few unreliable people in it. This old view of human error is increasingly outdated and will lead you nowhere. The new view, in contrast, understands that a human error problem is actually an organizational problem. Finding a 'human error' by any other name, or by any other human, is only the beginning of your journey, not a convenient conclusion. The new view recognizes that systems are inherent trade-offs between safety and other pressures (for example: production). People need to create safety through practice, at all levels of an organization. Breaking new ground beyond its successful predecessor, "The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error" guides you through the traps and misconceptions of the old view. It explains how to avoid the hindsight bias, to zoom out from the people closest in time and place to the mishap, and resist the temptation of counterfactual reasoning and judgmental language. But it also helps you look forward. It suggests how to apply the new view in building your safety department, handling questions about accountability, and constructing meaningful countermeasures. It even helps you in getting your organization to adopt the new view and improve its learning from failure. So if you are faced by a human error problem, abandon the fallacy of a quick fix. Read this book.

Product Description: The aim of this book is to set the 1957 Windscale accident in its historical context in the immediate post-war period and the early days of the Cold War, to describe the event and its consequences and to evaluate it from the vantage point of 1990.

Product Description: This book benefited from the financial support of a French Government scholarship between 1976 and 1978. It sponsored a doctoral thesis in which initial theoretical, empirical, and historical reflections on acci dents were developed and written while I was a student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris...read more

Product Description: Disasters, both natural and man-made, are on the rise. Indeed, a catastrophe of one sort or another seems always to be unfolding somewhere on the planet. We have entered into a veritable Age of Catastrophes which have grown both larger and more complex and now routinely very widespread in scope...read more

Product Description: Close calls, narrow escapes, or near hits. History has shown repeatedly that these "near-miss" incidents often precede loss producing events, but are largely ignored or go unreported because nothing (no injury, damage or loss) happened...read more

Product Description: What is RCA? It seems like such an easy question to answer, yet from novices to veterans and practitioners to providers, no one seems to have come to agreement or consensus on an acceptable definition for the industry. Now in its fourth edition, Root Cause Analysis: Improving Performance for Bottom-Line Results discusses why it is so hard to get such consensus and why various providers are reluctant for that to happen...read more

Product Description: People deal with physical hazards every day at the workplace, in their homes, on the roadways, and in many other areas. In any situation, people face potential hazards-often more than one hazard in each situation-and these hazards often lead to serious injury...read more

Product Description: Combining original reporting with dramatic photographs and detailed illustrations, Popular Mechanics looks at the science behind the most devastating events of the past 100 years—including San Francisco’s 7.8 earthquake in 1906, the Gulf oil spill, the Apollo 13 Space Mission, and Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall near New Orleans...read more

Product Description: The issue of risk should be embedded into the mindset of every engineer and manager to improve safety and dependability. Companies can be held accountable through law when a gross failing in health and safety management has fatal consequences...read more

Product Description: The issue of risk should be embedded into the mindset of every engineer and manager to improve safety and dependability. Companies can be held accountable through law when a gross failing in health and safety management has fatal consequences...read more

Product Description: Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines—death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example—developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people...read more

Product Description: On March 9, 1976, a violent explosion, fueled by high concentrations of methane gas and coal dust, ripped through the Scotia mine in the heart of Eastern Kentucky coal country. The blast killed fifteen miners who were working nearly three and a half miles underground; two days later, a second explosion took the lives of eleven rescue workers...read more

Product Description: A heartrending story of the human spirit from the author of the bestselling Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight Alexandra Fuller returns with the unforgettable true story of Colton H. Bryant, a soulful boy with a mustang-taming heart who comes of age in the oil fields and open plains of Wyoming...read more

Describes the 1919 collapse of a steel tank containing more than two million gallons of molasses in Boston--a disaster that claimed the lives of twenty-one people, injured 150, and caused widespread destruction--the causes of the tragedy, its aftermath, and the sweeping social changes that transformed the era.

The nine Pennsylvania coal miners who were trapped underground when waters from a flooded mine swept into the Quecreek mine where they were working recount their seventy-seven-hour ordeal and the rescue efforts that eventually got them out alive. Reprint.

An electrifying true account of love, hope, and heroism vividly recreates the terrifying events that occurred on December 3, 1984, in the ancient city of Bhopal, when a cloud of toxic gas escaped from an American pesticide plant, killing and injuring thousands of people. Reprint. 20,000 first printing. (view table of contents)