Engineering Failures and What We Have Learned from Them

Engineering is the only profession that names its failures after the places where they happened. Doctors have "complications". Economists have "corrections". Engineers have Tacoma Narrows, Chernobyl, Challenger, the Hyatt Regency walkway. There is nowhere to hide when your mistake is 300 metres long and visible from the highway. That brutal public accountability produced something unusual - a body…