APGA has advertised for our next technical webinar, via an email sent today (Monday 16 May).

The webinar will be on June 15, 2022, at 12:30pm AEST presented by Ted Metcalfe.

Get on over there and sign up via the APGA events website.

https://www.apga.org.au/events/technical-webinar-failure-normal

The title is: “Failure is Normal”.

This is a concept that might be hard to agree with. Especially since engineers are generally tasked with preventing failure.

What we’re trying to address here is the idea that engineers should consider failure is ‘normal’, so that then we do everything we can to prevent it.

The email sent by APGA on Monday 16 May included dates for the bridge failures which weren’t quite correct. (“the Quebec Bridge in 1915 and the West Gate Bridge the late 1960s“).

Mea culpa, the ad copy I sent was an incoherent hybridised version of the dates … which was just confusing, for those paying attention.

Here’s the real story:

• The Quebec Bridge actually failed twice during construction, first in 1907… and then again in 1916 when they were trying to rebuild it!
• The West Gate Bridge was of the innovative box girder design, and in the time period 1969 to 1973, there were at least four failures of box girder bridges during construction around the world.  The design was so innovative that the bridges were failing faster than the design engineers could improve the design!

Tune in on June 15 to learn more about why building bridges is a challenge and what lessons we can still learn today from those events. And, how the failure themes on these bridges might apply to pipeline engineering, or, just being a conscientious professional engineer in whatever work you are doing.