The Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper
"But what I found out at that meeting were that all factors of safety were gone."<p>Many catastrophic "accidents", and I use quotes because they could have been averted had people not cut corners w/o knowing the full context.<p><pre><code>  * Chernobyl (after hours test by an untrained crew with an inverted fail safe design)
  * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse (design change in the field, very similar to the citicorp flaw)
  * 3 Mile Island (indicator that triggered on switch rather than valve)
  * Fukashima (cost cutting on seawall and generator snorkels)
  * Ariane-5 (code reuse, dead code)
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If you want to look at good engineering, look at the Brooklyn Bridge[5] and the DC-3[6].<p>Too many people don't design with proper safety factors. You build it, you test it, you test it till it fails and you understand those failures. I would trust another citicorp wouldn't happen because we can do realistic wind model, we can do an earthquake model, an anything model. Maybe we can get to a safety factor of 1 when everything is automated, when everyone has an off-site backup of their own brain but until then. Safety factor 6.<p>[5] <a href="http://www.asce.org/People-and-Projects/Projects/Landmarks/Brooklyn-Bridge/" rel="nofollow">http://www.asce.org/People-and-Projects/Projects/Landmarks/B...</a>
[6] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-3" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-3</a>