Maggie's Farm

I remember reading "Normal Accidents" and was only mildly impressed. There were lots of stories and oodles of moral indignation but few useful tools to apply in my real-world work on nuclear reactor safety.

One lesson had already been learned and action taken - the infamous dropped light bulb event at a nuclear power plant in California.

One vendor's control system design was based on a control voltage of +30 volts as 100% and -30 volts as 0%. When the dropped bulb caused a short and a failure of control power, the control variables saw Zero volts or 50% signal, no matter the real desired value.

Well duh! You gotta fix that.

Another useful but obvious insight was that accidents seem to most often happen about 3 am. We had already supported research on Circadian rhythms of shift workers and had optimized shift rotations to minimize grogginess.

I'll look at these newer books.

Another appropriate application is in the design of freeways. While I can't point to specifics, it seems modern highway engineering has done a great deal to preclude "normal accidents."

Whether that improvement has been just blind evolution or a planned discipline is unknown to me.

Still, CalTran here in California seems to do a pretty good job of building roads to make it more difficult screw up as a driver.