Been watching a lot of disaster shows lately, specifically engineering disasters. Partly it's the morbid fascination with destruction, but another big part of it is the problem-solving that goes into a) figuring out what went wrong, & b) figuring out how to prevent it from happening again.
Every single time, a failure is down to *multiple* factors: a series of failures that all manage to align when unforeseen circumstances make failure not just a possibility, but an inevitability. Factors include human negligence or ignorance, lack of training/education, under-designing, building with materials inadequate for the job (either from cutting costs or because they don't know yet that the materials aren't enough)...
Not every engineering failure ends in deaths, but plenty do; and even when there aren't deaths, there are often serious injuries, and of course the destruction of materials, structures, and building equipment (like cranes or tugboats or barges, etc.). Hence the saying about policy being written in blood: all too often, people have to die before something is made truly safe.
And when something fails, it isn't always down to human error: sometimes it really is that the humans who built something *just didn't know* that the materials weren't suited to the environment, or that a sexy new design wasn't going to cut it at a particular location.
Or, rather, it isn't down to human *negligence* or carelessness. Sometimes it is, definitely. A lot of times, it isn't. And it's interesting to me to see how often the solution to an engineering problem is to *over*-engineer the new structure. Like, figure out how tough the environment will be on the structure, then make it 5x or 10x stronger than it needs to be.
I work for a hospital & we go over safety procedures again & again & again, because engineering failures happen for the same reasons why healthcare failures happen: multiple points of failure all add up until something collapses.
This is a big deal. It's an even bigger deal if it impacts a patient. This is why medical facilities of all kinds are regulated up the wazoo: to try to prevent and solve problems.
@Impious_Jade Sure. But most of the time it's the Morton Thiacol senior management saying " I don't want to hear another word about gaskets and temperatures, now back to work"!
@MidnightRider LOLSOB yeah unfortunately, that happens way too often. They definitely had go fever for that one.
@Impious_Jade Caved into public and political pressure instead of having the fortitude to say "the lives of the Astronauts are the first priority, we'll launch when it's safe".
@MidnightRider Definitely. My heart aches for Allan McDonald, who tried so damn hard to delay the launch and couldn't.
@Impious_Jade Yeah I know a guy whose job it was to identify manufacturing product flaws in the imaging department, He found a bad one and the company got mad at him for finding it. Oh wait that was me.
@Impious_Jade It's all numbers. We owned 95% of that segment. We had no solution at first so we kept a lid on it. I'm sure our lawyers said "screw it, the money we make is so huge we can handle a few lawsuits". And that children is the day I lost my faith in my company.
...design ideas that seem good at the time, but then environmental pressures prove more than the design itself can handle, changes made to a structure while it's under construction that aren't properly documented... lots of reasons, really. And of course, every safety policy is written in blood.