A huge category mistake is committed when conflating (1) the unfolding and interrelated consequences on life, property and markets of, say, a hazardous liquids pipeline explosion on populations and property and (2) the explosion’s consequences for the interconnected critical infrastructure system (ICIS) for those hazardous liquids, which includes not just these pipelines and associated refineries, but also–just as significantly–the electricity and water infrastructures that the former depend upon in real time.
So what? To equate “the system” with the impacts of the spread and interaction of knock-on population-and-property consequences of failure (Cf) is to identify the chief problem as one the lack of systemwide management of Cf. It is as if many official units (jurisdictional, administrative) were not or are not doing their job.
Yet the ICIS is in fact manage in real time by the control rooms of the respective infrastructures (which in turn are regulated systemwide by fewer regulators of record). That is, “coordination” can be taking place within the ICIS around shared overlapping system control variables, albeit not (or to a lesser) extent in the “system” of interconnected impacts (Cfs) from the explosion.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 