Catastrophe

Last weekend, I skipped both the N.F.L. games and the presidential debates.  Instead, I opted for two other forms of disaster for my weekend entertainment.   I attended opening night of the film, “Command and Control” at the Siskel Film Center and saw the film “Deepwater Horizon” as well.  It was fascinating to see these two films back to back.

Command and Control is a documentary by Robert Kenner (Food, Inc.)  and recounts the tale of an accident in a 1980 at the height of the Cold War.  The powerful Titan II was the mainstay of the U.S. fleet during the height of the Cold War.  Standing almost nine stories  high, the Titan II packed a wallop and could deliver an explosion greater than all the bombs unleashed in WWII and deliver it in minutes.  The missile experienced what appeared to be a minor malfunction and when repair crews were sent to fix the problem, one of the workers accidentally dropped a ratchet wrench (which was the wrong wrench and picked up accidentally) down the silo, banging into the side and causing a plume of fuel to start filling the silo.  The team failed to control the problem, and the silo ignited, killing 1 crew member, injuring others, and expelling the warhead.  Had the warhead detonated, the results would have been devastating.  The film makes the point that if a warhead ever detonated on U.S. soil, we expected it to be a Soviet one.  Command and Control is a riveting film, showing that we were a hairsbreadth away from massive loss of life arising from this accident.  Of course, someone was blamed for this particular accident for bringing the wrong wrench, but the frequency of these near misses gives one pause.

The second film I saw last weekend was Deepwater Horizon, a Peter Berg film about the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2012 on the oil platform that was the biggest ecological disaster in history.   Berg has become one of my favorite filmmakers. He won several awards with his cable series “Friday Night Lights” and is known for his innovative filming techniques and close ups that capture human emotion so well.   He delivered with this film as well.  In a film that echoes of “Titanic,” Deepwater Horizon shows up once again the potential consequences of pushing technology past its limits.   Like Titanic, Deepwater Horizon also has a villain—the BP supervisor (masterfully played by John Malkovich) that eggs the platform crew on, downplaying warning signs that something may be amiss.  The result is a backup of oil and explosion on the platform and a gripping struggle to survive by the crew and staff.  Mark Wahlberg turns in one of his best performances in Deepwater Horizon as does Kurt Russell and Kate Hudson.  The world was focused on the ecological damage cause by the accident, but 11 people died and several others were injured in a horrific catastrophe at sea.

In both instances, investigators tried to finger a human cause.   It is human nature to try to find a person to blame.  But I have just started to get acquainted with the work of Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents) and have started to look at alternative explanations for these events.  Perrow focuses on system failure, particularly with respect to high technology systems.  Perrow contends that complex systems have parts that interact in unexpected ways, and those systems are most vulnerable where there is “tight coupling,” i.e. where sub-components interact.   Clearly, an offshore oil rig and a missile silo are both complex technology dependent systems and Perrow would say that we would expect failure in a certain number of instances.  In fact, one of the points of Command and Control is that it is almost a miracle that we haven’t had a catastrophic,  mass casualty  failure especially given that we had some 50,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War.

Both of these films were riveting depictions of failure of technology (as was the Titanic), and the Arkansas incident very well could have been a mass casualty event.  Charles Perrow has started to get me to think about risk and technology in a different way.  Perrow would not be surprised by these events; rather, he would suggest that they are evidence to support his thinking.

Much has also been written about our power grid and it certainly gives one pause to consider the interaction between the internet and our financial system or our power grid.  Seeing these films together at the same time that I have begun to explore Perrow’s work has opened my mind to a new way of thinking about risk.