Cue Taleb...

...Was power grid failure a 'normal accident'?

In an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine in 2005, authors Vahir Madani and Damir Novosel, referring to Perrow's work, took the case of the 2003 power grid collapse in the northeastern United States and Canada, which left millions without electricity. They said: "The first event - though as Perrow would maintain, not the cause - was a failure in vegetation management: an Ohio power company did not keep up with its tree trimming, allowing highly loaded transmission lines to sag onto the branches and short-out, causing heavy power surges in other lines."