Trigger warning: The blog post below includes discussion of death in building failures.
Definitions of structural engineering tend to be positive, as they should be. Safely and economically designing structures…that sort of thing. Engineers are, amazingly enough, human and prefer to think about success rather than failures. I’ve been working on a paper for the upcoming construction history congress, and it’s largely about failure. It’s actually about the birth of the American version of forensic engineering, but there’s no way to talk about that without talking about failures and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of examples. Some of the ones I’ve used in the paper are reasonably well-known today, like the 1904 fire that obliterated downtown Baltimore. Some are not, like the horrific Ninth Ward School fire in New York. Every one that I discuss in the paper includes people killed by fire or by building collapse; the St. Louis tornado killed hundreds.
Obviously I mean no disrespect in dredging up events that caused so much misery. Engineers learn from failure, and the growth of forensic engineering has been a part of that for well over a century. No matter how respectfully a tragedy is discussed, it is still a tragedy; in all of these cases it is a tragedy for people not close to me. This issue is not unique to engineering, but is roughly equivalent to the discussions that take place among medical professionals or the research and publications of many historians.
The medical analogy is probably the best because of the issue of failure. Doctors know that some patients will die no matter how well the people and technology of medicine perform, but their job is to try to prevent that from happening as best they can. Similarly, there is no realistic way to prevent all deaths from fire and building collapse, but it is our job as engineers to try. We succeed most of the time – indeed, we have a far better success rate than doctors because we are dealing with structures far less complex than the human body – so it is unnerving when we fail. Most engineers I know have the occasional moment away from work when we suddenly wonder if we made a mistake on some project. Those moments are easily addressed by checking on the projects when we get back to the office. Reading article after article about old failures has the effect with me of triggering that baseless worry.
The photo above shows two skyscrapers, built with the latest in steel-frame technology, during the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. Those buildings survived, damaged, while many of the older buildings around them burned. The promise of fireproof construction proved, yet again, to be false, but the newer buildings survived better than the old ones did and so reduced the amount of time needed to get things functioning again. This fire was one of the last leading up to the Triangle Fire which, in killing 146 people while the building was hardly damaged, showed clearly that the new technology worked up to a point. It turned out that “fireproof” buildings were great at not burning themselves but that didn’t necessarily mean the people inside were safe.
In short, the word “failure” is both an accurate technical description of the topic and a euphemism to hide the fact that building failure means people’s injury and death. In a technical discussion, it’s the right word to use. In ordinary conversation, it’s a poor shield to hide behind to escape the consequences of bad engineering.
Finally, you can call it squeamishness or propriety, but I looked at a lot of photos before choosing the one above. The earthquake killed a lot of people but it is unlikely that the photo above captured any of the deaths, as it took some time for the fires to get to be that bad in the downtown area and people had evacuated.
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