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What are some engineering blunders?
Answer 1 There probably has been thousands, but the most interesting one of which I am aware is the collapse of the "Tacoma Narrows Bridge" [nicknamed "Gallopin…g Gerty"]. The original, and the replacement bridges are located just west of Tacoma, Washington state. The design engineers failed to take into account the extereme winds that sometimes blew up or down the narrow gorge which the bridge spanned. The first bridge was completed and put into use a couple of years before World War II, and collapsed shortly before the beginning of the war. Due to war priorities, the replacment bridge was not intalled until after the war. The cause of the failure was due to the use of solid support girders [possibly 20 to thirty feet from top to bottom] which were large enough to act as a sail, absorbing energy from the strong wind, causing the bridge to at first ocillate, then with continued wind energy input, to pitch and "buck," which eventually caused metal fatigue resulting in fractures which finally caused parts of the bridge to disintegrate and fall into the water below. There was black and white motion pictures made of the bucking and the final collapse, which have been shown many times in seminars, and on television programs such as the History Channel, and I think I also saw it on the Learning Channel once. Another more recent example would be the Campos Novos Dam GIANT cracks have opened in one of the world's tallest dams, just months after completion. The cracks appeared after a tunnel collapsed on 20 June 2006 beneath the 200-metre-high Campos Novos dam in southern Brazil, and the reservoir rapidly emptied. At one point, 4000 cubic metres of water (more than enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool) were rushing downstream every second towards a second dam on the river Canoas. (MORE)
