In addition to Design World’s new Ethical Engineering column, we’re also debuting another column focused on engineering disasters or failures.
Why disasters and why now?
The short (perhaps simplistic) answer is that engineering failures are a part of the engineering process, and so in a sense they are bound to happen. And when they do, they often make news, and not in a good way. Consider, for example, the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and the subsequent environmental and health impacts, or the tragic implosion of the Titan submersible in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Beyond the news aspects of such events is the obvious engineering or technical story of the causes of such failures. And as engineers, we’re interested in learning the how and why of the story so that the profession can learn from such incidents and prevent them from happening in the future.
The Hindenburg begins to fall to the ground after exploding mid-air, May 6, 1937. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The history of engineering and technology has no shortage of disasters. Take building failures as one example. There’s an often-heard expression that says that building codes (or safety regulations in general) are written in blood. The lives lost due to some catastrophic structural failure are honored by having future engineers learn from such tragic mistakes and changing the way we build moving forward, becoming the foundation for future design methods and principles.
Or consider the situation in the 19th century involving the new technology of steam power. In the early years of this new technology, there were quite a few catastrophic failures of steam engines resulting in many deaths and injuries. After careful investigation over many years and many different incidents involving steam boilers in locomotives and steamboats, design improvements were made and safety features added that greatly reduced the incidence of boiler explosions.
This led to some of the first formal design standards for building steam engines that sought to avoid earlier design flaws, making them inherently safer and far less likely to fail in the catastrophic ways that they had before.
As much as we may not like to admit it, failure is an essential part of engineering. Not something to be actively courted, of course — unless one’s job is to do destructive testing. But it is built into the nature of the enterprise itself. (Just think of all the comical black-and-white grainy videos that exist of the many early and not-so-successful attempts at aviation!)
As such, risk is an inherent part of engineering, something that we will never be able to get rid of entirely, only to manage as best we can.
So, as we look at more recent instances of engineering failures and what we can learn from them, we’ll also have the chance to revisit some of the seminal cases in the field, including the familiar ones that most people are familiar with; the famous (or infamous) Ford Pinto case, the Space Shuttle Challenger case, and others.
And as we do, we’ll hope to learn something from them all, and make the engineering discipline, and ourselves, a bit more knowledgeable and better.
Miles Budimir
Senior Editor
Filed Under: Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking, NEWS • PROFILES • EDITORIALS
