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Ten Technology Disasters

Posted by michael on from the things-that-go-crunch dept.

Ant writes "What do a 17th-century Swedish warship, an opulent Chicago theater and a Kansas City hotel "skyway" have in common? All met catastrophic ends and they have important lessons to teach today's innovators."

15 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. disasters course by EricBoyd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The engineering undergraduate program at Queens University actually has a disasters course as one of the non-technical electives. Basically, it involves dividing the class up into small teams, each of which then picks an engineering disaster to analyse in great detail. Presentations and written reports are submitted at the end of the semester.

    Supposedly this engenders a greater sense of responsibility into the engineers to be. I think it worked it for me :-)

    Websurfing done Right! StumbleUpon

    --
    augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
  2. Concorde? by reaper20 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It took just one more little mishap to make a disaster: a titanium "wear strip" fell off a Continental DC-10 in the path of an Air France Concorde leaving Paris. When the Concorde's tire hit the strip, a chunk of rubber tore off and smashed into the wing, punching a 600-square-centimeter hole in its skin and causing fuel to leak and ignite.

    Disclaimer: I know nothing about airplane safety or testing, but this one set off my common sense alarm.

    So, the tires on Concordes require to be changed alot - a chunk of titanium breaks of of another plane, and hits a tire on a Concorde, causing the accident - anyone else think that "Well gee, I don't think any kind of tire is designed to withstand titanium chunks slamming into them." Considering the condition of some of the commercial jets I've flown in, I'll take my chances with the Concorde. I'm sure there is more to it than just this, I thought it odd though.

    Though not a "disaster" per se - the Navy's dead Windows NT ship is tops for the funniest in my book.

    1. Re:Concorde? by iabervon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The titanium strip was just sitting on the runway, having fallen off the other plane. Of course, the plane was presumably going pretty fast at the time, but airplane tires should be able to withstand this sort of thing, or at least fail somewhat more gracefully.

      On the other hand, the failure in this case required 2 failures on the Concorde and bad luck with the fire, as well as hitting something that shouldn't have been there. There's a reason it took as long as it did for a Concorde to crash. I'm not sure exactly why this is in the list: in the other cases, the problem was that the makers were over-confident. The Concorde was supposed to be nearly indestructible, and it turned out that it could be destroyed once in a million times. So they fixed both of the things which contributed to that time. It's not the sort of thing you could say was just waiting to happen, or that you could say they should have found in simulation or testing.

  3. Carry through is important! by FortranDragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I live near KC and I remember when the skywalks collapsed. As the story unfolded after the tragedy, it became readily apparent that everyone just assumed everyone else was doing what they thought they should be doing or that their shortcuts were fine with everyone else. :-( Communication and checking up on how things are actually progressing versus the plans can be a real matter of life or death.

    Next time as a programmer you bitch about checking up on QA (assuming you are lucky to have a QA department) or on the users, just remember that your mistakes very rarely kill people. You've got it _easy_.

    Also, on a side note, the local KC TV news organizations try hard to prevent people from getting to their archives of what happened. They don't want to present Kansas City in a "bad light". This is also very stupid. If we can't easily learn from our mistakes we are going to make more of them. 'Protecting' KC's reputation just makes Kansas Citians look more retarded than the screwup that was Hyatt Regency Skywalks. :sigh: Yeah, mistakes were made, so let's own up to them and learn something so we don't do it again.

    --
    "All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
    1. Re:Carry through is important! by stubear · · Score: 3, Interesting
      "Yeah, mistakes were made, so let's own up to them and learn something so we don't do it again."


      By admitting any wrong doing people can open themselves up to enormous lawsuits, that's whay many times teh injured parties or those seeking redress often have to seek the truth on their own with little to no assistance on the accused. Look at Enron and Andersen for a godo example of this.

      The Enron and Andersen officials aren't being unhelpful because they want to be a pain in the ass, they are being inhelpful because they risk jailtime and possibly enormous fines. By not admitting to anything the jobis that much tougher to bring civil and/or criminal charges against them.

      Like it or not, it's unconstitutional to force people to incriminate themselves.
  4. Re:What about Texas City? by reflexreaction · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Doing a quick google search (technology, disaster history), I found this story with this headline
    Twenty-five years ago, the greatest disaster in airline history killed 538 people, in part because of a "heterodyne" radio glitch that still hasn't been fixed.

    It's a good lengthy article. Worth the read
    --

    We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
  5. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next? by Phrogger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "There's also some stuff like "Watch when retrofitting parts of an old system with new technology"

    Tennessee is just about to do something similar with a
    nuclear power plant. This plant has been mothballed since 1985 but they want to bring it back online. Oh yeah, they also want to overclock it by 30%; it was originally designed for 1000 megawatts production but they are going to crank it up to 1300 megawatts.

    The plant had caught fire in 1975, causing a series of problems leading to the shutdown in 1985. Now they want to extend it's orginal 40 year design for another 20 years. A nuclear-safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists figures that a new plant would be safer and cheaper. From an engineering point of view, "It's like trying to dust off an eight-track tape player rather than buying a DVD system..."

    First Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next?

  6. or Halifax. by s20451 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In 1917 collision between two ships in Halifax harbor -- one carrying close to 3000 tons of high explosive -- resulted in an explosion which levelled much of the city and killed 2000 people, in what was one of the largest non-nuclear manmade explosions in history.

    --
    Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
  7. No Common Thread...but... by efuseekay · · Score: 5, Interesting

    every engineer has their own stories of how they SNAFU-ed. I have mine (one of the reasons why I wuss-ed out and now do theoretical physics instead :)).

    Usually, the problem is :

    (a) Pushing Envelope without prior analysis (Vasa)
    (b) Not exercising Due Diligence in design (Tacoma Narrows)
    (c) Failure of communication between departments (Mars Climate Orbiter : remember the units SNAFU?)
    (d) Insufficent redundancy design (Iroquis Fire)
    (e) Failure to recognize likely failure modes (Concorde, Titanic)

    and others of course.

    I've once fucked up an expensive spacecraft component because of (c). I worked on the mechanical design of the component housing, some electronics guy worked on the electronics detector sitting inside my housing. We have an innovative design whereby some of my mechanical supports were designed to keep some of his electronics ICs in place without the PCB board. The SNAFU : both of us thought the other is suppose to apply anti-vibration gell (layman's term here, we call it RTD...).

    So the part was fab-ed, electronics put in, and the whole thing was sent to a vibration table for testing..

    Result : a loose IC, clanking around the housing for 2 minutes at about 600Hz. The whole thing was toast.

    --
    Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
    1. Re:No Common Thread...but... by Ironpoint · · Score: 2, Interesting



      So some gel is supposed to hold the thing together? I hope it was a vcr or something and not a jumbo jet.

  8. Concorde by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was at work, and when I walked by a radio I caught something about Concorde. I yelled to my boss "The Concorde crashed I think!". He said. "No way, it can't crash, it's the Concorde."

    For me, an aerospace buff, that crash was as big as the Challenger.

    I remeber when the transcripts from the Concorde crash were released, it was really chilling, thinking about those pilots, knowing something bad is happening, and trying with all thier might to abort to Le Bourget, and that big Delta is stalling and Christian Marty can only say "Too late".

  9. funny? by passion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    the Navy's dead Windows NT ship is tops for the funniest in my book.

    Many psychologists have suggested that the emotion of humor has evolved as expressing relief from danger.

    I find it truly frightening.

    --
    - passion
  10. or Texas City by nels_tomlinson · · Score: 3, Interesting
    It wasn't just Halifax; ports can be dangerous places. In 1947, there was a huge explosion when a freighter loaded with fertilizer blew up in Texas City, near Galveston. I knew about it because my father's ship left port hours before the explosion. His mother got a letter he posted from there just before the ship left, and she thought he was dead for several months, until she got a letter from the next port of call.

    There are some pictures on this page. It seems that over 600 people died; or at least they recovered that many bodies. There may have been some who simply disappeared. There was a tidal wave which swept 150 feet inland (NOT 150 feet high, but that far away from the beach.). Since the ship was at the dock, it started fires in the town, and at a chemical plant near the docks. It set fire to another ship which was nearby. That ship blew up the next morning with even more force, and did even more damage. There are more pictures here and here, which give some idea of just how big ithe explosions were.

    --
    See what I've been reading.
  11. Re:Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next by Melantha_Bacchae · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Phrogger wrote:

    > First Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next?

    Sorry, Tennessee would have to get in line. One of the most spectacular examples of stupidity causing a nuclear accident was at a plant in Tokai-mura on September 30th 1999, and it is the greatest nuclear plant accident in Japan's history. Basically, they dumped all the safety precautions and mixed themselves up a batch of acidic nuclear soup in a big steel bucket and stirred. Instant hot fission! You can read the World Nuclear Association's writeup here (it has a nifty table of different levels of nuclear catastrophe that is a must read):

    http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf37print.htm

    The interesting thing is, Toho was filming on location at the Tokai plants for a Godzilla attack in the then upcoming "Godzilla 2000 Millenium". They were probably done with filming by the time the accident actually occured. In December 1999, the movie opened, with Godzilla heading over to attack the plants.

    This wasn't the first one of Toho's monster movies to "come true", only one in a long history. Here are two other famous ones:

    "Gojira" 1984: the Russians have a nuclear accident in the movie (in the original Japanese version, US version makes it a deliberate act). In 1986, the Russians had a real accident: Chernobyl.

    "Mosura 3: King Ghidora Raisu" 1998: the King of Terror (King Ghidora) begins his attack on Tokyo by flying through the twin towers of a skyscraper. Office workers flee while talking on cell phones. The US version ... well there was no US version, except the real life one on September 11th, 2001. Tristar, why was "Rebirth of Mothra 3" never released so we could have been warned as Mothra clearly intended?

    Sonora:"New Godzilla reading. He's moving inward toward Tokai."
    Shinoda: "The nuclear plants, I knew it.
    Sonora: "Afraid so."
    Yuki: "Well, that's just lovely. Another Chernobyl."
    "Godzilla 2000" (US version dialog)

  12. Crazy guys give good advice. by Nindalf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I had one manager who was adamant that for any medium sized project there ought to be NO time spent on making the code re-usable. Every line of code should be directly related to specific aspects of the customer's requirements/specification document. At first I thought he was crazy.

    I had a guy who thought dynamic memory allocation should be avoided at all costs, and you should never use a data structure more complex than an array.

    I still think he's crazy, but now I see his point. I mean, he was terrible for global variables and giant functions, but his programs never leaked memory and very rarely wrote to bad pointers. If you don't need dynamic memory allocation, you shouldn't use it, and when you do need it, you should only have one malloc and one free (or equivalent) for every dynamic data structure. Often, you only need one or two, even in a relatively large and featureful program. That way, I can write a good page of error handling code and comments on memory consumption for each dynamic memory access, and it saves me a lot of grief.

    I don't like reusing code, either, unless you can make a good case for it being a part of the underlying system. I like the analogy of an architect stapling someone else's blueprint of a fully-equipped foundry and machine shop to his design because the inhabitants will need a screwdriver. Reuse means bloat, and bloat is bad. Every extra line you add is another place for a bug to hide.