Forensic Engineering
An explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery illustrates how an organisation’s structure can undermine the effective management of process safety risk. The Incident On 23 March 2005, a distillation column at BP’s Texas City refinery was overfilled, causing hydrocarbons to escape and subsequently ignite, resulting in an explosion. 15 people were killed and 180 injured. [ ]
If you re a board director who relies solely on the preferred safety metrics of ESG rating agencies, you could be blind to your fatal and catastrophic risks. On 20 April 2010, while BP executives were onboard celebrating its impressive safety record, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had a blowout. Eleven people died and the incident [ ]
Over the last five parts of our Miami Bridge collapse series, we’ve explored the events surrounding the failure of the Florida International University (FIU) bridge on 15 March 2018. In this part of the series, we’ll try to make sense of this tragedy, not only from a technical perspective, but also from the perspective of [ ]
In Part 4 of our Miami Bridge collapse series we discussed how bridge design is, simplistically speaking, a process of ensuring that the ‘actions’, e.g., forces, in each member or connection of a structure are lower than their capacity to resist those actions. We also learned about the Member 11 to 12 deck joint, the [ ]
We ended Part 3 of our Miami Bridge failure series with a quote from Bruce Landsberg of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB): “A bridge-building disaster should be incomprehensible in today’s technical world. We have been building bridges in this country for over two hundred years, and long before that in other parts of the [ ]
As part of the Brady Review into fatalities in the mining and quarrying industry, we examined the causes of Serious Accidents. These types of accidents have a specific definition in Queensland they re accidents that either result in a fatality or result in a person being admitted to hospital as an in-patient for treatment of [ ]
The failure during construction of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, Australia in 1970 was one of world’s worst bridge collapses. Thirty five people died and, as with most failures, a creeping barrage of poor decision making dominated events. Error begat error … and the events which led to the disaster moved with the inevitability [ ]
A curious paradox lies at the heart of trying to understand why the Miami bridge collapsed. The more details you learn of what happened, the harder it is to understand why it happened. If this were a movie you’d say it was unrealistic, you’d say engineers would never behave so nonchalantly in the face of [ ]
In Part 1 of our Miami Bridge failure series we discussed how re-tensioning Member 11, undertaken to close cracks in the concrete, led to the bridge’s sudden collapse. But while this collapse was sudden, warning signs of trouble were evident in the structure for weeks before the failure. In this article we’ll examine these signs. We’ll explore [ ]
In the early afternoon of 15 March 2018, a partially constructed pedestrian bridge at the Florida International University collapsed. It fell 5.6 m to the highway below and crushed or partially crushed 8 vehicles. Five vehicle occupants died, as well as one worker who was on the bridge at the time of the failure. In October [ ]