Major accidents are rare events due to the many barriers, safeguards and defences developed by modern technologies. But they continue to happen with saddening regularity and their human and financial consequences are all too often unacceptably catastrophic. One of the greatest challenges we face is to develop more effective ways of both understanding and limiting their occurrence. This lucid book presents a set of common principles to further our knowledge of the causes of major accidents ...

In this fourth book of Reasoner's ten-book Civil War series, as Cory Brannon has a chance to assist the South with supplies brought in by blockade-runners and discovers his sweetheart Lucille Farrell, a sense of obligation and duty stirs in the hotheaded Titus back home in Virginia, and the Confederate cause claims another Brannon son, this one a gifted rifleman.In early 1863, a fitful calm pervades the Virginia front until another Union commander is named. Joe Hooker leads his arm...

This succinct but absorbing book covers the main way stations on James Reason’s 40-year journey in pursuit of the nature and varieties of human error. In it he presents an engrossing and very personal perspective, offering the reader exceptional insights, wisdom and wit as only James Reason can. The journey begins with a bizarre absent-minded action slip committed by Professor Reason in the early 1970s - putting cat food into the teapot - and continues up to the present day, conveying his ...

Although Stonewall Jackson was dead, Confederate moral was never higher. The victory at Chancellorsville had come against overwhelming odds, and the Union army was in retreat. In less than a year, the Federals had been pushed back from the outskirts of Richmond and, now, virtually out of Virginia.Will and Mac, the two eldest Brannon sons, are in the ranks of the Stonewall Brigade and Jeb Stuart's cavalry. A short bivouac allows them to visit the family farm, but almost as soon as W...

The last half of 1863 has taken a toll on the Brannon family, but winter has finally forced the armies to suspend campaigning. The lull in the fighting allows Mac to take leave from Jeb Stuart's cavalry, and Will comeshome from a Richmond hospital to convalesce.What little calm Christmas brings, however, is shattered with the sudden appearance—as if from the grave—of Titus, the son believed to have been lost to the war more than a year earlier. Though his return is joyous news, Tit...

Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents introduced the notion of an ’organizational accident’. These are rare but often calamitous events that occur in complex technological systems operating in hazardous circumstances. They stand in sharp contrast to ’individual accidents’ whose damaging consequences are limited to relatively few people or assets. Although they share some common causal factors, they mostly have quite different causal pathways. The frequency of individual accidents ...

Manassas is the first book in Reasoner’s ten-volume series spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one Southern family.Storm clouds are approaching Culpeper County, Virginia, in early January 1861. The troublesome Fogarty brothers have been raising havoc across the countryside, and when the local lawman, Will Brannon, returns from another futile attempt to track them down, he finds the townspeople abuzz. South Carolina has seceded from the Union, and rumor has...

For members of the Brannon clan, the action ranges from Pennsylvania and Virginia to Georgia, Mississippi, and Illinois in this seventh of ten volumes in Reasoner's Civil War series. Two Brannon sons were with Lee at Gettysburg and one, Cory, was at Vicksburg while the other, Mac, assists in protecting the Army of Northern Virginia. They still mourn the loss of another, Titus, presumed dead but actually interned in a prison camp. Titus is now determined to escape the Yankee prison camp and...

Vicksburg is the fifth in a ten-book series spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one Southern family.In the waning months of 1862, as the Union army advances closer and closer, Cory Brannon must abandon the supply train in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to undertake a vital mission for Confederate General John Pemberton, the commander in charge of Vicksburg's defenses. Vicksburg is the key to the Mississippi River—and the future of the Confederacy—and they must no...

Three stories of unspeakable malevolence make up The Dead Man Volume 2, an action adventure collection full of dark humor and surprising twists that follow the life of Matthew Cahill in his running battle with the supernaturally evil Mr. Dark.A serial killer is stalking Crawford, Tennessee, and Matt is determined to stop the killing in The Dead Woman. But when his new love interest turns out to have his ability to spot evil, and Mr. Dark puts his fingerprints on t...

This book explores the human contribution to the reliability and resilience of complex, well-defended systems. Usually the human is considered a hazard - a system component whose unsafe acts are implicated in the majority of catastrophic breakdowns. However there is another perspective that has been relatively little studied in its own right - the human as hero, whose adaptations and compensations bring troubled systems back from the brink of disaster time and again. What, if anything, did...

Human Error, published in 1991, is a major theoretical integration of several previously isolated literatures. Particularly important is the identification of cognitive processes common to a wide variety of error types. Technology has now reached a point where improved safety can only be achieved on the basis of a better understanding of human error mechanisms. In its treatment of major accidents, the book spans the disciplinary gulf between psychological theory and those concerned with ma...