Was Three Mile Island a ‘Normal Accident’?

Abstract

Perrow’s normal accident theory suggests that some major accidents are inevitable for technological reasons. An alternative approach explains major accidents as resulting from management failures, particularly in relation to the communication of information. This latter theory has been shown to be applicable to a wide variety of disasters. By contrast, Perrow’s theory seems to be applicable to relatively few accidents, the exemplar case being the Three Mile Island nuclear power station accident in the U.S. in 1979. This article re‐examines Three Mile Island. It shows that this was not a normal accident in Perrow’s sense and is readily explicable in terms of management failures. The article also notes that Perrow’s theory is motivated by a desire to shift blame away from front line operators and that the alternative approach does this equally well.

A framework for examining leadership in extreme contexts

“…Going beyond an extreme event, we define an extreme context as an environment where one or more extreme events are occurring or are likely to occur that may exceed the organization's capacity to prevent and result in an extensive and intolerable magnitude of physical, psychological, or material consequences to-or in close physical or psycho-social proximity to-organization members. 4 Examples include the Mann Gulch (Weick, 1993) and South Canyon fires (Useem, Cook, & Sutton, 2005), Indian Ocean Tsunami (Athukorala & Resosudarmo, 2005;Rodriquez, Wachtendorf, Kendra, & Trainor, 2006), Bhopal Chemical release (Bowman & Kunreuther, 1988;Shrivastava, 1987;Union Carbide Report, 1985), Three Mile Island meltdown (Hopkins, 2001;Perrow, 1997), Columbia Space Shuttle explosion (Heimann, 1993;Starbuck & Miliken, 1988;Vaughan, 1996), Westray mine disaster (Hynes & Prasad, 1997), Mount Everest climbing incidents (Kayes, 2004;Tempest, Starkey, & Ennew, 2007), hurricane Katrina (Comfort, 2007;Gheytanchi et al, 2007;Kapucu & Van Wart, 2006;Rego & Garau, 2007), Tenerife airplane collision (Weick, 1990), Chernobyl (Hohenemser, Deicher, Ernst, Hofsäss, Lindner, & Recknagel (1986)), numerous military leadership and combat studies (e.g., Cosby et al, 2006;Morath, Ccurnow, Cronin, Leonard, & McGonigle, 2006;Leonard, Polich, Peterson, Sorter, & Moore, 2006;Department of the Army, 1950Scales, 2006;Snook, 2000;Ulmer, Shaler, Bullis, DiClemente, & Jacobs, 2004;Wong, Bliese, & McGurk, 2003) and organizational doctrine such as the U. S. Army (Department of the Army, 2006) and National Wildfire Service (2007) leadership manuals.…”

Organizing Risk: Discourse, Power, and “Riskification”

“…Examples include the case of 'mad cow' disease (Pidgeon, Kasperson & Slovic, 2003), the Challenger and Columbia disasters (Feldman, 2004), Three Mile Island (Hopkins, 2001), Deepwater Horizon (Hopkins, 2011), Mann Gulch (Weick, 1993), and 9/11 (Hood, 2005) to name but a few; not to mention numerous accidents in coalmines, nuclear plants, airlines, aircraft carriers, oil rigs, nuclear submarines, etc. (e.g., Heimann, 2005;Hopkins, 1999;Perin, 2005;Perrow, 1999;Sauer, 2003;Vaughan, 2005).…”

The Legacy of the High Reliability Organization Project

“…There is a wide gap between the level of knowledge published and debated in the academic circles on these issues and the level of knowledge transfer that has actually occurred from these circles to the industry or regulatory circles. Hopkins (2001, p. 72) is right when he observes that ‘this is not just a theoretical debate. There are practical consequences for the way we go about accident prevention’.…”