Safety & Health

Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

"Dark Tide is the definitive account of America's most fascinating and surreal disaster." —John Marr, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Shortly after noon on January 15, 1919, a fifty-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a fifteen-foot-high wave of molasses that briefly traveled at thirty-five miles an hour. Dark Tide tells the compelling story of this man-made disaster that claimed the lives of twenty-one people and scores of animals and caused widespread destruction.

Dark Tide has been selected as a "town-wide reading book" for five Massachusetts communities including Holliston, Mass.

"Narrated with gusto . . . [Puleo's] enthusiasm for a little-known catastrophe is infectious." —The New Yorker

"Compelling . . . Puleo has done justice to a gripping historical story." —Ralph Ranalli, Boston Globe

"Thoroughly researched, the volume weaves together the stories of the people and families affected by the disaster . . . The cleanup lasted months, the lawsuits years, the fearful memories a lifetime." —Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press

"Giving a human face to tragedy is part of the brilliance of Stephen Puleo's Dark Tide . . . Until they were given voice in this book, the characters who drove the story were forgotten." —Caroline Leavitt, Boston Sunday Globe

The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error

When faced with a human error problem, you may be tempted to ask 'Why didn't they watch out better? How could they not have noticed?'. You think you can solve your human error problem by telling people to be more careful, by reprimanding the miscreants, by issuing a new rule or procedure. These are all expressions of 'The Bad Apple Theory', where you believe your system is basically safe if it were not for those few unreliable people in it. This old view of human error is increasingly outdated and will lead you nowhere. The new view, in contrast, understands that a human error problem is actually an organizational problem. Finding a 'human error' by any other name, or by any other human, is only the beginning of your journey, not a convenient conclusion. The new view recognizes that systems are inherent trade-offs between safety and other pressures (for example: production). People need to create safety through practice, at all levels of an organization. Breaking new ground beyond its successful predecessor, "The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error" guides you through the traps and misconceptions of the old view. It explains how to avoid the hindsight bias, to zoom out from the people closest in time and place to the mishap, and resist the temptation of counterfactual reasoning and judgmental language. But it also helps you look forward. It suggests how to apply the new view in building your safety department, handling questions about accountability, and constructing meaningful countermeasures. It even helps you in getting your organization to adopt the new view and improve its learning from failure. So if you are faced by a human error problem, abandon the fallacy of a quick fix. Read this book.

The Green Studio Handbook: Environmental Strategies for Schematic Design

With more and more clients and architecture schools demanding 'green' design, both student and professional architects need to get up to speed quickly with the vast range of techniques in this fast moving area.

This extensive and user-friendly handbook presents practical guidelines for applying environmental strategies during the schematic design of green buildings. For each strategy, the book provides: brief descriptions of principles and concepts, step-by-step approaches for integrating technologies into the early stages of design, annotated tables and charts to assist with preliminary design sizing, key issues to be aware of when implementing a given strategy, and references to the most recent international standards and rating systems, guidelines, and internet resources.

The text is reinforced with conceptual sketches and photos in full color, illustrating each strategy. A discussion of the green design process and case studies of several green building projects puts the strategies presented in context.

* Provides information required to implement green design ideas with confidence and accuracy.

* Practical information provided in an easy-to-use format.

* Full colour images throughout.

Standard Work FOR THE SHOPFLOOR (Shopfloor Series)

STANDARD WORK FOR THE SHOPFLOOR

Productivity Press Development Team

STANDARD WORK FOR THE SHOPFLOOR is the latest in the Productivity Press "Shopfloor Series" created by our in-house development team. This book is a guide to standardizing and documenting operatorsÂ’ current best practices on the shop floor. Standardized work stresses consistency while remaining dynamic enough to change with products and process. It documents guidelines and illustrations for employees performing the same specific job.

Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies

Hang a curtain too close to a fireplace and you run the risk of setting your house ablaze. Drive a car on a pitch-black night without headlights, and you dramatically increase the odds of smacking into a tree.

These are matters of common sense, applied to simple questions of cause and effect. But what happens, asks systems-behavior expert Charles Perrow, when common sense runs up against the complex systems, electrical and mechanical, with which we have surrounded ourselves? Plenty of mayhem can ensue, he replies. The Chernobyl nuclear accident, to name one recent disaster, was partially brought about by the failure of a safety system that was being brought on line, a failure that touched off an unforeseeable and irreversible chain of disruptions; the less severe but still frightening accident at Three Mile Island, similarly, came about as the result of small errors that, taken by themselves, were insignificant, but that snowballed to near-catastrophic result.

Only through such failures, Perrow suggests, can designers improve the safety of complex systems. But, he adds, those improvements may introduce new opportunities for disaster. Looking at an array of real and potential technological mishaps--including the Bhopal chemical-plant accident of 1984, the Challenger explosion of 1986, and the possible disruptions of Y2K and genetic engineering--Perrow concludes that as our technologies become more complex, the odds of tragic results increase. His treatise makes for sobering and provocative reading. --Gregory McNamee

Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk--complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling--this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them.

The first edition fulfilled one reviewer's prediction that it "may mark the beginning of accident research." In the new afterword to this edition Perrow reviews the extensive work on the major accidents of the last fifteen years, including Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger disaster. The new postscript probes what the author considers to be the "quintessential 'Normal Accident'" of our time: the Y2K computer problem.

The Buffalo Creek Disaster: How the survivors of one of the worst disasters in coal-mining history brought suit against the coal company--and won (Vintage)

One Saturday morning in February 1972, an impoundment dam owned by the Pittston Coal Company burst, sending a 130 million gallon, 25 foot tidal wave of water, sludge, and debris crashing into southern West Virginia's Buffalo Creek hollow. It was one of the deadliest floods in U.S. history. 125 people were killed instantly, more than 1,000 were injured, and over 4,000 were suddenly homeless. Instead of accepting the small settlements offered by the coal company's insurance offices, a few hundred of the survivors banded together to sue. This is the story of their triumph over incredible odds and corporate irresponsibility, as told by Gerald M. Stern, who as a young lawyer and took on the case and won.

Developing an Effective Safety Culture: A Leadership Approach

Developing an Effective Safety Culture implements a simple philosophy, namely that working safely is a cultural issue. An effective safety culture will eventually lead to the desired goal of zero incidents in the work place, and this book will provide an understanding of what is needed to reach this goal. The authors present reference material for all phases of building a safety management system and ultimately developing a safety program that fits the culture.

This volume offers the most comprehensive approach to developing an effective safety culture. Information is easily accessible as the authors move first through, understanding the cost of incidents, then to perspectives and descriptions of management systems, principal management leadership traits, establishing and evaluating goals and objectives, providing visible leadership, and assigning required responsibilities. In addition, you are given the means to systematically identifying hazards and develop your own hazard inventory and control system.

Further information on OSHA requirements for training, behavior-based safety processes, and the development of a job hazard analysis for each task is available as well. Valuable case studies, from the authors' own experience in the industry, are used throughout to demonstrate the concepts presented.

* Provides the tools to rebuild or enhance a desired safety culture
* Allows you to identify a program that will fit your specific application
* Examines different philosophies in relation to safety culture development

Leading with Safety

Building on years of research and experience in the field, Leading with Safety redefines organizational safety as an activity that both leads other performance areas and in turn must be led. Thomas Krause poses the question, "What does it take to be a great safety leader?" — and answers with a comprehensive new model for understanding safety leadership as it affects organizational culture and safety climate. Leading with Safety defines the practices, tools, and systems essential to creating an injury-free workplace, including the role of employees at each level, special considerations for coaching the senior executive leader, and the two crucial aspects of human performance that every leader needs to know. Ending with inspiring real-world examples or organizations that have put these tools into practice, Leading with Safety is written for any leader who wants to lead with safety toward a more robust, productive and effective organization.

Emergency Response Planning for Corporate and Municipal Managers, Second Edition (Butterworth-Heinemann Homeland Security)

Emergency Response Planning outlines the essential roles of corporate and municipal managers and demonstrates the importance of their relationships with federal, state, and local government agencies as well as public and private community sectors. Author Paul Erickson, one of the leading experts in the field, focuses on proactively planning for emergencies, particularly in the recognition and advance coordination of response to incidents instead of simply implementing emergency measures.

The book is broken out into three sections. Section 1 outlines the overall scope of comprehensive emergency planning and discusses in detail the major elements that must be addressed in an Emergency Response Plan. Section 2 examines the types of hazards and risks faced by emergency response personnel, as well as the public, in typical emergencies, and provides specific recommendations regarding the immediate and long-term health and safety of emergency response personnel. Section 3 discusses a range of issues that must be given special attention in the development and implementation of any emergency response plan including: hazard and risk reduction, decontamination, data and information management, monitoring strategies and devices, terrorism, and the training of emergency response personnel.

* Helps you to develop and implement an Emergency Response Plan
* Provides specific recommendations regarding the immediate and long-term health and safety of emergency response personnel
* End of Chapter summaries and questions provide concise information on learning objectives and a review of important concepts

Principles of Emergency Planning and Management

As interest in planning for emergencies and disasters burgeons, and educational and training programs proliferate, Principles of emergency planning and management is the first book to meet the need for a concise yet comprehensive and systematic primer on how to prepare for a disaster. Providing readers with a comprehensive, systematic, yet concise introduction to effective preparation for disasters, it provides a unified starting point encompassing the scattered and parochial literature in this nascent field of academic enquiry and practical endeavor.
The book provides a general introduction to the methods, procedures, protocols and strategies of emergency planning, with emphasis on situations in industrialized countries and the local level of organization (i.e. cities, municipalities, metropolitan areas and small regions), though with ample reference to national and international levels. Rather than concentrating on the practices of any one country or state, the author focuses on general principles. Principles of emergency planning and management is designed to be a reference source and manual from which emergency managers can extract ideas, suggestions and pro-forma methodologies to help them design and implement emergency plans. A comprehensive all-hazards approach is adopted, with frequent reference to the most important individual hazards and the planning and management needs that they create. Twelve examples of actual emergency planning and management problems are analyzed in detail.
Principles of emergency planning and management is written especially for the new generation of emergency planners and managers that is emerging as a result of intensified governmental interest in disaster preparedness. Many of them will occupy positions in government or other organizations that require emergency plans. The book will also be of value to students of disasters and hazards who have a practical interest in how disasters are planned for and managed, and to professional workers and trainees who will eventually have to participate in disaster plans. Principles of emergency planning and management is designed to be easily integrated with training courses in emergency preparedness.