According to Yale University Professor Charles Perrow, it is time to start learning from recent natural disasters in the United States like Hurricane Katrina. On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, Perrow asserts that instead of simply responding to natural disasters, we should be reducing our vulnerability to them.
Reducing the size of targets is one such way of reducing vulnerability to natural, and man-made disasters. Encouraging the numerous disaster recovery and prevention agencies to talk to each other is key to implementing changes that will actually save lives.
According to Perrow, the United States lags far behind other countries, such as those in the European Union, not just in natural disaster prevention, but also policies on drugs, the food industry, telecommunications and software. What prevents change from happening, suggests Perrow, is campaign financing and the debt owed by politicians.
Charles Perrow is a noted organizational theorist and sociologist for some time on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh and recently at Yale University. Perhaps his most famous work is "Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay." He is the author of the book "Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies" which explains his theory of normal accidents; catastrophic accidents that are inevitable in tightly coupled and complex systems. His theory predicts that failures will occur in multiple and unforeseen ways that are virtually impossible to predict.
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This free podcast is from our IEEE Spectrum Radio series.
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