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Stupid Engineering Mistakes
lee1 writes "Wired has bestowed on us a list of the ten worst engineering mistakes of all time. We have the St. Francis Dam designed by 'self-taught' engineer William Mulholland, which burst and wiped out several towns near LA; the Kansas City Hyatt walkway collapse; the DC-10, and more, but my favorite is the one I'd never heard of: a giant tank of molasses that ruptured in 1919 and sent 'waves of molasses up to 15 feet high' through Boston, killing 21."
The Kansas City Hyatt was a disaster, but it wasn't because of bad design, but actually, "Construction issues led to a subtle but flawed design change that doubled the load on the connection between the fourth floor walkway support beams and the rods carrying the weight of the second floor walkway. This new design could barely handle the dead load weight of the structure itself, much less the weight of the spectators standing on it". The original design would have been safe but what seemed an innocuous change completely changed the dynamics of load bearing, a result easily derived by any first year physics student.
Also, while a "top ten" list is always subjective, I think it'd be instructive to at least include Galloping Gertie as honorable mention, another design which had been identified as flawed. This Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge began swaying wildly as it set up its own harmonic resonance in a typical Puget Sound winter wind storm and eventually ripped apart and collapsed into the Sound. Interestingly the original Galloping Gertie could and would have sustained the fatal winds by strategically placed holes in the beams.
I don't consider disasters as consequences of poor engineering to be especially funny.
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Built on national pride, it's become the world's largest albatross.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And to think I felt sorry for all of the poor people in india who just got hit with 10-foot waves of regular water.
I regret spilling a glass of ginger ale on an achritect!
I think CowboyNeal is self-taught spelling.
A common theme in half of these is that a small change was made at the last minute.
Lesson of Life: Trust the engineers, they do stuff for a reason
Of course the other half were just poor engineering
Lesson of Life: Never trust the engineers
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
What on earth were they planning on doing with such a huge stockpile of molasses?!
The "Vasa" ship mentioned in the story is actually the Regalskeppet Vasa.
21 people couldn't avoid the flow of molasses? This seems very strange seeing that molasses is the canonical viscous fluid - slow as molasses in January. 15 foot amplitude, gotta wonder at the wavelength crest to crest...
They forgot the most important one, the one that's screwed the most people by far.
Windows
Osaka built the world's first sports stadium with a movable roof, which malfunctioned shortly after inception, and the company that made it went bankrupt. The roof has been stuck for the past 5 years. Incidentally, the stadium was built on rubbery landfill, so whenever audiences jump up and down during rock concerts, it causes earthquakes in the neighborhood. Osaka also built a new airport on an artificial island that is sinking into the sea, so it may become the world's first underwater airport. Seoul has had various engineering disasters also, including a department store that collapsed and killed hundreds of wealthy housewives.
I am among a group of individuals who insist that if you walk through the North End of Boston on a hot late summer's day, you can still get a whiff of the sweet scent of molasses. If you are in the North End in August, see (smell?) for yourself.
BTW, I noticed the smell BEFORE I heard about this disaster.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
How is a wave of molasses going to kill anyone? You could probably outrun it easily; molasses isn't very fast.
There's a big difference between laughing at people for dying and laughing at disastrous engineering mistakes.
I hope the Texas City disaster made the list. "Destruction of a city" ought to rate for something, dammit! Google it and be shocked that you've never heard of it.
Hopefully the Pepcon Corp explosion in Nevada made the list, because nobody was smart enough to keep that disaster from happening.
its an honest mistake!!
about engineering disasters, "To Engineer Is Humnan: The Role of Failure in Successful Design". It's worth picking up a copy from amazon/abebooks/etc...
Amazon.com
The moral of this book is that behind every great engineering success is a trail of often ignored (but frequently spectacular) engineering failures. Petroski covers many of the best known examples of well-intentioned but ultimately failed design in action -- the galloping Tacoma Narrows Bridge (which you've probably seen tossing cars willy-nilly in the famous black-and-white footage), the collapse of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways -- and many lesser known but equally informative examples. The line of reasoning Petroski develops in this book were later formalized into his quasi-Darwinian model of technological evolution in The Evolution of Useful Things, but this book is arguably the more illuminating -- and defintely the more enjoyable -- of these two titles. Highly recommended.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
like myspace.com?
gone fishing...
It's as much a human-factors disaster story as a strict "engineering" disaster story, but the story of the Therac-25 incidents (warning: radioactive .PDF) should be part of every CS curriculum on the planet.
this disaster involved a couple morons on a drilling rig in a lake forgetting to carry the two, hitting a mineshaft, and draining the whole lake and part of the gulf of mexico into the mine, along with several ships, etc etc.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I used to complain about this too. Then I remembered that Digg and Slashdot exist in the same reality, so there's likely to be some convergence in the content.
And even those accidents the safety defects were quite minor, nothing major that one could claim that it was poorly engineered. Outward opening doors have been used on all aircraft, Douglas was the first one to make one as a baggage door for a production airliner, improper servicing lead to issues with the locks and finally two accidents, the final resulting in a bulkhead failing that sliced the control cables.
United 232 was a result of a failure of imagination, no one imagined that there would be a failure that massive that would severe all there hydraulic lines, even though they weren't placed next to each other (just near each other as they would have be as they have to run to similar areas of the aircraft). The engineer that designed it probably reasoned, that any failure that would result in all three being severed would be large enough that the aircraft would be lost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur/
c o.html/
Basically, an oil rig, drilling in the middle of the lake, punctured a mineshaft below the lake (mining for salt). The end result was the entire lake draining into the mine below it. Fortunately, nobody was hurt.
From: http://members.tripod.com/~earthdude1/texaco/texa
The water of Lake Peigneur slowly started to turn, eventually forming a giant whirlpool. A large crater developed in the bottom of the lake. It was like someone pulled the stopper out of the bottom of a giant bathtub.
The crater grew larger and larger (it would eventually reach sixty yards in diameter). The water went down the hole faster and faster. The lake had been connected by the Delcambre Canal to the Gulf of Mexico, some twelve miles away. The ever-emptying lake caused the canal to lower by 3.5 feet and to start flowing in reverse. A fifty foot waterfall (the highest ever to exist in the state) formed where the canal water emptied into the crater.
The whirlpool easily sucked up the $5 million Texaco drilling platform, a second drilling rig that was nearby, a tugboat, eleven barges from the canal, a barge loading dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, tons of mud, trees, and who knows what else. A natural gas fire broke out where the Texaco well was being drilled. Let's not forget the estimated 1.5 billion gallons of water that seemed to magically drain down the hole (does the Coriolis effect come into play here?). Of course, there was the great threat of environmental and economical catastrophe.
I'd have thought that'd be pretty high on any such list, no? Flawed design from the control rods to the containment vessel, leading to the worlds biggest nuclear accident?
Oh no... it's the future.
In 1814 in in London town,
g ht=&
a flood of beer came to drown.
http://www.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=121&highli
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I can't quite remember, but I seem to recall that the records are scanty on this point -- it may be that the designers of the ship just didn't have the expertise and understanding of buoyancy of later shipwrights, or it may be that there was some kind of kickbacks or other shenanigans that interfered with the building and compromised the design.
When I say "if you look at the ship," though, I am being literal -- because you can. The really interesting thing about the Vasa is that it sank not far from Stockholm harbor, in waters that had a unique mineral consistency. Unlike other parts of the world, for whatever reason the waters in this area were particularly unfavorable to the shipworm. Normally a wooden ship like the Vasa would be eaten up. The Vasa, however, was merely covered with silt at the bottom of the bay, where it lay for hundreds of years.
Eventually -- and again, memory fails me but I believe it was sometime around the 1970s -- the location of the Vasa was discovered and work began to bring it to the surface. Today the entire ship is on display in a museum in Stockholm. The museum building was actually built up around the ship itself. A lot of repair and preservation work had to be done, including plastination of the wood, but it is mostly intact except for the original painting. You can't go onboard, but you can walk around it and view the hull from all sides. It is literally the closest you'll ever get to a 17th century wood-hull sailing vessel -- about five meters away. They've also built a facsimile of the interior decks that you can walk through -- if walking is the word. (Let's just say they made people smaller in those days.)
The museum has salvaged all kinds of other goodies from the ship as well, from cannon to tools to even the bodies of some of the original sailors, all of which are on display. If you get the chance you should check it out -- if you're at all into things nautical, it's a one-of-a-kind experience.
Breakfast served all day!
Ever have one of those moments of severe humiliation or embarassment "you'll look back upon and laugh at some day"?
It's probably unfunniest to those who were killed and injured and those friend to or relations of.
An architect friend pointed out some building in Denver, Colorado, with a curved roof. A heavy snow overwhelmed whatever means the building had to cope with accumulations of precipitation. The foot or more snow fell as a sheet and flattened an unoccupied car parked along the street. Funny, but perhaps not to the person who returned to find their car under a pile of ice and snow and thinks they are now living on borrowed time.
What comes back to me, from time to time, is the astounding feats of engineering accomplished before computers came along. Now errors seem rampant as people think too much in virtual terms and don't spend enough time actually thinking through what their creation may really have to endure.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I remember watching an episode of Modern Maverls aptly named engineering disasters. Well the funniest one had to be the disaster where a bunch of oil riggers managed to drain an entire lake into a mine. The drilled right through the mine shaft because of a bad map and the whole entire lake and part of the land surrounding it went into the mine. Fortunately, no one died but yeesh... I didn't think such a thing could happen.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
This one isn't quite on topic, but it keeps with the mood... Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom
When I think of engineering mistakes, the Cypress Freeway comes to mind. A double-decker freeway built on soil that isn't solid in an earthquake-prone area is a disaster waiting to happen.
The former double-decker section of 880 has since been replaced with a new, single decker structure a bit to the west of the original alignment. The cost of that new, short freeway section was $1.13 billion dollars, more expensive than the costs of LA's Century Freeway (105), IIRC.
... I mean Boston Molassacure
From the way things play out, I presume it really means the ten worst reported in the US in the last two centuries. It doesn't even mention the disaster in Japan a few years ago where an entire mega-mall collapsed because they forgot to increase the gague of the beams for the parking level after tweaking the design for the upper levels. I'm pretty sure there were probably some major engineering disasters in building early pyramids and ziggarauts too, not to mention the Roman buildings that didn't survive through the ages.
The plane that had it's door sucked out crashed because of poor maintenance -- a mechanic slammed the door shut with too much force, crushing the seal which lead to the door coming loose in flight.
The Turkish Airways flight crashed due to the airline modifying the seat configuration and not telling anyone, subjecting the floor to forces it wasn't designed for.
The flight of which the engine collapsed was, again, a maintenance issue. Crews were instructed to remove the engine before removing the pylon on the wing, but to save time they took it off all in one go -- again, something the airframe wasn't designed for.
The DC-10 is little better (or worse) than most other modern airliners.
I agree with a poster above that this shouldn't be listed under "funny" as all of those mistakes cost well over 1,000 people their lives, if I remember the article correctly. But it seemed to focus on the fact that people's lives were lost in just about all of those. I would have placed a number of other engineering mistakes in that list just because of the nature of the mistake.
For example, the bridge (the name of which I can't remember) from the early part of the 20th century that bent and twisted under high wind until it finally just fell apart. Loss of life? I don't believe so, but it was a spectacular destruction.
The Johnstown Flood, perhaps? A lot of people were killed in that flood, and it was caused by engineering of a sort. The dam itself seemed to be stable until a lot of critical components, such as iron rods, were replaced with such highly stable components as dirt and manure, at least according to various web sites and documentaries. Sure, that wasn't a fault of the original design, but the "remodeling" is most likely a very important factor that resulted in the deaths of over 2,200 people.
I found it particularly interesting that the article mentioned how something happened 200 years before Titanic then failed to mention the Titanic itself. Based on the documentaries I've seen, the bolts that were used to hold the steel plates together were cheaply made and severely weakened under the frigid water of the north Atlantic. That was an engineering/design flaw from the beginning.
New Orleans. Oh, yeah! Let's design and build a city with an ocean on one side and a lake on the other and - here's the clincher - we'll make it below sea level! Yeah, baby! Party on! Enough said.
Seriously. I don't know what criteria this person used for the "worst" engineering mistakes, but it's clear to me at least that he really doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I've been waiting patiently for a hurricane to make it to NYC so that we can see of the Citicorp building fixes worked.
Not only did Mullholland build that dam that collapsed, he also built the Los Angeles Aquaduct, that's still bringing water down from the North to supply the city's needs. He's also remembered by Mullholland Drive, along the Santa Monica Mountains. I don't know if he built it, but I do know it was named after him.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
In my Calculus 2 course, we had a problem that dealt directly with The Great Molasses Flood. We had to calculate the pressure of the tank contents upon any spot on the side of the tank.
At least the problem's background was interesting...
One I would've put on this list would be the Hotel New World disaster. The building's own weight was left out of the calculations on the load it would be able to hold.
Yeesh... Someone all ready posted a better and more detailed description of the lake. Anyway here is another engineering disaster. The Disney Opera House in California. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Concert_Hall It was a really nice building. Very ornate and very shiny and cool looking. The problem is that they designed and built Archimedes Death Ray. Certain parts of the building were curved that they were cooking the inside of people's apartments, melting trafic cones, blinding drivers, and setting stuff on fire. The solution was just to sandblast the offending objects but yeesh.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
The old Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a.k.a. Galloping Gertie was a fascinating example of self-excited forces gone wrong. It didn't make the cut?e #Film_and_Video_of_collapse)
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridg
I mean, I know there were no human losses, but won't somebody please think of the fish?
http://www.exponent.com/multimedia/
Have you read the comments at Digg lately? I panned them months ago - but took a peek the other day to see if time would have raised the comment IQ over there. Not a chance. It's as bad - if not worse than something from MySpace.
Even when the comments are short here - they're at least literate.
(And if this looks like kissing ass for Karma's sake - I'm already "excelent" disclaimer blah. Of course that doesn't preclude earlier ass-kissing.)
>astounding feats of engineering accomplished before computers came along. Now errors seem rampant
Errors were always rampant. Railway bridges used to collapse routinely. Frank Lloyd Wright built buildings that couldn't even keep the rain off, a feat pre-industrial peasants had been managing for thousands of years.
Only the best work has survived until now.
There is a fantastic story from 1995 in the New Yorker as told by the lead engineer of the Citigroup Center building. He talks about how one of his engineering students at Cambridge told him his math was wrong and his building would fail. He didn't believe him at first, but finally found his error. He decided to come forth with the fact that he screwed up, which could have ended his career. An excellent read.
http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm
LOL TRUE!!
80 people dying 80 years ago after waves of molasses 15 feet tall drench central Boston is a comedy.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The Violence of the Explosion
Fermentation, a sudden rise in temperature, and an inadequate tank caused the tank containing two million gallons of molasses to explode. The force of the explosion was so great that:
* Half-inch steel plates of the huge molasses tank were torn apart. ("Seeking Cause of Explosion," The Salem Evening News, January 16, 1919: 7.)
* The plates were propelled in all directions, hard enough to cut the girders of the elevated railway. (Ibid.)
* After the explosion, a tremendous vacuum sucked into ruin buildings which had withstood the primary blast. (Ibid.)
* The vacuum also picked up a truck and dragged it across the street toward the molasses tank. ("Big Molasses Tank Blast Kills Eleven," The Boston Globe, January 16, 1919: 8.)
* An elevated train was lifted off the rails and fell onto the ties. (Ibid.)
* Some buildings collapsed.
* Some buildings were knocked off their foundations.
* Some buildings were buried under
If you can't laugh at hundreds of needless deaths, what can you laugh at?
Dodge caravan - Engineers were on serious drugs designing that transmission and engine bay.
Pontiac Grand AM 1997-2006 - I want to personally kill the engineer that designed that engine cooling system.
All Delco car radio products 1990-2006 - Those engineers need to be beaten hard with the product they made. Any car that can lose functionality or even not run when you remove the factory radio was designed by a retarted engineer.
I can go on for days just on recent automotive designs and building techniques. Automotive engineers are the most hated on the planet lately because of the incredibly stupid designs they continue to come up with.
And they have done it for decades, Oldmosbile Quad 4 engine, instead of making the engine balanced we put in a harmonic balancer that runs at 4X the engine RPM's.. but not use a system that can handle the incredible RPM's or make sure it stays oiled.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Although wikipedia says differently http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_(airship)# Rate_of_flame_propagation
I thought that coating the surface with flammable material was a poor choice. I saw some documentary where they burned a scrap of the ship or a recreation of it and it burned like magnesium.
Sure the fact that it contained hydrogen added fuel to the fire, but surely wrapping a fast burning fuse around a flammable gas was the ultimate in stupid.
Like I said wikipedia says differently but I'm going with the discovery(history? tlc?) documentary on it and blame the idiot that installed the fuse.
Leave hydrogen alone will ya, after all 1 is the lonliest atomic number.
Wired forgot to mention the *end* of Skylab. It was falling out of orbit around 1979. Then, someone realized that it very well might fall on U.S. soil. Yikes! NASA engineers to the rescue! They managed to put it into a tumbling position, which delayed its descent by about half an orbit.
Whew! Lucky the only thing we hit were a few Australians in the town of Esperance. They sent the U.S. State Department a fine for littering.
And really, the humor section? I know being killed by a flood of molasses is novel, how is having a walkway full of people falling on your head funny?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Wasn't the Erie canal implemented by lawyers and judges who learned it as they went?
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
... since today the Army Corps of Engineers released a report accepting fault for the breakdown of the levee system during Katrina.
h tml?hp&ex=1149220800&en=8ac0ecfa22b1f7c8&ei=5094&p artner=homepage
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/us/01cnd-corps.
Maybe it deserves a spot on the list?
The uber-parent never heard of the infamous Great Molasses Flood? I'm totally shocked that someone could have gone through life and never heard of this. I have lived in New England most of my life, mostly in Massachusetts, but I keep coming across stories of this event that aren't at all something that only New Englanders would have heard about. Amazing ignorance, or just not well read?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
The New Orleans levies. Increasing evidence has shown a number of design decisions that lead to a the failure of the system. From placement, to construction, to backup systems.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"4. Northeastern US power grid, 1965
A single protective relay tripped in Ontario, overloading nearby circuits and causing a cascade of outages that left 30 million homes without power for up to 13 hours. A fragile, redundancy-free design ensured that it would happen eventually. After decades of repairs and upgrades, it happened again in 2003."
Although this point implies that the 2003 outage originated in Ontario as well, a joint U.S. and Canadian investigation found that it originated in Ohio due to several failures of FirstEnergy corporation, among them the failure to keep trees near high voltage power lines adequately trimmed! When the Eastlake generating plant in Ohio went offline during a period of high demand, other high voltage power lines in the area experienced increased demand to pick up the slack. The increased current across these HV lines caused them to sag and short-out when they came into contact with said trees. HV lines heat up and sag as current increases, and this is accounted for in both their design and in guidelines for keeping trees near HV power lines trimmed, which were apparently not adhered to by FirstEnergy.
This wasn't the only thing that FirstEnergy did wrong however. In total, they were found to be in violation of *seven* NERC standards. Although more reliability and redundancy could be built into the North American power grid, blaming the 2003 outage on poor engineering is not accurate. It was FirstEnergy's failure to adhere to standards that precipitated the cascade failure. As such, it would be more accurate to blame greedy corporate management that was too cheap to shell out adequate funds for operation.
For more on this, check out the report found here:
https://reports.energy.gov/BlackoutFinal-Web.pdf
...but I thought "Bridges Are Easy"....
As Something Positive reminds us, we should all take a moment to talk about the dangers of molasses.
[part1] and [part2]
I just rented a Chevy Colbalt. It has to rank up there.
Bhopal Gas Tragedy.
This sig doesnt exist.
They mention a large pre-Titanic boat, but wasn't the Titanic also caused by engineering? It was later discovered that iron rivets, IIRC, were made in a way that caused them to become brittle in cold temperatures. Naturally, when Titanic sailed through icy water, they easily broke.
Also, as I recall, the Titanic was designed to withstand a leak by having compartments in the hull. However, they did not anticipate that having several leaking compartments would tip the boat, causing the others to even more quickly fill, domino-style, making the ship unexpectedly capsize.
is that it finally gives me an excuse to tag something 'ohshit killermolasses'
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=500
Some quotes:
The Damn Interesting website is a potentially huge time sink. There is so much interesting stuff to read in there. Recommended.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
If I want to hear about their stuff, I can read their magazine on my own. Am I the only one who thinks this is lame?
The DC-10 went on to have a long term decent service record for a "heavy".
The molasses flood is on the Boston Duck Tour - the second coolest thing to do in Boston.
Galloping Gertie missed making the list - especially in light that the same basic design was used in the Golden Gate (but the winds aren't harmonic there and mods were done).
I also nominate the city engineers who couldn't find a parking spot so they circled a Chicago block thrice, craned their necks, shrugged and then gave the go ahead to drive pilings right into the old Chicago Tunnel system and the basement of everything near the Kinzie Street river crossing.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Case sensitivity in programming languages has probably wasted billions of man hours of time.
Because the guy honestly didn't care.
s
He (him) fsck'd huge parts of the west out of their water rights to get an ROI out of his investments in L.A.
The damn breaking was terrible PR. I believe it only troubled him because of the fear he would be found liable for the damage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_War
You can still find *giant* chunks of concrete in the flood basin in the east end of the san fernando valley. I was honestly surprised to find them there.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Nine out of ten of the worst mistakes of "all time" were made in the last hundred years? Somehow, I doubt this.
More likely, nobody wanted to bother and actually do any research beyond "interesting mistakes I can remember from what I was taught in Engineering 101".
Get two engineers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Toshiba put a 1.1GHz desktop CPU in a laptop with a laptop cpu cooling system. The laptop would overheat soon after being turned on, so they slowed the FSB in the bios and slowed the cpu to half its speed, still selling it as a 1.1GHz machine. Lawsuit soon followed.
It's very unfair to group the DC-10 with these disasters. McDonnell Douglas was actually very little at fault for the 3-4 accidents that unfortunately occurred right near each other. The most spectacular crash of the American Airlines flight was actually caused by an AA maintenance crew being dumb and cracking the pylon holding the engine. But thanks to the American sensationalistically hostile TV media, the only thing that everyone saw was the engine falling off the wing, which led everyone to assume it was the DC-10's fault, and led to huge cancellations on flights on the actually safe DC-10. It was a good airplane destroyed by bad press and bad luck.
(If any of you have read Airframe by Michael Crichton, you'll know what I'm talking about...from the NYT review of that very good book:
"And, Casey explains, when something goes wrong, a media industry that has grown hostile and shallow with the ascendancy of television always jumps to the wrong conclusion. Why, just look at what happened to the DC-10, ''a good aircraft . . . destroyed by bad press,'' because the crash of an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Los Angeles in May 1979 was misreported and misunderstood. ")
St. Francis Dam was no engineering mistake. People didnt know that the ground in California moved, at the time. And knowone knew it was actually built on a fault line.
Yeah, great. That's what we need here..another frigging skyscraper collapse.
And you're actually wishing this on us? Jeez.
Huh?
In rapidly developing Fairfax County, VA where I grew up, a two-lane road was widened to 4 lanes in both directions. The original traffic light system which allowed left turning traffic to yield to oncoming traffic was left in place. The road may also have been slightly regraded in the process so that left-turners sometimes had little time to react to speeders coming up a hill.
For several months, perhaps even a couple years, metal-crumpling accidents seemed like a weekly occurance. The signals were eventually changed so that left-turns could only be legally made with a green arrow. The intersection is stil dangerous, but not nearly as much.
I would be surprised if most Americans didn't have a similar story about some road or intersection that's well known to be accident prone and fixable with the proper lights or signage.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The molasses flood was not an engineering mistake. The basic design of the structure was ok, the disaster is believed to be most likely to been have caused by shoddy contruction techniques and/or overfilling plus pressure buildup due to fermentation of the molasses in the tank.
"Why did the Vasa sink?
...
r for%20sjonk%20Vasa.aspx?lang=en
r lisningen.aspx?lang=en
s tory.htm Which bankrupted the area then, but now provide enormous revenue to the area.
# His_buildings
In the 17th century there were no scientific methods of calculating a
ship's stability. It was not uncommon that warships heeled over and
sank. Their cargo - the guns - were placed relatively high up in the
ship, whereas merchant-vessels stored their cargo in the hold, ie in
the bottom of the ship."
"However, the reckonings used in building the Vasa were intended for
smaller ships with only one gundeck. The Vasa was built differently.
She had two gundecks with heavy artillery (when the norm was to
place lighter guns on the upper gundeck). The standard rules
obviously did not apply here.
Deep down in the Vasa several tons of stone were stored as ballast.
They were meant to give the ship stability. However, the main reason
for the Vasa capsizing was that the ballast was not enough as
counterweight to the guns, the upper hull, masts and sails of the ship.
In the inquiries after the Vasa disaster it was revealed that a stability
test had been performed prior to the maiden voyage."..." Present
was Admiral Klas Fleming, one of the most influential men in the
Navy. His only comment to the failed stability test was "If only His
Majesty were at home!" After that he let the Vasa make her maiden
voyage."
- http://www.vasamuseet.se/Vasamuseet/Om/Skeppet/Da
Lots of reasons for the sinking, but I wouldnt classify it as an engineering failure. Purely due to the non-existence of the engineering discipline. These people were craftsmen, granted, but they were not engineers in the current sense of the word
And as for order of magnitude of the disaster:
"Of the 150 people on board, 30-50 died in the disaster." - http://www.vasamuseet.se/Vasamuseet/Om/Skeppet/Fo
I cant find anything on the cost, but lets assume it is considerable. However the swedish are now making money from the museum. Its a give/take situation there I think. Similar to the mad king Ludwig II building this: http://www.neuschwanstein.de/english/index.htm and this: http://www.schlosslinderhof.de/englisch/palace/hi
King Ludwig: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria
Can't we all just get along
"I believe in the genocide of front-load washing machine believers."
Dude, this is slashdot, why are you doing laundry?
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
How may gave their asses to fill that giant tank?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
No discussion of engineering disasters is complete without mention of PEPCON. First, build a factory 10 miles from Las Vegas. Use it to manufacture ammonium perchlorate -- a component of rocket fuel. Store the stuff in aluminum containers. BTW, aluminum is the other component for the rocket fuel. Then start welding nearby. Oh, and make sure you put the factory on top of a gas main.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster
There's some great footage of it here:
http://www.apechild.com/videos/pepcon.mov
You'll never see a better demonstration of speed-of-sound vs speed-of-light. You see massive explosions and shockwaves (taking out trees and cars) several seconds before you hear them.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I have never in my whole live seen a top-loading washing maschine (neither in someones home nor in a shop), so the problem you rave about seems as logical as somebody getting hysterical about the sky being blue.
Just get over it.
(also, did it ever get into your mind that front loading washing maschines can use gravity to move the cloths while turning, getting the water more often and quicker through the clothing. And as you said, its the water that cleans).
Btw, i heard once on the internet that american washing mashines work with cold water. Any truth to that?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Single handledly destroying ozone layer. Oh and giving "candle blowing in the wind" a whole new meaning.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I'm surprised the St. Francis dam made the list, but not the dambreak that killed 2,200 in Johnstown, PA. Prior to the dambreak, the dam had been rebuilt not in an effort to control floodwaters, but to provide a lake for a resort area.
I hate to say it but the Wiki has it incorrect about the deaths caused by the Theriac-25. After a Successful Prosecution, it turned out that 6 of the deaths could have been easily prevented if and only if the damn doctors who thought they knew better then the engineers who'd designed the machine had not modified the programing or equipment.
In other words, there was no engineering mistake made other then not idiot proofing the hardware/software as they should have.
Excuse me, I just wondered if I could distract you from your presumptuous tirade to point out that just because I know all about the Drop Bears and Piecosts and everyone I know knows about them doesnt mean everyone else in the world does. It may be a common story among your social group, but not everyone will know about it.
I know its easy to assume the people who dont know the exact things you know are either ignorant or poorly read, but here is a novel concept for you. Perhaps not everyone knows the same things or the same people.
Can't we all just get along
The truly sad aspect of the R-101 disaster is not that it crashed, but that the crash utterly killed any chance that the R-101's sister airship, the R-100, would gain public acceptance.
The two ships were built simultaneously, to the same set of government design specifications. The R-101 was designed by government engineers with an effectively unlimited budget, and no penalties for failing to meet specifications. Because a government agency was building it, the press were treated to frequent and highly colored bulletins about the R-101.
The R-100 was designed by a private firm, under a strict budget, with limited access to design information about the R-101. It was built with much less publicity and launched with no fanfare at all.
The R-100 made a successful trans-Atlantic test flight, was several knots faster than the specification called for, was highly maneuverable, and had a considerable payload capacity. It performed almost flawlessly, and was fairly economical to operate. (The Wikipedia article makes a bit much of the R-100's problems, such as the tail cone collapse; the engineers decided that the tail cone was unnecessary.)
The R-101 was grossly oversized and overweight, poorly stressed, and had been lengthened by some yards at the eleventh hour. Because of pressure to outperform the R-100, it was sent on an intercontinental flight before its local flight tests (which would probably have revealed its weaknesses) were completed. When it crashed, it took with it any chance that the R-100 would be followed up, even though the R-100 was a nearly unqualified success (for a prototype, anyway).
Dig up a copy of Nevil Shute's Slide Rule for an entertaining and sometimes harrowing account of the two rival airships.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
My mistake, it WAS in January!
"A famous incident involving molasses was the Boston Molasses Disaster on January 15, 1919, in which a large molasses storage tank burst and flooded a neighborhood of Boston, killing 21 and injuring 150." Wikipedia
Oh You POS
I'm not the grandparent, but we have a top-loading washing machine here, in the US, that works with cold water. Like the grandparent mentioned, there is a lot less to go wrong in a top-loading machine.
An article on Straight Dope on the Boston molasses accident
How fast did the initial surge of molasses travel? Experts and eyewitnesses agreed on 35 mph, but we needn't take their word for it. I consulted with Gareth McKinley, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, and established that the theoretical maximum rate of flow for a (roughly) 50-foot column of liquid, ignoring density and viscosity, was 38 mph. Surprisingly, molasses's stiffness would have slowed things only a bit--making certain assumptions about Reynolds number and whatnot that I expect some gratitude for not sharing, the flow rate would have been mostly a function of inertia (i.e., mass) rather than viscosity. Bottom line: 35 mph was a pretty good guess.
The Liberty ships - a truly textbook example of a major engineering stuffup, had no such excuse because they were built in the 1940's. A sudden change in design from rivets to welding and a change in the grade of steel was not done by professionals and a square hatch cover with sharp corners was the starting point for cracks that could then make it all the way around the vessel with nothing to stop them (many of the riveted ships cracked from one plate to the next, but this took time and rapid repairs could be carried out sometimes before the ship sank - one ship in the Southern Ocean made it through a storm with crewman bolting plates over a crack that opened up to as much as three feet wide). There are photographs in textbooks of two of these welded Liberty ships that had snapped completely in half - one before it had even made it out of the dock. It wasn't until this point that sinkings were not blamed on non-existant submarines and that the large cracks (several feet long) in hundreds of these ships were taken into consideration, the design scrapped, more appropriate steel used, and weld tests that had been standard practice for the last decade applied instead of cutting corners.
how Windows didn't make the list.
Weird, until 6 months ago top loading washers were the only kind I'd ever seen outside of a laundromat. And yes, we do have the option of washing with cold water, though I never do. Hot for whites which we bleach, warm for everything else.
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.
I was living in KC when it happened. Seems that the original design called for several load-bearing steel beams cast in a single piece to stretch from floor to ceiling, to distribute the load. During construction, the firm decided it would be easier (and possibly cheaper) to connect the walkways with cut beams joined at each stress point with a simple double joint. The construction company signed off on the design change without realizing that it would put all the stress of the walkways on the bottom girders. The girders could barely support the weight of the walkways, let alone the mass of people crowded onto it. How this obvious error escaped the engineers remains a mystery.
Any list of engineering failures is incomplete without Windows ME.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
The article indicates that it was a design flaw that caused the failure. In fact, the problem was that on-site construction crews modified the plans without consulting with the structural engineers. As a result, steel rods and bolts that had been speced to carry the loads with large safety margins were asked to essentially carry twice the designed-for loads. Coupled with dancing on the walkways that introduced harmonic motions, the nuts holding the walkways failed, dropping tons of concrete onto the crowds below. Needless to say, the modifications made to the design were totally unauthorized. Post-mortum studies indicated that, had the design been implemented correctly, the walkways would have been safe.
The deHaviland Comet. Stress concentrations and metal fatigue resulted in the loss of several aircraft.
HMS Titanic. Inadequate watertight compartments (IMHO the bulkheads should've extended higher, and/or been closer together). Also too few lifeboats to accomodate everyone on board.
Hubble telescope. Nno loss of life, just extremely bad press on a very expensive engineering program. 100% avoidable too.
Denver airport luggage system. No loss of life, unless one of the engineers jumped. The automated system was very expensive, late, and never worked correctly. To the point that the airport is using a normal manual labor system and has given up on ever using the automated system. (but is still paying for it)
Chernobyl (sp?) and/or Three Mile Island. Safety equipment, procedures, and training obviously not up to the task.
Any one of several early Soviet nuclear submarine designs. That more of them didn't sink or irradate their crews (more) is a credit to the bravery and dedication of their crews.
The main thing to look for in a "worst engineering mistakes" list would be something that not only seems obviously a bad idea in retrospect... But that should've been recognized as a really bad idea, even with the technology and education levels available at the time.
--- Just another Code-Monkey
Keeping to the thread -- Disney may not have been an engineer, but his start-in-a-garage enterprise hired good ones early (including my late uncle Lee Adams). A lot of very geeky stuff came out of Animation, long before nVidia etc. Fine old tradition.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It is my understanding that Europe knows how to preserve older buildings of passing interest. Since modern buildings are basically a steel erector set, you can just build around them. But that isn't good enough for the "Roman" American mentality. You have to raze to bare ground and start fresh.
t m
When Minneapolis was planning development for the so-called "Block E" downtown some people wanted to preserve the Schubert Theater built in 1910. [If you had been in the Schubert when it was still an operating movie theater in the '70s you might also have agreed with me that it was one of the uglier downtown theaters sadly lacking in classic majesty -- but that is a detail.] Anyway, the only plan that was seriously considered was to move the whole theater. And so they did -- in what I understand was one of, if not the, largest move of an entire, intact brick building at one time. And so it sits today, 7 years later, a couple blocks from where it was built. Still unrestored.
"My personal favorite boondoggle is the $11 million for the Schubert Theater tucked away in both the House and Senate bonding bills," said David Strom, President of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota. "The most expensive building move in history has bought us a rotting hulk in Downtown Minneapolis. Now they are going to throw good money after bad to restore yet another money-losing theater."
Taxpayers may recall all the promises to restore the theater entirely with privately donated funds. And the price of the restoration project has increased by a whopping 67% since first proposed! The current cost of restoring the theater will be $41,222 per seat--one of the costliest restorations ever, anywhere."
http://www.taxpayersleague.org/PR/2006/04052006.h
Webcam of the move:
http://idream.tv/schubert.php
80 people dying NOW to waves after waves of molasses 15 feet tall drenching any part of the world would be hilarous.
there's too many idiots anyway, no big loss
When I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, I took the oath of the order of the engineer and even though I have since become a sysadmin, I still wear the ring.
The oath and ring were inspired by the Quebec bridge collapse of 1907, which resulted in the death of 75 of the 86 workers on the bridge at the time. The point of the oath is essentially "I wont screw up my calculations and get people killed."
Due to the scope of the catastrophe and the importance of the symbolism of the oath and ring, I'm surprised it didn't make the list.
Front-loaded machines are:
1) More energy efficient.
2) Washes more clean.
3) Doesn't rip the clothes apart. All top-loaded washers I've been using here in North America have ripped my clothes after a couple of months of 2-3 washes a week, whereas a front-loaded machine takes years to create the same result.
And as for the life expectancy of front-loading machines... I've got an Electrolux front-loaded washer, and it's still going strong after 15 years of use.
Perhaps you should buy European washers instead... oh, no... they're too expensive... Then be cheap and get what you pay for.
Statics kicked my ass too!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I'm not an expert, I just happened to read some stuff on airliners.net over the last couple days.
In AA 191, when one engine went, some of the pilot's indicators stopped working. It included the flap position (as opposed to setting) indicators. It also included the shaker that told when a stall was about to occur. There was a system to engage backup power to these systems, but it was not activated. They were probably too distracted.
These indicators were not replicated on the co-pilot's side (which was still powered), so they had no way to know the slats were retracting and it was entering a stall.
I also learned some other stuff, like that the DC-10's crash record still isn't great, despite very good results after the bugs were ironed out.
To me, if you kill a significant amount of people ironing out the bugs in your plane, it's an engineering disaster. I know not everyone agrees.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
In July 2003, the US Immediately blamed Canada for the blackout but 2 comisisons later and a thorough investigation shows that what happened? Oh yeah, some idiot in the us crossed a few wires and blew up the eastern power grid. BOOOOURNS To all of you that say it was ontario and screw you wired. You blew that up, not us. PS: Blame CANADA! Wooo!
Because they lived in Kansas, would be my guess.
Ha ha, you live in the midwest!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Are you going to rail against the new dishwashers that use too little water to clean your dishes? No siree, can't have that. Must use more water to make sure my dishes are spot-on clean.
Okay, someone explain to me why this was given a "troll". The statements are completely valid. There are many other things throughout history that engineers and historians would no doubt consider to be far more "disasterous" in terms of both engineering and human life than the exaples that the original article writer quoted. Look at the article as well and you'll see that he gives absolutely no reasons whatsoever for choosing those disasters nor does he quote anyone else more qualified than he to determine what are the worst engineering disasters.
Personally, I can name a few engineering disasters as well that I think would be far more apt to be on such a list, the biggest of which would be CHERNOBYL, which not only showed the problems of a flawed design but also contaminated a large area for the next 600 years or so. Granted, human error was also to blame, but all of the documentaries that were shown as of late seem to come to the conclusion that the design was bad from the start.
Yet a molasses tank rupture (or whatever goo was in it) makes the list as does the sinking of a ship, and the parent gets smacked as a troll. Wow...!
The History Channel series "Modern Marvels" has covered several of these engineering disasters in the past, as well as some of the extras that other posters have brought up. These particular episodes are entitled "Engineering Disasters", and I think they have around 20 or so of them. In each show, they discuss three or four pretty horrendous disasters, most of which led either to great loss of life or the destruction of a large and expensive structure. Learning about beer or breakfast cereal is interesting, but the Engineering Disasters episodes are by far their best ones.
It seems like the time has come to add a "Death Porn" section to slashdot.
... the Windows Registry isn't on that list.
I guess that would be on the SOFTWARE engineering list.
Well, let's confront your misconceptions:
1. It's actually your great-grandmother's suffering you're reliving. You see, the way to wash the sweat and human oils out of clothes was to take the big pot (like a witch's cauldron) and make Clothes Soup over an open fire. So good job on advancing yourself to 1890.
2. If you went back to freshman chemistry, you'd learn that water and oil do not mix. Which means, if you want to get the human soils out of your underwear, and the human sweat/grease out of your clothes, you're going to have to use soap. Water won't do it. Or, if you don't believe me, just stop buying laundry detergent. You do use it, right, hypocrite? FYI: The water is the medium for the soap, and removed soils. It all has to go somewhere - the soap alone won't carry it.
3a. A liberal arts guy, huh? 'Nuff said.
3b. Just for general info, did you ever see what your top-loader does with your Clothes Soup? The paddle in the middle spins a turn clockwise, then a turn counter-clockwise....and so forth. It also has to spin the drum for the spin cycle (you know, the only major moving part on a front-loader). So you have 2 major moving parts, one of which has to support counter-movement. So you're actually on the WRONG END OF THE SIMPLICITY ARGUMENT. Duh.
You do have the efficienty argument down, though. Front-loaders use 40% less water and much less soap, along with being much easier on the actual clothes because there is no paddle-like implement used to pummel your clothes. Gravity and water do that for the front-loader, off that one mono-dirctional moving part.
4. So...you do change the water in your washing machine from time to time, right?
How do you get it out?
Could it be...........a cute little rubber seal? At the bottom of the drum? Under way more standing water pressure than a front-loader sees?
PS: Check into how long Mankind has been making watertight seals. I bet you'll be suprised. We've had time to actually get kinda good at it.
How the hell did your particular brand of idiocy get modded up?
Check out this article for many really fascinating details about discovering the problem with the tower, and how it was fixed.
http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm
Here's a few self taught people
Bill Gates
Michael Dell
John Carmack
This was highly influential to a young animator named Walt Disney
As was Neuschwanstein - it's a beautiful castle, and elements of it were shamelessly used in some of Disney's creations. I visited Neuschwanstein and Linderhof last year, and regardless of Ludwig's state of mind, he had some sweet places to hang his hat.
A lot of very geeky stuff came out of Animation, long before nVidia etc. Fine old tradition.
Big time. Over at Disney-MGM Studios they have a Walt Disney exhibit where some of the cooler things like the multiplane animation camera and some of Disney's hand-made models are on display. That reminds me - I gotta get out there for the last Star Wars Weekend next week to see Jeremy Bulloch and Temuera Morrison. The Fett family's in town!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
FYI, I understand that your post is (probably) meant to be saire, but I'm going to play along and act as if it were not.
The dryer *has* to be horizontal, but the washer doesn't. I choose a washer with a horizontal drum because I like to stoop uncomfortably
OMFG - you'll have to bend over to load clothes into your washer! What a huge burden, having to take an extra two seconds to load the washer.
Of course, it's easier to move the clothes to the dryer afterwards with a front loader (you don't have to lift them out of the drum), and you have the convenience of being able to stack stuff on top of the washer. But, hell, we can't afford to bend over to load chothes.
I don't understand freshman chemistry, where even the D- students can prove that it's the water, not the detergent or agitation, which dissolves the dirt. Hence, I'm stupid enough to believe that a "water efficient" washing machine will actually get my clothes cleaner than a real washing machine.
Well, first of all, our LG front loader cleans clothes way better than the Whirlpool top-loader we used to own. And, second of all, it's moving and extracting the water that cleans the clothes, combined with the soap and agitation. Front loaders move more water through the clothes and they extract it better (by spinning faster).
If your top loader works so well, then why does it take three times more soap than my front-loader to get clothes clean?
Being a graduate of an arts program, I believe the engineers are lying when they tell me that reliability is inversely proportional to the complexity of a mechanism.
My LG washer has no belt to break and no agitator to jam. It's a drum driven directly by a DC motor with a pump and a couple of valves. All of the complexity comes in the firmware.
And finally, I believe that cute little rubber seals are more reliable than gravity
Our Whirlpool top-loading washer failed when the drum rusted through. Rubber seals have proven to be effective even in long-term use.
P.S. I understand it's harder to have an orgasm using a horizontal-load washer than a top-loader. Not that this is relevant to the environment or anything. But I like noting it.
What, no mention of the Teton Dam Flood of 1976? Destroyed Sugar City, royally screwed up Rexburg, didn't do Idaho Falls a lot of good, fscked up a bunch of farmers.
Sorry, but that disaster killed more people and cost more money by far than many of the items on this list.
Of course, having lived through it personally I am a bit biased.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I have a MechEng/ Materials dual degree, and one of my later courses was actually a "Metal Failures" course, dedicated to this kind of stuff. Most of it was more complicated. My professor was actually a retired PhD who worked on investigative teams that evaluated accidents like these, and acted as the 'expert witness' for technical information in many cour cases.
We studied this case, as well as many on the list above, in detail. In particular, the box beams in question ran horizontally to support the walkway, while the vertical rod was the support for the end of the box beams. The beams could have been made better, but they were good enough for their design loads.
The problem was that the original design called for one continuous vertical rod, with several levels of walkway hanging from it at different heights. However, due to construction issues, the installation was changed (for the worse) so that separate vertical rods were used. This unfortunately got written approval, and shouldn't have. Instead of the successive loads being applied to the rod, the box beam was then holding the weight of all the floors below it, which it was not designed to do.
Imagine one rope hanging from a ceiling, with 3 people hanging at various heights on the rope. The rope can hold the total weight of the 3 people easily, but each climber needs only enough grip to hold up his own weight. Now imagine due to "construction issues" you can't get one long rope, so you get 2 shorter lengths. Ideally, you'd tie the ropes together to create a nearly identical scenario, but in this case, it's like they tied the bottom rope to the middle guy's ankle, and expected him to hold on with the added weight of the guy below him.
Unfortunately, it was just strong enough to hold a few people, but let go when it was fully loaded.
=
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Wow, nothing gets by you, does it?
Says the man who's never owned a sweater.
What exactly are the engineering flaws in the Three Gorges Dam?
Perhaps you're insinuating that Chinese people make poor engineers, or do things on the cheap. I think that's insulting.
Perhaps future students will study the failure of WTC 7 which managed to collapse without getting hit by a plane, or how other buildings, which were designed with the possibility of a plane collision, also collapsed from small fires. Design failure? Maybe this is beyond an ordinary technical failures class, more along the lines of an Ethics class.
That guy put his entire career on the line to do the right thing. You sure don't see that much anymore.
These days people would have other people killed to keep that sort of gaffe quiet and cover their own asses, and to hell with the consequences.
I was very small (about 5) when he was explaining all this to Dad, but I remember the moment because Uncle Lee really enjoyed his work -- he was really, really enthused about the work he did.
When was the last time I was that excited by a bit of engineering? Can't remember (hmm... cable pinouts today - yay fun wow) But my uncle would laugh and wave his arms a lot when he spoke of what he was doing. I guess if you get that excited about what you do for a living, keep an eye on your five-year old audience. You may have an effect.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Vasa had a complement of 445, of whom it is not clear how many were lost. The HMS Royal George, however, sank just off Spithead on August 29, 1782 in very similar circumstances to the Vasa with the loss of eight hundred, including an admiral of the fleet. An inquest concluded that her loss was due to structural failure. This was one of the worst marittime disasters of all time, and I'm surprised that the loss of the Vasa, and not of the Royal George, is on the list.
One of the common themes I see is that they all seem to have recurred at least once...
No, that was real water surrounding the levees, not a bunch of politicians shoving those levees over. Oh, I get it! Wow, that's deep. Didn't think of climate change as a man-made engineering disaster, but you got a point.
That's nothing LANAL Labs has ~ 100 miles of road dedicated to it. Someone decided in their devine wisdom to engineer the road such that for 80 of the 90 miles it's on sandstone, not a major problem--- if it weren't on the edge of a ~80 dgree cliff (not quite perpendicular to the raveen that the roads takes you to the labs runs along). Now this is fairly bad. Also add: it's a 4 lane road two directions. A free way. High Rad rating. A valcanic trench ~20 miles of a valcando's. Mix in a few fision power plants, and I'd say that's definatly a recipe for disaster-wich it has been. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/08/eveningn ews/main672516.shtml. I want to know what asshat decided: YEAH, lets place nuclear expirments right on a ---love making fault zone ---WTF were you people thinking!
The Tacoma Narrows bridge didn't fail due to resonance.
Read that first line again.
It was not resonance, your first year, second year, calculus, dynamics and control systems books all lied to you. Lied. Not truthful. Not correct.
Read: K. Billah and R. Scanlan, "Resonance, Tacoma Narrows Bridge Failure, and Undergraduate Physics, Textbooks;" American Journal of Physics, 1991.
It was not a time dependant thing, therefore, not resonance. The bridge was shaking NOWHERE near its resonant frequencies. The motion of the bridge actually induced "negative damping" . That would sort of be like pulling your parachute and having it drag you to the ground faster and faster as you gain speed. Sounds weird, but totally true. They show in that paper that the bridge under the wind loading becomes a self excited structure and, at a critical wind speed, the eigenvalues of the bridge stucture change sign, causing the bridge to enter an exponentially increasing vibrational state, eventually breaking the bridge down.
I built a cool model of the Tacoma narrows bridge, with controllable air flow, and reproduced this behavior for a college course in experimental design. It was neat to visually watch eigenvalues change in an experiment.
Oh the physics of pulling wool over eyes is so fun. BTW, that "doubling the loading that any physics student could understand" bit in the other posts. Right. Most physics students can't tell you if the box slips downhill or uphill using a free body diagram. Give me a break.
* The Soviet Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, in the town of Chelyabinsk.
* The Bhopal Disaster.
* The GM Pinto.
* The John Hancock Building.
* The Silver Bridge collapse, in West Virginia.
* The Teton Dam.
Now arguably, they had to pick the top ten, but it is very hard to imagine a top ten without at least Bhopal.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
... and forgetting to convert to 1. I'd say that's pretty stupid.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9911/10/orbiter.02/
Then again we wouldn't have this problem if we just switched to the metric system.
I'd love to have met your Uncle Lee - I think the thing he was most known for was inventing Audio-Animatronics, wasn't he?
I've always had a fondness for the Disney of the past - the era of the Nine Old Men and such. Late last year I got to spend some time with Margaret Kerry, a wonderfully sweet little old lady who was the animator's model for Tinker Bell in Disney's "Peter Pan". She knew Disney and Marc Davis very well, and had some really great stories to tell. It was just so cool to be able to talk with someone that actually knew Walt himself. Disney (the company) was totally different back then, and really was less about commercialism and more about art and the engineering needed to effectively tell a great story. They had the attitude that if you did your job properly, the money would take care of itself, and they were largely right. Nowadays you can't do anything at all if it even looks as if it might hurt the quarterly numbers.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
There was a time for a while in the US that everyone and their brother was afraid we'd run out of water, tomorrow (EVERYBODY PANIC). Manufacturers (temporarily) switched production, almost exclusively, to front-load machines to capitalize on that fear. It turns out that the only people afraid enough to actually use the damn things were the people who live in deserts (I'm looking at you southern California). They're the ones that keep foisting abominations like low-flow showerheads on those of us smart enough to live close enough to stable water supplies.
n.b., Just so you know I'm at least half-joking about SoCal, I live in New Orleans, where we occasionally have a little too much water.
I'm not sleuth of disasters, but how about these:
Italian dam causes tidal wave
Chernobyl
Space shuttle disasters (pretty worthless program, costing 145 Billion dollars)
Columbia
Challenger
Chemical explosion in India
Galloping Gertie
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
What, did the Wired editors forget how to convert units, too?!? How can this not be on the list?
of the Martian lander probe. JPL did their calculations in metric - used 9.8 (m/S^2) for 'g', while Lockheed did programmed the computers with 32 for 'g'. The result is that the probe crashed during it attempt to land!
Wow.. so was the saying "as slow as molasses in January" originally sarcastic, a reference to the Boston incident? ;)
I don't hear them complaining, so why should you?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Sweet!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center
The citgroup building in manhattan. It was well desigend to the standard enginnering principles by its architecht/engineer William LeMessurier. Shortly after its construction, he got a call from a student who asked him about a different type of wind shear, and he assured the student the building was bult to withstand all winds up to like 130mph. After a little thought, he ran the numbers again as the student brought up, and realized that a hurricane might take out the building, and cause a domino effect that would take out most of manhatten. This man actually stepped up and told the buildings owners about the problem, and came up with a plan to fix it. This story seriously restored my faith in humanity, and he is one of the great unknown heroes of our age. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut, and no one could have faulted him, he did everything right. But he still stepped up and said "theres a problem with what i did...."
This is one of the best examples of ethics i have ever seen.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Can't fault them though, they *do* live in america. Can't really expect them to know what's going on in the rest of the world, or their own country now can we?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Some pyramids actually collapsed due to structural failure. It's not obvious, but a pyramid is not a stable structure. It's not all vertical load; there's a spreading component as the forces are transmitted down the structure. With no tensile strength between blocks, at some size and angle, a pyramid will push itself apart.
The Pyramid of Maidun collapsed for that reason, and the mess is still there.
No, by far the worst engineering mistake was the f-er who designed my date Mary Swansons impossible-to-remove-in-a-car bra clasps in 1989. I was totally going to score that night but the stupid thing wouldn't come off and killed the moment.
"Nobody can climb a rope. It's physically impossible." -- Principal Skinner
Bhopal was a pretty large engineering snafu I think., But then again - this is wired, titillate and intrigue but don't educate or involve controversy
The article is about construction/design snafus, not operational snafus. Bhopal was a bad operational snafu, but the plant was designed sanely. The problem was that all safety-related features were inoperational due to bad maintenance or shut off on purpose to save money. The engineers who constructed the plant cannot be blamed for that.
The ship sank some 10 to 15 minutes into it's maiden voyage. The exact location was forgotten. It was found as the result of one old fellow who spent years and years looking for it by taking core samples of the bottom of the sound every meter or so. The ship was then dug out of the mud by (now archaic-looking) dive teams, raised and then brought to dry dock where it is today.
IIRC the shipmaster died partway into the construction without a trained or skilled replacement. Unmodified, it would have not been noteworthy and maybe a little under armed. Adding the extra gun deck made the ship too tall and unstable. So to compensate, extra ballast was added, bringing the lowest gun deck about inline with the water.
Before launching, it failed the stability test of the time in which 40 men where to run in unision from one side of the ship to the other 40 times (or something like that). It was launched anyway, sliding nicely into the water, some sails were set and when it rounded the end of the island and caught it first breeze, it tipped and sank.
The sinking roughly co-incided with the end of Sweden as a feared superpower, thought it was only one factor of many.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Somebody tell me why the icon for this is supposedly funny?
A really interesting book about all kinds of issues that must be addressed in construction. It's companion, Why Building Stand Up is just as informative if a bit less sensational. Both by Mario Salvadori and available on Amazon. Brings up a saying I invented (or so I think), "If we built buildings the way we build software, we'd all be living in caves."
What's about Ariane 5 ? http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.ht ml/
The Death Railway may not have been mistakenly engineered in itself but if 116000 people died while building it then it's a safe bet something was less than optimal about its circumstances.
Other than that, those medicine bottle lids that kids aren't supposed to be able to open are the engineering of doom.
Frog blast the vent core.
"The sinking roughly co-incided with the end of Sweden as a feared superpower, thought it was only one factor of many."
Given that the era of Sweden as a major power is usually given as between 1611 och 1718, and that the Vasa sank in 1628, that is hardly true. Agree with the rest of your post though.
This is just some pulled out of the arse list, not the ten worst of all time.
How can any list of engineering disasters omit the Tay Bridge Disaster. Not only was it extremely important in showing structural engineers that wind forces need to be considered but it also had a poem written about it by the Immortal Bard Willian Topaz MacGonagal. Not many other engineering cock-up shave been immortalised by the pen of a genius, unless you count Feynmann's shuttle disaster report.
No but, yeah but, no but...
The overloaded ship ruled the seas for all of a mile before she took on water through her too-low gun ports and promptly capsized.
Wow, that's incorrect. The ship wasn't overloaded and the gun ports weren't too low. The point of gravity was too high by design, causing the ship to tilt wildly even in very modest seas. Yes, it took on water through its gunports and capsized, but it did that because (a) the gunports were open and (b) the ship tilted to one side very badly in a gust, much more than would be expected. The root cause was the high center of gravity, not gunports or overloading
Hi,
I don't really get what you say.
The bridge entered an:
"exponentially increasing vibrational state"
Why would it do this if it wasn't being vibrated at a resonance frequency?
What is negative dampening? I understand SHM and damped SHM, but don't understand how you can get negative dampening.
Thanks
whoa...my distrust in engineers is getting worse... but they didn't even mention the "Tahoma Bridge", when frequency overlapping led to the collapse of a bridge. Check it out here: http://www.thefilmvault.com/disasters/tahoma_bridg e.html
I read the Wikipedia article and found it very interesting:
The vibration had nothing to do with the resonance frequency of the bridge as a structure, but with the fact that it was wind (as opposed to some other form of energy input, e.g. sound) that was exciting the bridge. At a certain wind speed, the bridge enters a positive feedback loop - when the small motion induced by the wind changes the angle of attack in a way that makes the bridge absorb more and more energy from the wind, eventually increasing the amplitude of the oscillation to a point where structural failure occurs.
To make it short: The bridge did not oscillate at one of its resonant frequencies - aerodynamics caused it to vibrate at an entirely different frequency but managed to pump enough mechanical energy into the bridge to break it anyway.
You know, I was going to make a crack about those of us that chose to live near unstable water sources -- New Orleans. "Occasionally" may be a little polite, though. I seem to remember at least one day that I tried to go to work, only finding that part of Earhart was closed off due to flooding in Harahan, backtracked to take Cleary to Earhart only to find that Cleary was closed due to a bridge washing out, etc.
But if you are still there, you're a bigger man (woman? - I don't know) than I am. I plan to stay away for a least a few years more. Of course the lack of a job or home there kind of help my decision somewhat.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
the Kansas City Hyatt walkways weren't a negligent desgin iirc, the problem was in the interpretation of the design. The walkways were suspended by steel rods, which had a nut which supported the Walkway
the design specified that a for each support, a single rod would run vertically down, and each walkway sat on a nut on the rod. The rod was strong enough, each Nut could support a single walkway.
The incorrect interpretation meant that the rod terminated at the first walkway, and a new rod went down to the next level which then terminated, and a third rod then ran to the next walkway down and so on. With 3 walkways suspensed from a nut that was designed to handle the load for 1 walkway it's no surprise it collapsed.
a
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
I don't care who you are, the DC-10 obviously isn't flawed. If it's good enough for the evil lord Xenu, by golly, it's good enough for me.
It's been a long time.
That is machine-specific. Until the thing actually starts letting water into the washing chamber, adding additional laundry should not be a problem.
Also, why is that a problem for washing machines and not really a problem for dishwashers ?
It is impossible to soak clothes overnight.
Duh. Don't houses over there come with more than one sink and/or a bathtub ?
I have learned to hate the "American" cheap-ass toploaders. You only get three temperature settings (Cold, Warm, Hot), and the actual temperature you get depends on what comes out of the hot water faucet
The specs called for two "C" shaped beams to hug a metal rod as so - ]|[
Funny, just a couple of brackets can be the only thing between a wonderful feat of engineering and a witless stunt of stupidity.
There's a lesson to be learnt here, kids. Always keep your brackets nearby.
And a portable microscop to read the tiny text.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Rescuers found it difficult to make their way through the syrup to help the victims.
That's gotta be one of those situations where you don't know whether to laugh or cry.
You end up sobbing with a chuckle.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
How can there be more to go wrong with a front loader that has a direct drive DC motor onto a single drum, with no gravity pressure water seals to deal with? as opposed to a paddle/drum, belt drive and water seal that needs to deal with several inches of pressure head of water.
I beg to differ.. front loaders are less complex unless you can tell me otherwise.
don't really have top loaders in the UK, and anyway, since (in the UK at least) washers are often in the kitchen or a utility room, a top loader also robs you of worktop space.
a
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
Btw, i heard once on the internet that american washing mashines work with cold water. Any truth to that?
Most American washin machines need to be hooked up to cold and hot water faucets, and their temperature settings merely indicate the ratio at which they mix the two inputs, not an actual temperature. So "hot" might be anything from near-boiling to lukewarm.
But a top-loader you can add stuff even *after* it's filled. As for dishwashers, I don't know about yours, but mine doesn't fill up with much water--it doesn't come up to the bottom of the door. So I can add additional stuff in the middle of a cycle anyways. Front-loading washing machines don't do that.
Chris Mattern
...I'd throw a dagger from Illinois to California to castrate William Mulholland.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
Agreed about the engine falling off in Chicago, but I believe the Iowa crash did involve some engineering issues. The design error I have heard about is not that a compressor disk can fail, but that a compressor-disk failure in the center engine can sever all the hydraulic systems, including the nominally-redundant ones, leading to complete loss of control.
Disclaimer; IANAAE (Aeronautical Engineer)
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Building it on a fault line.
Weren't engineering disasters. They were procedural/training/operator headspace disasters. Chernobyl, especially, was an example of people not thinking before acting. The design of the reactor was acceptable, if the operators paid attention and didn't push it beyond its limits. They deliberately pushed it beyond it's limits. Well beyond.
Best Slashdot Co
The DC10 did have some early problems. They were eventually all sorted out and
now the DC10 has one of the BEST safety records of ANY airliner in terms of
flight hours between accidents. The plane's early history though scared off the
flying public so it isn't used anymore in passenger service. But air freight carriers love it. Fedex and UPS are two of the air freight services still using the DC10 as their bread and butter. The pilots like the plane too.
What about the Platypus. Tell me that wasn't the result of someone spilling coffee on the plans and fudging the blurred bits together!
Somewhere in Germany in the late 1800's it came to pass that a large pile of Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer was left out in the rain to dry and harden. A very large pile. Tons.
The townspeople, not knowing what do do with it tried pouring diesel fuel on the pile to soften it, and added dynamite to blast the pile apart.
In the ensuing explosion the town and all witnesses were vaporized. Seriously, no shit.
No one could answer the question of what happend. until about 15 years later when it happened again in Texas.
The grand walkway in the french airport that collapsed in 2004, killing 5 people and costing close to a billion dollars? Sounds like a pretty serious engineering mistake to me. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3739715.stm
I just read the poorly contructed levy system is th emost expensive engineering failure in history.
The way I see it, every story that's on slashdot was / is also on digg. However the stories that are on both sites are really the only ones I'm interested in reading. digg gets flooded with an enormous amount of crap. Not to mention most of the good information comes from reading the comments and we all know how great* the comments are on digg.
* sarcasm
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
occurred in the drum storage area. The fire continued to spread and reached the storage area for the filled aluminum shipping containers. This resulted in an even larger, second major explosion, about four minutes later..."
From the Wikipedia article cited above (emphasis mine).
psshaaa! OSHA smosha!
90 degrees Celsius? How does it heat the water?
Try to spot the one authentic story
is the guy who read the article and corrected the guy who didn't read the article and yet received points from a moderator who didn't read the article and incorrectly criticized for not reading the article the guy who read and linked to the article?
And really, the humor section?
Point taken. But have you ever submitted a story here and gotten to the stage of having to choose a "topic" from the pop-up list, and found that none of the choices apply? I was like, "Well, let's see here....crashes, people dying: not funny. But a molasses tidal wave? Kind of amusing: ok, choose 'Funny'." Can you forgive me?
When I was younger and more foolish, we bought a 1992 Volvo 960, the flagship of the Volvo car line. This had an all new aluminum engine design, and they were pretty piss poor at casting the block. Nearly all the early 92's ended up with cracked blocks between 60-80k miles.
We bought it with nearly 80k miles on it, and it had a cracked block. That was about $4k usd to replace.
Then there was the $600 in parts and labor to replace the dashboard lights, the $1200 muffler replaced just before the entire engine seized (one month after paying it off), and a few more thousands in other repairs.
So, an expensive, poorly designed and manufactured lemon that sunk my finances, the Vasa. I hate Volvo's now.
the Boston Molassacre?
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
They made industrial alchohol out of it, which was used in making gunpowder. See the straigth dope article.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
With this new-fangled thing called electricity. AFAIK natural gas-powered washing machines haven't really taken off.
"Chinatown" was inspired by Mulholland.
The Soviet Union had a good way to celebrate the opening of a new bridge: The engineer/s who designed it stood under the bridge when the first train went over. Not a bad idea in my opinion.
Ignorance is always a recipe for unintended consequences.
a el.html?page=1
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2002/1125bethisr
http://www.enterpriseleadership.org/read/halamka
"On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, the network experienced a major slowdown for three days. The CISCO technical support team found the Layer 2 structure of the network to be unstable and out of specification with 802.1d standards. The management VLAN in some locations had 10 Layer 2 hops from root. The Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) imposes a maximum network diameter default of seven. Thus, two distinct bridges in the network should not be more than seven hops away from one to the other.
A major contributor to this STP issue was the network and Picture Archive Communication System (PACS) network, for sharing high-bandwidth visual files and other clinical data; this was 10 hops away from the closest core network switch, three too many for the spanning tree to handle."
And really, the humor section? I know being killed by a flood of molasses is novel, how is having a walkway full of people falling on your head funny?
People deal with tragedy in different ways. Making light of it is one of the more common. It does not necessarily show disrespect for the dead. Call it laughing in the face of death. In some ways it is empowering: "Haha, fuck you Death, You can take my family, my friends, my whole village, but you can't take my sense of humor!"
Little kids are (mostly) innocent creatures, right? I remember the kids in my school coming up with a whole slew of jokes after Challenger blew up. Remember "Need Another Seven Astronauts?" Or "You feed the dog, I'll feed the fish?" The dead don't care, and the survivors can always use a good laugh.
Fuck you, Death.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So these washer have electric water heaters that are hotter than regular water heaters?
Yes, they do.
Actually, if you look at those things, the real common theme was that they were designed or modified by people who _weren't_ real engineers. E.g.:
- a dam is built by a "self-taught engineer" who can't even get the foundations right
- a ship design is modified by a king who has no flippin' clue about ship design. He demanded changes like cutting extra portholes right above the water line, loading extra guns and other stuff, and so on. The final design was basically the king's, not the design of a real shipwright.
- a huge container for molasses is designed and its building supervised by a beancounter with _no_ engineering background whatsoever, and whose only concern was getting it built quickly and cheaply.
Etc. Sorry, you can't say "never trust the engineers" when, in fact, those mistakes were made by non-engineers.
Want another common theme? How about ignoring testing or warning signs that it's about to fall apart. E.g.:
- when the dam started to crack, the "self-taught engineer" just ignored it
- the molasses container was (A) never tested, e.g., by filling it with water, and (B) when a worker complained that it leaked heavily, the beancounter just covered the problem by having it painted brown.
- the Vasa, as other posters have noted, was in fact tested before being lanched, but noone had the courage to tell the king that his design doesn't work. In effect, again the warning signs existed, but were effectively ignored.
And the third thing is: don't think those are just historical trivia, because the exact same things happen nowadays with software. Everyone loves to spew the "colleges don't teach engineering" or "it's time programmers started acting like engineers", but some of the most catastrophic mistakes come from people who had _neither_ a CS or engineering college, _nor_ reasonable work experience or training to bring them up to par. I'm not even sneering (mainly) at the actual coders, because lot of those mistakes were from some manager or customer demanding/making some catastrophic change or imposing some impossible deadmark or policy. (Remember the Vasa and the king.)
E.g.,
- a financial institution restates its earnings by 1 _billion_ dollars, because some Excel spreadsheet programmed by a beancounter with _zero_ engineering or programming background... guess what? Mis-calculated by a whole billion dollars.
- a radiotherapy machine, using lead blocks to cover the parts of the patient that shouldn't be irradiated, had a problem using more than IIRC 4 lead blocks. So a doctor takes it upon himself to hack it to use non-rectangular blocks to the same end. The result: the program mis-calculates and some people are given a lethal dose of radiation.
And that's just the spectacular stuff. I'm sure almost everyone has their own stories where someone else's intervention had catastrophic results, even if in less spectacular ways.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
My front loader washer (Miele) was bought by my mother over 28 years ago and is still going strong.
The worst part of the top loaders is probably the lack of a temperature control, just mixing hot and cold water of undisclosed temperatures is no good at all.
It is probably due to the shortcomings of the top loader that so many US textiles are marked 'Dry Cleaning Only'.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Do not forget the Challeger Space Shuttle which exploded during launch and the Ford Pinto whose gas tank easily exploded with light impacts.
How fast was the syrup moving?
-- If you're posting to be funny, and your sig is funnier . . . .
No offense, but the chem101 facts have changed. I'll explain...
> 2. If you went back to freshman chemistry, you'd learn that water and oil do not mix.
Gas free water and oil mix very well.
Waters high affinity for oil is a very big problem in the oil industry where oil and water
commonly form a stable solution underground.
> 1. It's actually your great-grandmother's suffering you're reliving. You see,
> the way to wash the sweat and human oils out of clothes was to take the big pot
> and make Clothes Soup over an open fire...you're going to have to use soap...
Just to be pedantic you could probably wash out oil with no soap using boiled water.
Boiling water will partially degas it and increase the waters ability to absorb oils.
This is fairly recent research and has applications in: making water soluble injectables,
food processing, and I have seen research into an air/water separation device intended
for washing machines. An amusing side note, this may mean that the airator on your sink
makes it harder for you to wash your dishes.
Getting back to the topic of engineering disasters... Injecting water into an oil well
could mean unintended problems later when unexpected mixing occures.
Ha! Made that connect didn't I!
Further, yes I do have a monocle and being a monocle bearer I will leave you with an
engineering riddle; about my monocle.
* I have a monocle I made myself
* It is not made of glass or anything clear
* It is not a mirror
* When I wear it, it corrects my vision
* It corrects vision for anyone using it
* It is a safe fairly obvious configuration that is simple to manufacture...
From this figure out how it is made and how it works.
Hints, well you don't need hints do you?
Good luck and enjoy the riddle...
The welded box beam, even when pierced at the welds, (that's what you've ASCII illustrated with " [|] ") is sufficiently strong to support the walkways. The design was correct, even though it would have been difficult to implement. Long threaded rods, suspended from the ceiling superstructure, were to hold up two crossing walkways. The design called for threading a nut (covered, I believe, by a large washer) twenty feet onto the ceiling rods. Instead of that, the design was changed so that two rods pierced the box beams holding the upper (4th floor) walk way. But wait, there's more: It wasn't the double piercing of the beam that caused the collapse. The problem is that the change doubled the load on the upper walkway. Because with the change the lower walkway became a load (e.g. was suspended from) the upper walkway box beams. In the original design, the load of the lower walkway (and the upper walkway) was carried by the long rod. The single rod could carry both loads. But the box beam failed at the attachment point of its hanger nuts. Oh, here's a nice drawing at wikipedia. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/
I've always been told hot for whites, warm for bright colors, and cold for darks. As most of my clothes fall into the dark category, I rarely use hot water for washing. These are the instructions printed on the machine and the detergent. My clothes always come out clean.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Nothing about Chernobyl (fatal design), nothing about earthquake in Turkey (death toll thanks to cheap enginering) and a lot of ...
catastrophes caused by bad engineering in Asia
Here's some extra info about Vasa, to my knowledge the only big failure that has a own museum. The king, Gustav Vasa was such a show off that he wanted not only the most and biggest cannons, but also the most gold on a ship. A small windblow turned it over before it left Stockholm.
p x?path=%2Fhome%2Fvasamuseet%2Fom&layout={C0D465E0- 3110-436A-A0E4-EA5BB84475B8}
http://www.vasamuseet.se/Vasamuseet/Vasamuseet.as
Speaking of lakes and engineering disasters, there's also the Salton Sea. Up until the 20th Century it was known as the Salton Basin or Salton Sink -- a big low-lying area in the middle of the California desert.
In 1901, people dug irrigation canals from the Colorado River. Due to a flood, most of the river gushed through the canals into the basin. By the time they diverted the river back to its own bed, it had created a lake 35 miles long and buried several towns under water.
Things were okay for a while, and it became a resort area. But since there's no outlet, water flows into the lake, evaporates, and leaves behind whatever minerals it brought with it. Much of the influx is runoff from agriculture, so fertilizer is a major pollutant, and the lake is more saline than the ocean. The shores are littered with ghost towns and abandoned motels.
This was probably the worst disaster in the history of the world.
(someone else might also want to talk about the flaws in the New Orleans levy system as well, the report just came out this week).
1. The name of the operation acronymized was "O.I.L." - which became a political problem when considering the credibility gap for the war's justification, and accusations that the "war was about OIL".
2. Many armchair military "experts" - as well as more than a few retired generals, as well as perhaps a few active duty generals (who remained silent for fear of their jobs) believed that in the area of 300,000 to 500,000 troops would be necessary for a successful occupation. The invasion proceeded with less than 150,000 troops, and since that time, troop levels were drawn down as low as 115,000. The results were devastating.
While America's superior military hardware technology made this one of the least lethal and quickest invasions in military history, the lack of planning and troops created a chaotic situation which has resulted in massive looting, armed gangs executing civillians in large numbers, weapons depots like Al Qa Qaa being raided, with hundreds of tons of high explosives falling into the hands of looters, (and from there, probably terrorists, who are now using it to murder civillians and US troops).
3. The civillain policy that went along with the invasion initially involved setting up a viceroy-like regime governed by the Iraqi National Congress, and organization run by Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted embezzler (we're talking $300 million here), and who was since proven to be an Iranian spy, and is alleged to be involved in the deaths of several postwar Iraqi politicians. This plan, along with the complete disenfranchising of any Iraqi that had been involved in the previous Iraqi government (ie. anyone who had any experience or knowledge in how to administer this country and it's government services and infrastructure) resulted in a huge violent backlash among religious extremists, which led to the issuance of an arrest warrant for one of it's leaders, Sadr. His followers then organized into armed gangs, which became a threat, and in order to quell this threat, the US was forced to offer a rival shiite leader some political say - which led to a collapse of the "original plan" - and forced the US to accept free elections (one of Sistani's demands - NOT a part of Bush's original plan). The Bush Administration's rhetoric changed accordingly, and suddenly, the war had a new excuse: democracy promotion.
4. Despite a new constitution being drafted, and elections being held, a new government with any legitimate force has still not been formed, and the country has been de-facto run by the various factions and armed gangs, with dozens of violent deaths occuring every day; groups of 10-40 bodies turning up, day after day, hands bound, showing signs of torture, often from electric drills.
5. While many Americans believed that by taking Saddam Hussein out of power, the country's oil supply would be loosed onto the market, bringing oil prices down, and the profits from the sales paying for the war - in fact, what has happened is Iraq's oil production has pretty much come to a halt due to sabotage and disorganization. Oil prices are now approximately double on the world market, what they were prior to invasion. And now, we're faced with the dilemma, if American troops leave, we may end up with a sectarian massacre. If American troops stay, we will continue to burn money at a rate of approximately $100 Billion a year, and tie up our forces in a foreign land where they will be unavailable for the defense of American interests elsewhere. (like rattling sabres at rogue states like Iran or North Korea as they attempt to perpetrate nuclear extortion).
6. The Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority, which ruled Iraq before the election, lost - yes LOST $9 Billion. Call it theft, call it poor accounting practices, call it the fog of war. Nobody is investigating what happened, or
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
SUV
I don't really think six people dying puts that on the top ten engineering disasters list.
Companies pull shit like this on purpose so that you MUST take the car to the dealer to get it serviced or spend a fortune elsewhere. They could have put that oil filter in a good spot, not have designed that radio that way but that wouldnt bring in the extra business. The big shots at the top want to make quick bucks the ass hole way versus small bucks the good guy way, and thats why they are on the virge of going broke now. Greed is all it boils down to.
Here's one engineering disaster they didn't mention.
The Russian N1 moon rocket. About the time we were preparing to
get Apollo-11 off to the moon the Russians tried to get there. They
didn't have too much luck with the N1 on it's first attempt, the second
stage blew up. So they quickly worked the issues and got TWO N1's ready
for takeoff on two launching pads near each other (BAD MOVE!) They figured
if the first un-maned rocket worked they would risk a crew on the second.
Well on takeoff there was a problem with a fuel pump on one of the first
stage's 36 engines(!). The computer should have shut down the bad engine
and throttled up the rest but instead it shut down ALL of the engines
(except the bad one). The rocket lifted up about 100' off the ground
and then fell back to the pad. It exploded with a force of a small
atomic bomb causing the rocket next door to also blow up, killing
the crew in the block house near the launching pad.
Ever wondered why the Russians never went to the moon?
// Sort one item of laundry.
if (garment.isRed) coldPile.add(garment);
else if (garment.isWifesUnderwear || garment.isBra) delicatePile.add(garment);
else if (garment.isSock || garment.isUnderwear) warmPile.add(garment);
else if (garment.isSweater) delicatePile.add(garment);
else if (garment.isDark) coldPile.add(garment);
else warmPile.add(garment);
how on earth did they manage to clean all that goop up?.. yech...
You can get those for sinks, too, so you don't have to wait for all the cold water to flow through the pipes before you get hot water. They heat the water as it passes through, without a tank.
Oh, the irony of your grammar. :)
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Both of these vehicles suffer from the same exact problem: a "saddle" fuel tank.
Basically, what this means is that the fuel tank sits above and "wraps" slightly around the rear axle of the vehicle. In a rear end collision, the force can cause the axle to push into the tank, rupturing it and spilling fuel, possibly with ignition of the gasoline. In the case of the Pinto, this was also compounded by a fitting on or near the axle (I have heard "bolthead", but I am not sure exactly what it was) putting point pressure on the tank as well, facilitating the rupture. A similar issue might be the case with the Crown Vic, but I don't honestly know.
In the Pinto's case, a part that would likely cost 10 cents could have saved people's lives, but Ford likely figured it was cheaper to deal with the lawsuits than deal with the issue. In the Crown Vic case, however, a Phoenix Police Officer (now a detective) was severely disfigured when his police car was rear-ended during a traffic stop. Many municipalities around the country use Crown Vics with the "Interceptor Package" as police cruisers, and (IIRC) a lawsuit was brought against Ford for the issue by the City of Phoenix. From what I remember, it was settled out of court, with Ford installing racing bladders into the tanks of the Crown Vics used by municipal fleets (or maybe only Police fleets?) - but for the consumer version of the Crown Vic, I am not sure *anything* was done...
BTW - from what I understand, if you can get a Crown Vic with the Interceptor package, it is a pretty fun ride, if you can afford the gas - I have seen such vehicles on the used market, mainly from government auctions...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
should read:
At least this is the code my washer seems to use...
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Well, that measily 15 foot wave of molasses might have caused some chaos in Boston, but recently I watched an episode of Modern Marvels on the Discovery Channel on beer and breweries.
Apparently, a brewery in the UK back in the 1800's or early 1900's had a storage tank burst, sending out a 25 foot wave of beer. 8 people died (you know, if you're gonna go...), several were injured. Then a crowd moved in and started drinking the beer with their cupped hands.
OK, I've heard about that for sinks. I didn't know that it was available for washers.
I can open the door of my front-loading machine until it's filled close to the opening for the door, and that's really all I've ever needed.
Additionally, it features a 'soak' option that increases the duration of any program by about 2 hours.
They most certainly do, but it tends to increase the price. Repair costs can also be quite a bit higher on such a design.
Ignoring the fact that the Yellow River is yellow.
Nearly every building in downtown was flooded. The company my dad worked for was one of the (many) HVAC companies that supplied pumps and temporary HVAC gear during/after the flood. I recall being downtown during the flood, and it was very weird having such a big city downtown area be basically empty of people in the middle of the day.
It was ruddy expensive too, most of the buildings downtown had their AC gear and boilers destroyed by the flood (the boilers were ruined because they were drained, and the buoyancy tore them off their mounts), and the local power substations were in underground vaults (which flooded). As they pumped out the subbasements, they were finding *fish* in them, sucked in from the river.
-- -- The Dragon De Monsyne
"But you have taken it to a whole new level by not reading an article you are telling us about "
*Ahem*. As guygee already pointed out, they were storing the AP in aluminum shipping containers as well as plastic drums and open bins. And not only have I read the WP article, I've read a couple of reports on the PEPCON distaster. This one is from the United States Fire Administration, and covers the fire and emergency response in detail. This one is mainly concerned with how the blast wave and projectiles, and the resulting damage, progressed.
I believe you owe me an apology.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That's awesome. You said exactly what I was thinking. I even took the time to work out all the clauses in your setence to make sure it was right. Thanks for the support! -- Dh
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Geeks are geeks, irrespective of era, I think. If we ever lose that sense of fun, of wonder, if we ever let the accountants rule the creators completely, the belief will stop and nothing will hold back the grey tide.
We have to remember that, to stay alive.
My daughter picked it up I think ... she's an absolutely wild-ass gifted animator plowing through university as if she owns it, and she's on to the physics and the raw humour too -- and she is already way ahead of me in comp as well, even with my 35 years in the industry. When she was tiny, she was fixated on Dumbo and a few other Disney vids -- the ones from the 30's mostly. Early Disney is a core and thread of essential good, and has a very long legacy. When she showed me her first and entirely politically-incorrect Flash animation -- of a space shuttle landing in Cheltenham with trash cans flying everywhere to bouncy music, it all clicked together. She wants to make computer games "that make you miss school and starve" (her quote).
When we were in the early times of computing, everyone followed us around. Now it's the content makers, the artists, who rule, and us computing types are going to be following them around for a while. I think that's good, and about time the pendulum swung around that way again. One gets so tired of commercial drivel. Don't give up hope. And if you do, pretend you haven't. It's the best we can do for them.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
While I cannot comment on the scientific quality of the cited article, I do know that to claim a statement is a lie is to make an accustation of a willful intent to deceive, at least somewhere in the chain of telling and retelling. I find myself doubting this on the part of textbook authors or publishers. And I found no such implication in the article itself - maybe I just missed it.
Also, any claim made in a single paper cannot be considered gospel. Until numerous citations of agreement are published in the scientific literature there is no particular reason to believe or disbelieve the claim - and anonymous posting on slashdot do not, of course, count as citations in the scientific literature.
And, just as those in Mr. Coward's field may very well use the term "lie" differently than the manner in which it is used in the English language as a whole so might engineers consider the terms "resonance" and "vibrational state" to be critically different, while perhaps physicists use "resonance" in a manner that encompasses both terms. I don't know, though I do find myself trying to get my mind around the concept of a vibrational state that is not time dependent.
Criticizing a field outside your own discipline is an activity fraught with peril not the least of which is the differing use of words in different communities. Those who do so over their own signature will generally do so in a spirit of humility, attempting to open a dialog. I think Billah and Scanlan at least approached the proper attitude. Mr. Coward did not even come close.
Just basic science. Give me a break.
Information is not Knowledge
So there were too many nuts involved ? Or too few ? Around here nuts get removed by men in white coats.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Fool. You are tall, Korean is short.
If you had brains, you could hire a short Korean to operate your front-loading washing machine.
No such luck, though.
i belive generally they fill up with water from the supply (both hot and cold connections) and then heat up the last bit to the temperature required (british washing machines pretty much require a dedicated 13A socket giving them 3KW of total power to play with).
iirc generally they will work if you only connect a cold supply but will spend a lot of time heating up to the required temperature.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
... the biggest engineering mistake of all time is ourselves, homo sapiens.
...but you are so close ;) I'm glad you're enjoying the riddle. Just give it 5 seconds more thought and you've got it.
The answer to the riddle is not perverted. No goats.ex links, and no the monocle is not for one eyed willy, sorry to disappoint... It is not made from baby eyes or from cat eyes either, though a cat eye monocle would be cool... ;) Anyway, think plastic, not eyeballs or prophylactics... :P
The worst engineering mistake I have ever seen was at Towson University:
The very high quality ceramic mayonaise and ketchup pump dispensors they use in the cafeteria have tubes that only extend halfway down into the tub. Once the mayo or ketchup level inside reaches the half-way point, you have to manually open up the device and use a spoon to get out your condiment of choice.
This easily trumps all the other so-called "engineering mistakes" in that list.
All I see around here is dumbasses with too much money buying front-load LG and Samsung washing machines. There's your disaster.
Lets see, front loading washers can be used by anyone Top loading washers are difficult or impossible for people in wheelchairs. The percentage of the population in wheelchairs is rising or falling? I believe my point is made.