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Charles Perrow With a new preface by the author

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"The Next Catastrophe is the work of the master at his formidable best--a dazzling array of learning, perspective, good sense, and, above all, command."--Kai Erikson, Yale University

"A profound and vital book, The Next Catastrophe provides a devastating indictment of the U.S. government's response to the deep organizational faults revealed by the September 11 attacks and Katrina. Perrow shows in fascinating detail how our politicians allow human disasters to be transformed into opportunities for profiteering and politicking, and routinely substitute wasteful bureaucracies for smart plans to reorganize fragile systems. The fundamental answer, Perrow writes, is to discard the profit- and power-driven ideologies in favor of our nation's traditional common-sense approach to the challenges of our all-too-real world."--Barry C. Lynn, author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation

"A profound meditation on the paradox that modern technological and management orthodoxies have taken us down an increasingly perilous path. In the name of efficiency, sensitive industries are now so concentrated that they can be crippled at a single blow, from nature, accidents, or acts of terrorism. The mantra of asserting 'central control' in response to catastrophes only makes things worse, Perrow notes, as hierarchies strangle grassroots networks of local responders that might do some good. A trenchant, troubling study."--John Arquilla, Naval Postgraduate School

"From the opening pages, The Next Catastrophe is riveting, eye-opening, and haunting. The causes of disasters go far beyond random acts of nature or terrorism; they reflect underlying systemic and managerial issues that we must confront in order to ensure our safety. Luckily, Charles Perrow digs deeply to find some difficult but promising solutions. Concerned citizens must join the experts in reading this brilliant book."--Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor, best-selling author of Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End

The Next Catastrophe is a fascinating, stimulating, and far-reaching work. Perrow's signature themes are here--the role of political and economic institutions, the reach of their power into organizations, and the inevitability of major organizational failures. The basic argument will stir discussion, and the feasibility of Perrow's proposed solutions is sure to provoke controversy."--Lynn Eden, author of Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation

"Perrow's thesis is laudable and his execution is strong. When he discusses the mistakes still being made in the way the U.S. has set up FEMA and Homeland Security, he is especially strong balanced, thoughtful, and convincing--and his explanation of the Enron debacle is one of the clearest ever presented. Overall, he analyzes how our organizations fail, why it is that regulation doesn't solve the problems, and how susceptible we have become as a result, doing so in a way that is just plain splendid."--William R. Freudenburg, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Charles Perrow is the undisputed 'master of disaster.' In this timely and well-written book, Perrow offers not only a shrewd sociological diagnosis of the looming threat of (un)natural disasters, but, lo and behold, in arguing for us to shrink targets and disperse risk, he actually provides a bold yet feasible policy solution to what will surely be a growing threat to our way of life."--Dalton Conley, author of The Pecking Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become

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The Next Catastrophe

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition...........................................................................viiAcknowledgments............................................................................................xlixPart One: Introduction and Natural Disasters...............................................................liChapter 1 Shrink the Targets..............................................................................1Chapter 2 "Natural" Disasters?............................................................................14Part Two: Can Government Help?.............................................................................41Chapter 3 The Government Response: The First FEMA.........................................................43Chapter 4 The Disaster after 9/11: The Department of Homeland Security and a New FEMA.....................68Part Three: The Disastrous Private Sector..................................................................131Chapter 5 Are Terrorists as Dangerous as Management? The Nuclear Plant Threat.............................133Chapter 6 Better Vulnerability through Chemistry..........................................................174Chapter 7 Disastrous Concentration in the National Power Grid.............................................211Chapter 8 Concentration and Terror on the Internet........................................................248Part Four: What Is to Be Done?.............................................................................289Chapter 9 The Enduring Sources of Failure: Organizational, Executive, and Regulatory......................291Appendix A Three Types of Redundancy......................................................................327Appendix B Networks of Small Firms........................................................................331Bibliography...............................................................................................335Index......................................................................................................355

Chapter One

Disasters from natural sources, from industrial and technological sources, and from deliberate sources such as terrorism have all increased in the United States in recent decades, and no diminution is in sight. Weather disturbances are predicted to increase; low-level industrial accidents continue but threaten to intensify and the threat of cyber attacks on our "critical infrastructure" becomes ever more credible; foreign terrorists have not relaxed and we anxiously await another attack. Cataclysmic fantasies proliferate on movie screens and DVDs, and scholars write books with "collapse," "catastrophe," "our final hour," and "worst cases" in their titles.

But we have neglected a fundamental response to the trio of disaster sources. Instead of focusing only on preventing disasters and coping with their aftermath—which we must continue to do—we should reduce the size of vulnerable targets. Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) already litter our landscape; terrorists need not sneak them in, and they are more likely to be triggered by natural and industrial disasters than by terrorists. Ninety-ton tank cars of chlorine gas are WMDs that travel daily through our cities; dispersing the deadly gas via a tornado or hurricane, an industrial accident, or a terrorist's suitcase bomb would endanger up to seven million people. New Orleans and its surroundings is, or was, our largest port, but it could have been a target one-third the size of its pre-Katrina population of some 450,000 souls, and much easier to defend and evacuate. Because of the increased concentration of the electric power industry, our vital electric power grid is so poorly managed that sagging power lines hitting tree branches in Ohio plunged the Northeast into darkness for hours and even days in some areas in 2003. The industry has made its grid a better target for a heat spell, a flood, a hurricane, or a few well-placed small bombs. Deconcentrating the industry would uncouple the vulnerabilities and barely decrease efficiency, as we shall see.

Not all of the dangers confronting us can be reduced through downsizing our targets. Some natural hazards we just have to face: we are unlikely to stop settling in earthquake zones, nor can we avoid tsunamis, volcanoes, asteroids, or even tornadoes. Even small targets are at risk in the case of epidemics, and terrorists with biological and radiological weapons can cause such widespread devastation that the size of the target is irrelevant.

But, except for tornadoes, all these are rare. Devastations from the more common sources such as high winds, water and fire damage, industrial and technological accidents, and terrorist attacks on large targets can be greatly reduced. It will not be easy, but given our yearly disaster bill in the billions of dollars, it makes economic sense as well as social sense. It will require a change in our mindset about markets and regulation. Since our current mindset is only decades old—it changed quickly from the 1970s on—it is hardly inconceivable that it could not change again.

Disasters expose our social structure and culture more sharply than other important events. (Clarke 2005) They reveal starkly the failure of organizations, regulations, and the political system. But we regard disasters as exceptional events, and after a disaster we shore up our defenses and try to improve our responses while leaving the target in place. However, as Clarke persuasively argues, disasters are not exceptional but a normal part of our existence. To reduce their damage will require probing our social structure and culture to see how these promote our vulnerabilities. We will do this throughout this book in the hope of prodding changes in these areas.

Two of the major themes in this work are the inevitable failure of organizations, public and private, to protect us from disasters and the increasing concentration of targets that make the disasters more consequential. There are many explanations for the first theme, organizational failures, but we will highlight one in particular: organizations are tools that can be used for ends other than their official ones. To prevent unwarranted use, we require regulation in the private sector and representative governance in the public sectors. The failure of the political system means ineffective regulation. This can be changed.

One goal of regulation is to prevent the accumulation of economic power in private hands. Otherwise, we get the concentration not just of economic power but of hazardous materials, populations in risky areas with inadequate protection, and vulnerabilities in parts of our critical infrastructure such as the Internet, electric power, transportation, and agriculture. (We also need regulation to ensure that the public sector is not wasteful, that standards are adequate to protect us, that corruption is minimized, and so on.) The third major theme concerns a structural alternative to the concentrations that endanger us. We encounter it first in the electric power grid and second in the Internet; these are networked systems, rather than hierarchical systems. Networks are decentralized, with minimal concentrations of destructive energy and economic power. They are...