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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."
I don't consider disasters as consequences of poor engineering to be especially funny.
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They forgot the most important one, the one that's screwed the most people by far.
Windows
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.
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.
>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.
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.
"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. "
not an engineering mistake. The plitical issues surrinding the levees manifiested themselves as an enginer mistake.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
"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."
I guess that was a self-fulfilling prophesy, huh?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
As I recall a junior engineer approved the change without consulting with more experienced engineers.
How'd you like to be that guy.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
As both an engineer AND someone who does lots of contracting and construction, I'll agree that it happens. Not always, but you're right- architects usually are very egotistical jerks, we engineers can be narrow-minded, and we builders just want to get the thing built, and sometimes just have no clue about problems like the Hyatt. I would have never felt good about that construction detail (see the www.engineering.com pics linked elsewhere here.)
I'll also add that most construction workers and contractors are more "street-wise", savvy people, and are more tuned into their perception of non-verbal communications. Frequently we engineers get them annoyed because we're simply completely absorbed in something and they (the contractors) think we're snobs, have bad attitudes, etc. (I get to observe it from both sides!)
Also, people seem to HATE delays, regardless of the risk. Did we forget to mention the launch of the ill-fated Challenger, despite the launch-delay pleas of the engineers?
We need to mod this up to a 6. I also studied this disaster in school, but this simple paragraph does a much better, simpler job of explaining the cause than any other I've heard.
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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.
The design itself was flawed. Not structurally, but there was almost no way to actually build the thing as designed -- with a threaded section (for the support nut) in the middle of a 30(?) foot shaft. (Think about it -- for that to work, the threads have to be wider than the shaft.) Petroski discusses this (along with the rest of the disaster) in his book "To Engineer Is Human".
If you're going to design something that's hard to make -- and thus tempt the builders to take shortcuts -- you'd better darn well spell out in detail exactly the steps to take to fabricate it.
-- Alastair
An old Boeing manager once explained to me how some of Boeings design rules of thumb came about.
During WW-II, when Boeing was building bombers, they did a thorough analysis of where the flak damage was on the bombers that made it back after a mission. Then they redesigned or beefed up the parts where there was no damage -- on the principle that aircraft that had taken flak in those places didn't make it back.
They also did things like use four hydraulic lines (routed separately) where the DC-10 used three.
-- Alastair