Systemic failures are all around us.

• Position: Crisis Management - Venkat Venkatasubramanian on failures - Interview

There needs to be development of a new cross-disciplinary approach for analyzing and preventing systemic failures in complex systems that play a role in calamities ranging from huge power blackouts to the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon disaster and the subprime mortgage crisis, insists Venkat Venkatasubramanian, professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind.

"In the history of systemic failures, a few disasters have served as wake-up calls. The Flixborough chemical plant accident in the United Kingdom in 1974, where a Nypro plant explosion killed 26 people, was one such call."

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Other major catastrophes include the 1984 Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India, which killed more than 2,000 and injured over 100,000, and the 1988 failure of an oil platform operated by Occidental Petroleum in the North Sea, which resulted in about $2,000,000,000 in losses and almost 170 deaths.

"Such systemic failures are not limited to the chemical and petrochemical industries," points out Venkatasubramanian. "The Northeast electrical power blackout in 2003 and a recent massive recall of drug products are both systemic failures. Financial disasters such as Enron, WorldCom, the subprime mortgage derivatives crisis, and the Madoff Ponzi scam also belong to the same class.

"We must study all disasters from a common systems engineering perspective so that one can thoroughly understand the commonalities as well as the differences in order to better design and control such systems in the future. There is an important role for universities here, as well, in creating and disseminating knowledge about abnormal--events management in complex engineered systems and their public and corporate policy implications."

Such studies need to be carded out, he stresses, with...