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Ten Technology Disasters
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."
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"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
A ship blew up in the port. Oops.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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/
Over 20,000 died, and up to 150,000 are still sick
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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.
You can't breed out stupidity or rule out nasty ass-bad luck. This artical seems to infer you can do both.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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.
:sigh: Yeah, mistakes were made, so let's own up to them and learn something so we don't do it again.
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.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
Seriously: ten catastrophic goofs, but I don't see anything which really ties them together!
Am I missing something?
Yeah, sure "Don't cut corners" and "Don't trust management who would like to cut corners", but that's pretty obvious and we all still do it, right?
There's also some stuff like "Watch when retrofitting parts of an old system with new technology" and "pay attention to boundry conditions", but really I think this is just a laundry list.
So does anybody know of a good reference work out there which actually has some worthwhile analysis on stuff like this? Didn't Feynmann write something up after Challenger?
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
A story that claims to be reporting on the greatest tech disasters, in particular the lesser known ones, and it fails to mention Banqiao and Shimantan in 1975?
I mean, not only was this the greatest technological disaster in human history with 80,000 to 230,000 dead depending on whose numbers you believe, but it also is sufficiently unknown that the author of an article on disasters doesn't appear to know of it!
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Someone's been reading the Age of Empires technology progression chart again...
graspee
No discussion of the topic could be complete without mentioning RISKS. The RISKS Digest has been discussing risk factors associated with technology and engineering (and to some extent generally) on the internet since 1986.
Every engineer should spend time reading there. Any _good_ engineer should subscribe.
-David
We're on the road to Tycho.
See http://www.brisray.co.uk/misc/mind.htm (scroll down) for more info.
This is what happens when you have a system that allows the corporation to run amuck.
The lowest bidder cannot be trusted to create products that are safe.
In these cases, it is good to still have some government oversight.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Yes, it appeared as an appendix to the Roger's Report. He also discussed it in his autobigraphy either "Surely your joking..." or "What do you care...", I can't remember which. The appendix is a good read, and can be found here:
http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-r
or any of a number of other googleable links.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Even if you never get near embedded systems of this type, you can't call yourself a responsible software engineer until you read and learn from An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents.
Executive Summary: Company introduces next-generation radiation therapy machine, replacing hardware-based overdosage safety interlocks with software-based mechanisms. Software fails. People are killed.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Zeppelins were certainly used as bombers in WWI.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
"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?
From the article And a little bit later in the article
GO ARMY!!!!!!!
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
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.
Good thing war and death weren't around until modern man invented aircraft and nuclear weapons.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
I can't believe they didn't put the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on there!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Imagine if DigiScents hadn't ran out of money.
At least the air freshener industry would benefit for the next 20 years as we attempt to de-stink the world
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
but does it have that bridge on the list
You mean the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse? Didn't make the list, though it certainly could have. That's still one of my favorites - I always thought of concrete as an inflexible material until I saw that footage.
I saw another example one time in the 1980's: an NFL football game where the fans at... I think it was Buffalo... were stamping their feet in unison and the upper deck of the stadium was oscillating up and down with an amplitude of a couple of feet (as compared to the stationary points of reference beneath the deck). It was a bit scary when they showed it on TV - I was afraid I was about to see a stadium collapse on live TV. Fortunately, the only thing that collapsed was the Bills, and the fans soon stopped their rowdy and dangerous behavior.
--Jim
In case anyone is interested this story is in the current issue of the dead-tree edition of the magazine. Really interesting stuff!
OK, maybe the number of deaths wasn't a record, but the Space Shuttle Challanger disaster should rank up there as a technological disaster (anyone remember Feynman's presentation about the O-rings?)
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".
It was in "What do you care..."
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Because "case blah:" statements are basically labels. Sticking a label in your code does not modify the flow of the program -- A label should not generate any code. "switch" and "break" control flow. Changing the meaning of a label inside a switch block to mean "goto the end of the block unless preceeded by 'pass'" would be ludicrous.
Yeah, but a disaster should take some lives don't you think?
There is one bridge on the list
Get your Unix fortune now!
A dog died when the Tacoma bridge collapsed. It was in the car the was left on the bridge.
Another notorious example of power line problems was what happened to Auckland, New Zealand a couple of years ago when during a heat wave they lost all the power transmission lines going into the city.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
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
just like Communism would actually work if people weren't ivolved.
...or animals!
Oh yeah, that bridge was ever something... I remember back in 7th grade when I was in a parade with band. We have a bridge along the route that spans the two cities, and as we hit the bridge, we just broke step. The reason: That many people all putting weight in the same pattern would have made it really hard to stand...
SIG: HUP
I remember that. Is the guy with the glasses still alive now?
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Because "case blah:" statements are basically labels.
Why? Only because the creators of C chose it to be. There are many other languages - pretty much every non-C based descendent of Algol - where case labels are clearly control statements and clearly end the block.
I live in KC, and remember thinking that the guys who designed the skywalks got a bum rap.
They were designed for people to walk from one side to the other, perhaps to pause and
check out the view for a few moments before continuing on their way, but not for a huge
crowd to fill them, swaying in unison in rhythm to the music. I have a great deal of sympathy
for the people on the lower skywalk and those underneath them both, but the ones on the
upper skywalk contributed to their own injuries. I never saw any acknowledgment of this
distinction.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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.
Even better is Roger Boisjoly's lectures on Challenger. He was the engineer who, the night before launch, told management that it was too cold and that the O-Ring would break.
You can read his lectures online
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2.h tml
"Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va. As Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE, admits, "If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." But McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred."
Example:
case ch of
'A': WriteLN('Choice capital A');
'B'..'Z', 'a'..'z': WriteLN('Another letter');
else WriteLN('default case');
end;
Phrogger wrote:
m
... 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?
> 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.ht
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
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)
In an ideal world they would build a new one.. but it would be impossible in todays climate. No new nuclear power plant has been built in the US since the 80's (I believe.. might be a little earlier/later). It causes too much of an uproar - NIMBY. Plus, you get wacky SUV driving soccer moms who complain about how much nuclear plants 'pollute.' Sigh.
Saw a rather interesting documentary on the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire in New York (I think) near the turn of the century.. Essentially, a sweat shop went up in flames, and the owners had padlocked all the emergency exits. Whoever didnt burn to death plunged to the ground below, diving out of windows.
A couple people have probably mentioned the Hindenburg. The Hindenburg didnt crash because of sabotage, because of any engineering errors, or even because it was filled with hydrogen. Neither one of those are valid reasons, especially the hydrogen thoery. The hydrogen gas inside the blimp was doped with a substance that smelled like garlic, so the engineers and crew could smell hydrogen leaks if they occured. None were reported. A blimp like the Hindenburg contained pure hydrogen. Pure hydrogen by itself is NOT flammable -- An adequate mix of hydrogen and oxygen inside the ship would have been needed in order for it to ignite, and that mixture wasnt present. Besides, the footage of the accident clearly shows that there was no explosion -- It was only the outer skin that caught fire. The outer skin of the Hindenburg was coated with a combination paint and sealant that was both highly flammable, AND electrically conductive -- The prevailing theory on why the Hindenburg crashed is that the blimp collected so much static electricity during its descent into New Jersey (in a brief window inbetween thunderstorms, even..) that the charge eventually arc'ed, and ignited the outer skin of the craft. The Hindenburg crashed to earth not because of fire, but because of hydrogen loss.....all because of a poorly chosen paintjob, oddly enough..
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Well...when they look aside and coal companies dig under the mountains and cause the disasters. Or the oil companies spray black stuff all over the otters and moose. It sure isn't the Republicans' fault. Just the counterculture lefties. And the naieve students.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
In theory, this could happen to any bridge in America. Scary stuff, eh?
Not really. Engineers have learned from it, and build much more dampening in bridges now. They won't resonate as much anymore.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
From the article:The result was the most lavishly appointed and heavily armed warship of its day, but one too long and too tall for its beam and ballast--a matchless array of features on an unstable platform.
That's like Windows, right?
Speaking of technology disasters- What about Microsoft Outlook, whose many unfixed security flaws have brought about waves of email-borne virii, costing millions of dollars in lost data and productivity?
It's now a massive visitor attraction. However, that's not without its own unfortunate side effects: I heard a report a few week back on the BBC that the wood is now rotting again in places due to the humidy in the air from the visitors' breath, perspiration, damp outer clothes on rainy days, etc.
More information at the Vasa Museum .
...there would be no customers!
Infuriate left and right
Analogies are dangerous, but consider a tail light assembly. Other than something like a bumber clamp-on type of thingee, you have almost no chance of being able to reuse it from one model of car to another. Your manager is right in no time being spent on making the code reuseable. It is worthwhile making the code a bit more general than necessary, but the crux is in making the code match the edge conditions that exist in the customer's requirements. That makes little subtle distinctions that do NOT transfer well.
and now makes for a good museum in Stockholm, where you can learn the history and see the warship Vasa.
I could be wrong, but I seem to recall from my physics paper that this explosion provided the inspiration for the Manhatten Project's Hundred-Ton test (of conventional explosives), designed to help figure out what a multi-kiloton explosion would be like.
I'm the stranger...posting to
You just have to ignore all the opinion that goes along with it and form your own conclusion.
I mean, did you know about the Solaris problems? I didn't, and I find it interesting. I mean sure, every UNIX deviates a little, and causes some compatibility problems, but I have really been bothered by the attitude displayed in some of the GNU documentation. For example, I remember reading about the gcc extensions, and how you should go ahead and use them because everybody should be using gcc.
RISKS is a big pile of random technology problems, accompanied by off-the-cuff commentary usually by non-experts (who don't seem to shout "I am not an expert!" as typically as most discussion groups). It makes a great jumping-off point for case studies for the continuous education any good tech needs, but a lousy source of pre-packaged judgements.
I mean, they let practically anyone post, you expect a zillion monkeys at keyboards to come up with a professional journal of technology risks?
Does Slashdot fall into this so-called "technology failures/disasters" category?
Why bother.
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.
I'd recommend this book on failure analysis, written in layman's terms using case studies:
Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail; Matthys Levy, et al.; W.W. Norton ISBN: 039331152X; Reprint edition (1994); $14.95
There is also a companion book which I have not read (because I just found out about it when searching amazon.com):
Why Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture; W.W. Norton ISBN: 0393306763; Reissue edition (February 18, 2002); $14.95 ($10.47 at amazon)
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed" because insufficient stiffening allowed the wind to create oscillations that destroyed it.
... well, you get the picture.
...
Fast forward 61 years to London and the Millennium Bridge near-disaster where insufficient stiffening
Point is, a list such as this one is valuable ONLY if we remember and learn from it. Those who forget history are doomed
A dog died when the Tacoma bridge collapsed. It was in the car the was left on the bridge.
So what?
Get your Unix fortune now!
It absolutely was a technical disaster. The bridge's construction presented too much resistance to predictable winds - instead of being designed to allow the wind to pass through. Consultants who were called in to examine the design of the bridge before construction wanted to make significant changes; one wanted to replace the stiffening trusses with a much lighter structure.
And its collapse was no freak of nature - it was predictable. Even during construction oscillations were noted and made some people questions the structure's stability. After construction, the bridge would sway noticably even during light winds (5 MPH if I remember correctly) and the locals nicknamed the bridge "Galloping Gertie".
Do a google search on "Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse" and you'll find all sorts of further information.
--Jim
not the only swedish 17th century warship to have a catastrophic ending...
Better well known is the 16th century British warship, Mary Rose. Which sank following a refit.
This article mentions the "great AT&T problem" of 1989. But it doesn't mention the corporate witch-hunt for "hackers" which was known as Operation Sundevil. Everyone at AT&T was so hopped up on their own hubris, they assumed that the telecom problem that shut down exchanges in NYC and elsewhere had to be cause be (malicious) human hands.
The complete details are set out in Bruce Sterling's book "The Hacker Crackdown." Operation Sundevil also lead to the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I've never really liked case statements in C or any other language. It doesn't make the code any shorter and introduces bugs like this one.
;
;
;
;
;
So instead of doing
switch {
case 1:
break;
case 2:
;
break;
case 3:
break;
}
do this:
if (case 1) {
} else if (case 2) {
} else if (case 3) {
}
Pretty simple, huh? It even takes up fewer lines!!
I saw a documentary recently which suggested that even though the towers were designed to withstand the impact of an aircraft, no one gave much thought to what would happen AFTER the impact, and what effect the impact might have on specific components (like the building's core, and the fire-retardant coating on the steel beams that connected the outer walls to the inner core). It has been theorized that had these points of failure been considered, many more people may have survived, and the buildings might still be standing today.
Yes, I agree with your points. I think a key thing is to think about 'class string' as part of a library.... and this library is in itself a project all on its own. It has its own specifications and requirements and tests, and one of the requirements is for it to be reusable.
So in my opinion, it is totally feasible to split a large project up into smaller sub-projects. Some of which may have 'reuse' as a specification. But there is a fine line between what should be reusable and what should be not reusable... it comes down to a judgement call, and my point is that quite often those judgement calls come down on the side of too much abstraction and the 'illusion' of reusability.
"Damn, all this code we wrote with reusability in mind just does not fit well with this new application we want to make. Now we have to change the library and all the projects which depend on it!"
or worse: "Damn, this code we wrote with reusability in mind does not fit well.. let us make a bunch of adaptor classes to adapt them for use with our new project... it won't be as efficient as it could be but we gotta get this shipped and we don't have time to fix the library and all the projects that depend on it"
I have seen a number of cases where a 'bug fix' in one reusable component caused adverse effects in another project that used it! This is what I meant about the concept of two bugs cancelling each other out. Once a reusable component is changed for any reason - even just a bug fix - you must put all of your dependant projects through extensive testing again! It is not often clear what the ramifications of a bug fix may be!
One of the side effects of making your code 'reusable' is that you are less likely to hack it together into a mess. But proper design an coding should not depend on the reusability of the code... there should be good code everywhere.
--jeff++
P.S. unfortunately, under many c++ libraries you cannot reuse JUST the 'string' class. The string class usually implicitely pulls in all sorts of apparently unrelated things as well which may have their own issues. So for instance you want to 'reuse' the MFC CString class, now you are limited in your potential to port your code to another platform. So reusing code is not always a win as along with that reuse will come the 'reuse' of the original code's restrictions.
ipv6 is my vpn
That's exactly what I meant! Thanks...
Infuriate left and right
I saw a documentary recently which suggested that even though the towers were designed to withstand the impact of an aircraft
Which they actually did perfectly well.
no one gave much thought to what would happen AFTER the impact, and what effect the impact might have on specific components (like the building's core, and the fire-retardant coating on the steel beams that connected the outer walls to the inner core)
One important point about the WTC design is that both the core and outer wall were structural. Which is most likely why WTC2 collapsed first, an almost horizontal rip in one side of the wall is more damaging than a big hole in the middle.
If the WTC2 tower was hit second, and collapsed first, it was suggested that this is because of the location of the impact. The first building was hit near the top, so there was far less weight riding on the demaged structural elements. The second building was hit more toward the middle, so the massive increase in the amount of weight supported by the damaged structure lent itself to a quicker structural failure. Although I'm no expert, I can see why the horizontal rip may have also been a factor.