The Next Catastrophe

Customer Reviews

• Superb, Crystal-Clear, Speaks Truth to Power  Apr 3, 2008 (4 of 5 found this helpful)

  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 singl

• The Next Catastrophe  Feb 16, 2008 (2 of 5 found this helpful)

  Dr. Perrow has done another good job with a difficult and immediate problem. The book is very qualitative and does not touch on many of the quantitative methods available to model threats and how these risks are evaluated by the government and insurance companies. A mention of these methods and techniques, with appropriate references, would add immensely to this book.
  
  Kevin MacG. Adams, Ph.D.

• Too much politics, too little thoughtful analysis  May 16, 2007 (16 of 30 found this helpful)

  Perrow's book, Normal Accidents, is a classic in its field. I purchased The Next Catastrophe assuming that it would be a worthy successor. Boy, was I disappointed. Instead of careful argumentation, Perrow gives political commentary, based on nothing more than his own biases and preconceived notions. Normal Accidents was marred in a few places by clear political bias, but the overall analysis of the book was so well-done that overlooking those few places was easy. This is not true of The Next Catastrophe, in which good analysis and argumentation is hard to find amidst the diatribe. If you are interested in knowing about Perrow's political views, buy this book; otherwise, do not waste your money.