Interesting Stories, Important for Engineers but Hard to Distill Lessons From

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	• Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology James R. Chiles Collins, 2002 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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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.

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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.

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