Cruel Engineering

Bridges collapse sooner or later, but better later, or never. The prime cause is always structural, whether hit by a bomb, a ship out of control, the wind, an exploding truck or just by millions of vehicles running on them every year. Some element of the structure was not strong enough for the load applied, and it yields.

The effect of such prime cause is certainly loss of assets, unfortunately too often loss of lives and long term disruption of other lives.

But the real causes are to be found upstream in the process that created that collapsed bridge.

Those involve first the construction companies, that may not have properly executed their job, saved on materials quality or amounts, or not properly surveyed the location underestimating geological or other environmental problems. But construction companies are mere executors; they should just follow the designs instructions and specifications.

Moving upstream there are the engineers, designers and architects who have made decisions between possible competing solutions, shapes, technologies and may have overlooked some aspects of the problem to favor a particular design for imponderable reasons or because pressed by budgetary constraints of finances and time. Not always, but often, the engineers have not enough knowledge of the construction difficulties, little experience on the field and a rather theoretically oriented mind; the architects may be concerned with aesthetic trends, searching for slender and beautiful forms rather than solidity and practical execution.

Further up there are the public servants planning for roads and cities, dealing mostly with financial budgets, always too tight, and with urbanization targets, always too challenging as well as environmental constraints. Not always, but possibly often, such administrators have very little engineering knowledge, only few of them having practiced the profession themselves before joining the government offices and are usually concerned by short term performance indicators rather than the drafting of strict and practical specifications, not to mention their monitoring during execution.

Above engineers and administrators, sits, literally, the politician, placed in office to ensure the good of the people and not only his or her electors but all of them. Unfortunately the politician is, often, but not always, in charge for such a short time that the quick and much advertised opening of a brilliant engineering masterpiece for the town is the best reward and assurance for a re-election, which is all that counts.

But truly, above all of them, are the people, or they should be.

And the people know nothing.

They do not understand civil engineering, let alone the Laws of Newton or Entropy who dictate when and how the bridge will collapse; they have no idea about pre-stressed reinforced concrete tensioning and mixing methods; they do not know how many architectural and structural options are available to choose from; they are not part of planning and budgeting process and most of all, they do not know the real agenda of the politicians.

But they can vote for them, and with a bit of luck find the one who cares to select good administrators, capable of writing good project requirements and of monitoring the design and execution by the capable and responsible architects, engineers and constructors they have seriously awarded the job. Only, this happens in the ideal situation, rarely in reality.

The norm is that at every stage from the people up to the politician and down again to the executors, there are so many steps of inefficiency and ignorance that it seems a miracle things really work.

But this is life in a society, we have to live with it, there seems to be no better way… as long as we can see bridges go down, hopefully with no people over and below them, at least we can measure the failures and correct them.

The real worry is about the mistakes we will never see, or we can see only after a long but inexorable and irreversible process.

The worrying mistakes are in the management of environment, social relations, choices of urbanization, and subsidies on wrong technologies or initiatives, weak or wrong regulations that impact the lives of everybody from schools to health, to culture in general.

There are no big bridges to collapse in the thousands of small decisions that shape society every day, so nobody can see cumulative effects acting in an instant with large emotional impact.

Most mistakes in human society are subtle and will never be noticed, not like Engineering which is under the eyes of everybody, that is why Engineering is Cruel; it mostly shows you her few failures with a thundering bang.

Related posts:

How testosterone affects women's health and the differences between men and women.

Last week I had the opportunity to give my lecture on the topic “Success culture and visionary leadership” at the graduation ceremony of the ZfU Business School (Thalwil, Switzerland). The audience…

These past weeks have been quite exciting for me with regards to my internship, as I have been able to make good progress with my project work on Kubernetes. After gathering all resources and…