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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

Situations and systems are easier to change than the human condition - particularly when people are well-trained and well-motivated, as they usually are in maintenance organisations. This is a down-to-earth practitioner’s guide to managing maintenance error, written in Dr. Reason’s highly readable style. It deals with human risks generally and the special human performance problems arising in maintenance, as well as providing an engineer’s guide for their understanding and the solution. Af...

When a group of buffalo hunters gets into a scuffle with a party of Indians, the end results are tragic-leaving all but one of the Indians dead. With the sole survivor on his way to rally the rest of his tribe for vengeance, the buffalo hunters hightail it to the closest settlement, putting Redemption and new Marshall Bill Harvey in the middle of a range war ...

The Texas Two Step. . .Death-Head Crossing is just the name of a little town in Texas--until the population starts shrinking one body at a time. But the deaths are as mysterious as the face of the murderer, and only gunslinger Hell Jackson has what it takes to ride through the reign of terror and put an end to the killings.... . .Takes A Deadly TurnJackson also gets an unwanted partner: Everett Sidney Howard, a cub reporter from New Yo...

Saddle up and ride down the trails of western history with this outstanding new short-story anthology from Silverado Press! Our all-star posse of acclaimed western writers and fresh new voices have each taken a real historical event and built a story around it. From the 1812 earthquake in southern California to the 1856 sinking of the steamboat Arabia to the 1877 Texas Salt War, these tales are guaranteed to thrill, entertain, and teach a little something in the bargain.Co...

The crime fiction canopy's a broad one, with room to give shelter to writing of all sorts, as editor Lawrence Block shows with At Home in the Dark: "Some of these stories have one or both feet planted in another genre. James Reasoner's story is a period western, Joe Lansdale's is bleakly dystopian, and Joe Hill's novelette slithers through a little doorway into another world. "And now that I've singled out those three, I suppose I should go ahead and list the rest of the gang: N. ...

Hired to find out who's been threatening a Texas state senator's granddaughter, the two triplet sleuths Callista and Joseph Kingfisher find themselves in more trouble than they bargained for as Callie goes undercover at a therapeutic riding center and becomes involved in a dangerous conspiracy with roots on the other side of the world.Between international criminals who want them dead, an enigmatic former Special Forces operator who can't be trusted, federal agents who would like t...

DOWN THESE DUSTY TRAILS…Saddle up for a wild ride in this all-new volume of original short stories that explore the untamed lands and rugged characters that define the western frontier. From outlaws and lawmen to cowboys and frontiersmen, these tales capture the rough and tumble spirit of the West in all its glory and danger.Lawless brings together thirteen of today's best writers, each offering a unique perspective on the American frontier. From a boy caug...