Posted on 06/11/2006 9:53:40 PM PDT by neverdem
IN ancient Babylon, they knew from accountability. Under the Code of Hammurabi, "If a builder build a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death." What's more, "If it kill the son of the owner, the son of that builder shall be put to death."
Engineers these days don't have that worry. Mistakes may carry legal penalties and a measure of shame. The people who die are those who depend on the engineers' work.
Nearly 1,600 people died in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed. A June 1 report from investigators working for the Army Corps of Engineers concluded that flaws in the design, building and maintenance of the New Orleans hurricane protection system — the levees, floodwalls, pumps and gates — played a big role in putting 80 percent of the city under water.
Critics of the corps had argued for months that mistakes made the toll worse than it might have been, and they've alleged that there were more flaws in the system than the corps' report conceded. But with the admission by the corps, the tragedy of Katrina moved officially from the exclusive realm of natural disasters to that of disasters caused, in part, by man. John Barry, author of "Rising Tide," about the Mississippi floods of 1927, called the Katrina flooding "by a large margin, the worst engineering mistake in the history of civilization."
Thus do the dirt, concrete and steel of New Orleans take their place on the dishonor roll of engineering disasters. The list is long, and includes the failure of the Teton Dam in Idaho in 1976, which killed 11 people and caused an estimated $1 billion in...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That one wasn't the fault of the engineer. The contractor made a change to the design of the sky bridge, which made it a lot easier to build, but much less capable of bearing weight.
"Then some damn fool finds a way to break it and gets a lawyer to sue."
Yup, not an ordinary fool, but a damn fool. Hence the expression "you can make it fool proof, but you can't make it damn fool proof."
That was one point of the Hammurabi code: if your building fell down, you would be buried in the rubble. But the other key to the Hammurabi code was that builders were given authority as well as responsibility. Instead of having to build according to tradition, they were given the right to build things right -- as they saw it.
Make it fool proof and in walks in an idiot.
I thought the levees failed because George Bush et al blew 'em up?
Journalists and lay people have a very poor understanding of risk and risk management. Engineers can build to any safety standard deemed desirable, but then society might not be able to afford it.
Doctors might be able to spend millions of dollars to keep one person alive with extraordinary care, but can't afford to do that for everyone. Engineers face the same dilemma every day. They can't afford to build everything "bullet proof" so someone has to decide how resources are allocated. Usually that someone is a politician holding purse strings who has no way to assess risk/benefit of most expenditures and therefore responds to political pressure from special interests.
Any idiot (yes, I include lawyers and journalists here) can can come in after something fails and assess blame. The hard part is looking at something BEFORE it fails and deciding if it needs to be fixed and how much the fix is worth.
The very best consulting engineers in the world make about $200/hour. You can go through the phone book in any Podunk town and find dozens of divorce lawyers who make two to three times that much. What does this say about our society? You want to come down hard on engineers? Prepare to get in line when you want a seismic upgrade on your apartment building, because bright people can always find a less risky and more lucrative way to make a living.
...not to mention beady-eyed contractors cutting corners when no one's watching...
likewise for Roman bridges as the army marched across
"Well said. A bit of engineer bashing going on here. What isn't said is that in the above mentioned examples it was likely a pointy headed manager that overrode the engineer's more conservative approach."
I agree with everything you posted except "pointy head manager."
Not pointy head manager. Pointy head politician.
Katrina was not a cat 5 when she made landfall.
One thing this article fails to address is the political corruption withing NO and the political pressure place on the CORP by the NO folks to not make waves.
Bump for later.
No, zoning board mistake.
That walkway at the Kansas City Hyatt was actually designed properly. The on-site construction manager modified the original design because one of the components used to support the walkway was very difficult to find and would have had to be custom-made.
Relatively speaking, a minor amount.
Most of the news portals are so graphic intensive anymore that it can (quite literally, I'm not kidding) take several minutes to download a story.
The beauty of the printer friendly version is that it has few, if any, graphics and downloads very quickly.
A pet peeve: news organizations that take a story and spread it over several pages so they can torture you with a new set of graphical ads on each page. Grrr!
The local newspaper recently redid their web site. There are now so many graphics and ads in Flash movie format that the site has become unusable for me. It takes, again, I'm not kidding, over FIVE minutes for the home page to load. And I have a "fast" dialup connection of 50.2 Kbps.
Sorry for the rant. Thanks for asking about the pix.
Take a look at the second photo in #1. (The water is draining back into the canal.) That levee wall also wasn't designed to take being rammed by the barge at upper right (now resting in a residential area -- outside the canal...)
"Is it possible that the engineering mistake was to choose to build a city below sea level? "
The Dutch seem to do ok.
"I can give it to you fast, cheap, or good. You pick two of the three."
In other words, real-world engineering is a matter of trade-offs. As a user, I'm willing to trade off "cost" to get it "fast" and "good". A manager and/or politician, however, may choose to trade off "good" to get it "fast" and "cheap".
As long as managers and/or politicians with little or no engineering knowledge control the purse-strings, there is a risk you will see shoddy engineering fielded. Remember the Pinto? Goldin's "Faster, Better, Cheaper" plan at NASA?
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