Observing the English weather – a personal journey from safety I to IV

Pidgeon, Nick ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8991-0398 2019. Observing the English weather – a personal journey from safety I to IV. Le Coze, Jean-Christophe, ed. Safety Science Research: Evolution, Challenges and New Directions, Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, pp. 269-280. (10.4324/9781351190237-17)

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

The musician Terry Riley once remarked that the experience of listening to his music, in common with much of the minimalist output of his composer peers in the 1960s and 70s, was akin to watching the clouds drift by in a gentle summer breeze. If you observed them intently enough it appeared that nothing much was changing. Look away for a moment, however, and when you glanced back the apparent uniformity had given way to subtle new patterns and relationships: and so it was with much of his music. Being asked to return to reflect upon the safety domain some 30 years on from my close collaborations with Barry Turner, David Blockley and Brian Toft feels just a little bit like this. As the many excellent contributions to this volume demonstrate, many things that we took for granted then remain fundamental within the safety field today: the ‘surprise’ and intellectual reframing but also the opportunities for deep learning that all genuine disasters bring (‘how could we have been so sightless?’); the multi-causal complexity and ambiguity of risky systems that can serve to defeat even the very best risk assessment and management; culture, people and organisations as the key actors in major accident sequences; and above all the inevitable fact that somebody, somewhere, sometime, probably held all or parts of the knowledge that could have interrupted an incubating disaster. And yet for all of that, glancing back now few things appear exactly as they were.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Psychology
Publisher:	CRC Press
ISBN:	9780815392682
Last Modified:	27 Nov 2025 14:46
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/134363

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item