Just Finished Reading: Inviting Disaster – Lessons from the Edge of Technology: An Inside look at Catastrophes and Why they Happen by James R Chiles (FP: 2001/2002)

 

We live, as we are often reminded, in a technological age – an age of wonders, an age of miracles. We also live, as we are too often reminded, in an age of disasters and catastrophe. Not surprisingly the two are, again too often, linked. With great power comes the potential to do truly awesome amounts of unintentional damage. But why is that true? It’s something that the author of this equally fascinating and frightening book has been looking at for most of his professional life.

For decades now technology in its many aspects has become ubiquitous – ever present but virtually invisible. That is indeed part of the problem. We are all users of technology but very few of us (including me!) actually understand much of any of it. Not that long ago even the average driver would not only use his or her car but also maintain it, changing out components and understanding the basics of the internal combustion engine. Today hardly anyone has the technological knowhow – outside a mechanics workshop – to either diagnose or fix a problem most especially if neither the problem or solution are obvious. Now imagine you’re are a pilot flying across the Atlantic in a new aircraft. Naturally you have spent many hours in simulators learning to fly it and have been told about its new features (improved of course) and what to do in the event of a whole host of problems. But no one told you about or trained you to handle the fact that an overworked and very tired technician has forgotten to remove some duct tape covering an external sensor he was working on so the planes computer system ‘thinks’ nothing is wrong with the flight when something is very wrong. But you trust the machine. You trust the screen and the data it displays – just long enough to be put in a life or death situation that you might not be able to get out of. Now imagine you’re the night manager at a nuclear power plant. You’ve read the manuals and you have a pretty good idea of how everything works at the plant. But training, especially refresher training, is expensive and your last ‘hands on’ disaster training back at headquarters was almost 5 years ago. It was two days well spent but you can only cover so much in that time and there’s little utility in training for a once in a hundred year accident that even the most pessimistic engineer can come up with to bust the trainees balls in the simulated control room. So, as these things tend to do, when such an accident happens, when a mechanical valve sticks open but registers closed, when a readout gives faulty or ambiguous data, when a leak is invisible and you only have instruments to go off you do the best that you can and, potentially at least, cover a vast area in radioactive ash.

Accidents happen. They are a fact of life. No system is perfect. But we can mitigate, we can have redundant systems (despite the expense), we can have back-ups and failsafe’s and simulators and adequate training and…… But that’s the point of this book. Advanced technology is, potentially at least, very dangerous if we don’t look after it properly and treat it with the respect it deserves. If we build it, or design it, or use it we need to understand it enough to use it safely and wisely. We need to understand it enough and respect its power enough not to be that guy who left the bolts out of the compressor or didn’t turn the alarm back on or didn’t tell the pilot that his left tanks gauges aren’t reading right.

The author certainly gets around and seems to know his stuff. From nuclear power stations to airplane cockpits to high-rise office buildings he looks at disaster after near-miss to show what happened, why it happened and what can be done about it. It’s a sobering narrative but it’s one that need to be faced, especially as our technology gets more powerful and (potentially at least) more dangerous year after year. But be warned – reading this might put you off flying or living downwind of a nuclear power plant or anywhere near a port handling fertiliser (Texas, 1947!). One last thing: in my 2002 edition there’s a new introduction which looks at the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers from a structural engineering viewpoint. More sensitive American (or other) readers might want to skip over this bit. Definitely recommended.