Interesting reading about famous engineering failures and what we can learn from them. Ranging from simple errors that were corrected all the way to major mistakes that should have been caught.
On 27 March 1980, the offshore oil platform Alexander Kielland was, as a floating crew accommodation, supporting drilling operations by the Edda 2/C in the North Atlantic. There were 212 off-duty oil platform workers aboard that evening ...
Located about 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland, the Piper Oil Field was one of the first deepwater oil reservoirs to be exploited in the North Sea. The surprisingly productive oil field contributed significantly to the economy of the United Kingdom by ...
In the 1970s, power companies began building many new coal-fired electrical power plants in the Ohio Valley to feed the growing industry in that region. These power plants were close to coal mines, so the electricity they generated was less expensive than nuclear or hydroelectric ...
One night in September 1959, a Lockheed Electra L-188A turboprop aircraft with 28 passengers and 6 crew apparently disintegrated mid-flight over Buffalo, Texas. The Electra was new at the time, the first large turboprop airliner built by a United States aircraft company ...
It should have been a day of routine maintenance on November 9, 2010 at the DuPont plant in North Tonawanda, New York. Tank 1, which normally contained 10,000-gallons of polyvinyl fluoride (PVF), a slurry used in manufactured countertops, had been cleaned and inspected in preparation for repairs ...
In 1981, the shuttle Columbia became the first to successfully reach space. From 1981 to 2003, Columbia carried dozens of astronauts on missions, spending a total of 300 days, 17 hours, 40 minutes, and 22 seconds in space. Columbia’s last flight was STS-107, a 16-day research mission ...
Just before midnight on a cool, moonless night in March 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending 13 billion gallons of water in the form of a ten-story high torrent crashing along the Santa Clara riverbed towards the ocean ...
On the days preceding February 26, 1972, Buffalo mining officials kept an eye on a local coal refuse dam in Logan County, West Virginia, as heavy rain continuously fell. The company measured water levels ...
The Vasa was a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship sank after only sailing roughly 1,400 yards into its maiden voyage on August 10, 1628. Now, resurrected from the sea, the Vasa represents a widely-recognized symbol of the Swedish “great power period.”
On October 17, 1989, Ruth Anne Liu-Johnston left her office in San Francisco and traveled toward downtown Oakland. On her way, she drove across the Bay Bridge and took the I-880 connector. As she drove, she noticed her speedometer ...
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