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Recommended Reading: Henry Petroski

While the people of Minnesota are still pulling bodies from the wreckage of the I-35 bridge, I feel its inappropriate to comment much about the incident, and I am particularly not interested in assigning blame at this time. There will be plenty of time for that later, for now my advice is to stay out of the way, help who you can and for Gods sake don't dwell on it.

For those of you who can't understand how such a thing could possibly happen, I can recommend some reading on the subject of failure and its role in design.

engineer.jpg
Click image to peek inside...


Henry Petroski - To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

The book recounts several large scale engineering failures and how many of them were caused by simple, small never before seen and often overlooked errors. I don't know what caused this event and I don't think anyone does, but I suspect that we may be looking at something that will eventually end up in the second edition of Mr. Petroskis book.

I highly recommend any of Mr. Petroskis books. They all cause a great deal of thinking after they have been read.

( Full Disclosure: I am a software engineer by trade, but this book has been in my recommended reading list for years. The lessons learned in this book apply to my industry as well as those who make cars,airplanes and yes, bridges.)

Posted @ August 03, 2007 12:15 AM | Book Reviews

Comments

The picture above on your next post Frank, with your beautiful Sea Kayak perfectly balanced by the intelligent placement of the 'cargo', brought to mind that due to construction, only one side of the bridge was carrying traffic.....Hmmm.

Posted by: Blogengeezer at August 6, 2007 07:42 PM

I'm voting for sympathetic wave form vibrations from the jackhammers, coupled with a design flaw in the bridge that wont be discovered for another year, much like the Kansas City walkway disaster.

Posted by: frank martin at August 6, 2007 09:27 PM