Engineering is an essential part of the modern world - we wouldn't have things like roads without it - but it can cause dangerous situations when things go wrong. This series takes a look at what ...

The marvels of engineering far outweigh the failures/disasters. These failures and/or disasters result when engineers and designers push boundaries by building taller buildings, longer bridges, or ...

Eighty-six years after America's worst civil engineering disaster, the lessons appear painfully obvious. Engineers now know that each big project has its own set of unique challenges; there's no ...

Engineering is not often billed as an adrenaline infused profession. Indeed, introducing yourself as an engineer at a party likely won’t earn you the admiring ooh’s and ahh’s that, say, a fireman, or ...

The St. Francis Dam Disaster: To meet the needs of a rapidly expanding Los Angeles in the mid-1920s, the city hired William Mulholland to design and build a dam along the L.A. Aqueduct.

More than 35 years later, the post-mortem on one of the country's worst engineering disasters appears to be simple. A contractor asked for a change in an original design. The change was approved by ...

The tailings storage facility (TSF) failures at Mount Polley in Canada and at San Marco and Brumadinho – both in Brazil – have altered how tailings engineering, construction and operations ...

So too, professional engineering has produced a subspecialty that investigates disasters. One of the biggest names in the business is Exponent, a consulting company based in Menlo Park, Calif.