Another Engineering Disaster
Added 2022-12-18 18:11:36 +0000 UTCYou may have heard about this, but it always amazes me when a shocking disaster like this one in hindsight seems to be just a disaster waiting to happen.
Comments
I seen the aquarium years ago and i though exactly what you thought, a disaster waiting to happen. We have many around.
Filipe Gomes ( CT9ABQ - M0IVC)
2022-12-19 18:53:06 +0000 UTCDam dont they think anymore ,Gee jim that sucks
William Nimmo
2022-12-19 02:48:05 +0000 UTCLooks like the DC-10 version of an aquarium design. There will no doubt be an intense investigation in which they will find a "smoking gun" email from some low-level engineer who tried his best to persuade management to contact the contractor and stop the design/build. Fortunately, no lives were lost. Still, someone will be held accountable for the property damage. I think you were referring to the Hyatt Regency walkway disaster in which three walkways pancaked on top of each other during a big dance event in 1981. The original design was terrible, the on-the-spot redesign was just beyond negligent. The results were horrific. Blame went everywhere from city officials who gave the "ok" to the redesign, to the contractor who built it, to the architect firms that initially designed it, whatever... a lot of heads rolled. They obviously redesigned the the walkways with pillars so thick that it looks like you could lay railroad tracks over the walkways and drive freight trains over them. This is like the engineer at General Dynamics who pleaded with his superiors to change the cabin floor/cargo door design because it was a mathematical certainty that after so many hours a catastrophic failure would be inevitable. A year after he tried to raise the alarm, a Turkish Air DC-10 crashed outside of Paris with the exact failure mode the engineer feared inevitable. 346 people died needlessly. They found that memo in 1974 after physically going through thousands of documents between subcontractors and McDonnell Douglas. (No easy feat as there was no email at the time) Due to some contract dispute, the subcontractor warning memo was never delivered to McDonnell Douglas. But they knew the cargo door was seriously flawed already because one opened up in flight in 1972 and they barely made it back to the airport. A "handshake deal" was made with the FAA that McDonnell Douglas would fix the flawed cargo door design quietly and allow the production line to go on uninterrupted. Plenty of heads rolled for that disaster. We never learn as the 737-MAX MCAS disaster showed us. If humans designs it, there is always some chance of a mistake. Greed and negligence. Again, it's a true Christmas gift that the aquarium disaster did not kill anyone.
Matt Wietlispach
2022-12-19 01:02:58 +0000 UTCAt the very least - I mean.... what were they thinking?
Fran Blanche
2022-12-18 18:50:46 +0000 UTCDouble wall and/or a big ol' tray at the bottom that can contain the contents. As is done for above-ground tanks containing pollutants.
Steve
2022-12-18 18:25:48 +0000 UTC
