Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination

Lee Clarke

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Disaster Management and Resilience Risk Perception and Management Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis

Abstract

attention among Western governments in light of recent power failures, natural disasters, epidemics and terrorist attacks, both threatened and re-alised. Government studies and popular analyses note the complex, inter-dependent and fragile make-up of these infrastructures; one small failure can have a massive and unpredictable cascading effect. Consider the 2003 North American power outage: overgrown trees in Ohio helped trigger a power failure that affected 50 million people and cost the US economy any-where from $4 billion to $10 billion ( US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force 2004, p. 1). These events not only affect health and economics; they also infl uence politics. How successful elected offi cials are at managing crises infl uences the degree of public support they receive, and therefore, such crises can have an immediate and far-reaching impact on government policies and resources. One critical question for policy-makers is, with such potentially serious consequences and such high public and political expectations, how do governments protect these fragile and interdependent critical infrastructures? In Worst Cases Lee Clarke builds on the debate in Organization Studies that is concerned with safety and reliability of complex technological systems. Broadly speaking, two schools divide the fi eld. Whereas Normal Accidents Theory holds that accidents are inevitable in organizations that have interactive complexity and little slack ( tight coupling), High Reliability Organizations Theory states that hazardous technologies can be safely con-trolled by complex organizations if the correct design and management tech-niques are followed. (For a comparative discussion of the two theories, see

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1993The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents and Nuclear Weapons 2006Laws of fear: beyond the precautionary principle

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2008Fear and Security: A Vulnerability‐led Policy Response 2008Governing after crisis 2008Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities 2008Elites and Panic: More to Fear than Fear Itself 2010Policy and Practice: Recursive Learning From Crisis 2008Making Matters Worse 2019The Protective State 2014Organizational Myopia: Problems of Rationality and Foresight in Organizations

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