Following up on yesterday’s following up on Pat’s discussion of distress versus failure, I want to give set of examples of similar-type signs of distress. As is probably obvious from the picture above, they’re all variations on sagging. Let’s start with the picture above, in which the federal Farm Security Administration was warning that all …
Pat Sparks – a ridiculously good engineer and a friend of OSE – wrote a short twitter thread on Saturday that is worth reading. Pat is generally a man of fewer words than I am, which is a fancy way of saying he gets to the point faster. In any case, I want to expand …
There is only one item in the index to the Historic American Building Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record listed as “dragons.” It’s this cast-iron fence at 1000 North Dearborn Street in Chicago, described as “late nineteenth century.” It is, in my opinion, a beauty. It’s also tiny – the graphic ruler tied to …
I’ve talked about this before, but time to bring it up again. Engineering is not science or applied science. There are, in my opinion, two main areas where engineering differs from those two fields: the idea of design, and the importance of empirical fact. The picture above is an excellent example of why empirical fact …
That’s the 1916 Murtaugh Bridge over the Snake River, near Murtaugh, Idaho. It was recored by HAER in 1980 and demolished three years later. The two main spans were 102 feet long and 16 feet wide; if it were two lanes wide instead of one, it might have survived longer. Or maybe not. The HAER …
