ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the technical documentation and reports underlying the larger narratives of the disaster, since these technical documents serve as critical ground information for the reporting on and, further, the legal proceedings pertaining to the event. It also focuses on the composition of what risk communication specialist Beverly Sauer calls post-accident investigative reports, herein referred to as accident reports. The chapter shows that how the public understanding of disaster can be potentially improved by expanding invention strategies within the topos of causality by moving beyond the common, easily digestible but problematic topic of single, technical causes. It reveals an approach to accident report composition that reflects a posthuman methodology. Like many reports in technical communication, accident reports are highly situated documents. The most common feature of accident report grammars is the fault tree analysis (FTA), which is aimed at diagramming in a linear fashion the events of an incident.
