This article explores the causes of temporary works failures through the lens of real-life examples. By focusing on human, procedural, and technical issues.
Category: Lessons from Failures
This article introduces engineers to the various techniques available to monitor movement in historic structures.
This article discusses the collapse of the Baltimore bridge and highlights the key lessons structural engineers can learn from the engineering failure
This article presents the NTSB investigations into the 2018 Pedestrian Bridge Collapse in Florida and the lessons learnt from the failure
This article explores forensic engineering from the perspective of failure investigation. It highlights what constitute an engineering failure and how the structural engineer should approach a failure investigation.
There must be a delicate balance between progress and sacrifice. The Implosion of the Titan Submersible is an engineering disaster that should remind engineers never to compromise safety in the quest for innovation.
The Comet air crashes should teach and remind all engineers that, while all the analysis and design tools might be at your disposal, an engineer can only analyze and truly design for the situations they can actually imagine.
This second article in the series on temporary works discusses temporary works failures and how structural engineers can learn from them
In 2022, Nigeria recorded over 61 incidents of building collapse in 2022. As I write this article, I don’t know of any forensic report that has been made public on any of these incidents, or do you?
As with almost every structural failure, it is the human factors that holds answers as to why the opportunity to forestall the failure was missed. In this article the role played by human factors in structural failures is explored.