Here are some of the biggest engineering mistakes in history!
8 - Avenida Treze de Maio, Brazil On January 26, 2012, a 20-story building in
Rio de Janeiro spontaneously collapsed.
The gigantic high-rise crashed into another ten-story building as well as a third smaller
building, reducing all three buildings to one huge pile of rubble!
The impact sent an enormous wave of dust through the streets of Cinelandia square
If the disaster had occurred just a few hours earlier, it would have been much worse!
Fortunately, the district, home to many office buildings and Brazil’s famous Municipal
Theater, was pretty desolate due to the late hour of the collapse.
Authorities suggested that illegal construction work had weakened the 20-story building and
caused it to fragment, which triggered a chain reaction and brought down the two smaller
buildings.
This catastrophe led Brazilian authorities to call for reforms for stricter building
and renovation regulations.
7 - Hotel New World, Singapore On March 15, 1986, all six stories of Hotel
New World collapsed in less than 60 seconds!
The building housed a hotel, a bank and a nightclub, all of which disintegrated into
piles of rock and twisted metal.
It was the worst disaster Singapore had experienced since the 1940s, and it shocked the nation.
Singapore’s newly formed Civil Defense Force launched rescue and recovery efforts immediately,
and continued for seven days.
Engineers and other experts from around the world were called in to assist the delicate
rescue operation.
At first, they merely removed beams and other remains from the top and sides of the ruins,
but not many bodies were recovered.
On the second day, assisted by foreign experts who were in Singapore to build a mass transit
system, rescuers began to tunnel into the rubble.
Sound-detection equipment was used to help locate the 17 lucky survivors.
After intensive research, investigators discovered a terrible error in the original design of
the building.
The structural engineer had completely left out the building’s “dead load” during
the design process.
This is the weight of the building itself.
As a result, it wasn’t strong enough to hold itself up!
Tragically, Hotel New World was doomed from the beginning.
6.
Skyline Plaza, USA On March 2, 1973, tragedy struck the Skyline
Plaza complex in Virginia.
One of the complex’s towering apartment buildings collapsed, leaving a huge eerie
cloud of dust and debris where it once stood.
Luckily construction hadn’t even been completed at the time of the disaster.
The building wasn’t due to open until August.
Although there actually wasn’t a flaw in the design per se, the forms supporting the
concrete columns on the 22nd floor were prematurely removed.
The cement hadn’t hardened completely yet and couldn’t bear the weight of the 24th
floor!
The failure of these columns put an increased amount of pressure on the rest of the columns
on the 23rd floor until the entire floor buckled and slammed down onto the floor below.
The building hadn’t been engineered to withstand such a huge increased load, and the tremendous
weight proved catastrophic.
Each floor gradually couldn’t take the load and plummeted onto the floors below in a devastating
ripple effect!
Construction worker Michael Hill ran all the way down the stairs from the 23rd floor when
he saw cracks appear in the ceiling.
He made it to the fourth floor when he decided it was time to jump out of a window!
He broke both his arms but hey, he survived!
5 - Ronan Point, England In East London on May 16, 1968, a single match
triggered the collapse of an entire corner of a massive 22-story building.
Ivy Hodge, a 56-year-old cake decorator living on the 18th floor, got up early to make herself
a cup of tea.
When Miss Hodge lit her stove, the spark from the match triggered a devastating gas explosion.
The blast tore through the joints connecting the walls to the floor and threw her to the
ground.
The load-bearing walls came apart, leaving the four apartments above her without any
kind of structural support!
The four floors came down, tearing through the floors below like falling dominoes until
an entire corner of the building lay in ruins.
The building was actually brand new.
The construction was completed just five days prior to the collapse!
When Ronan Point came tumbling down, 260 people were in the building.
Surprisingly, only four people didn’t make it, and only 17 people were injured.
Although the building was rebuilt and the joints strengthened, public confidence in
high-rise tower buildings dropped.
Many high-rise blocks, including Ronan Point, were eventually pulled down to make room for
less intimidating low-rise housing.
4 - Highland Towers, Malaysia At 1:35 pm, on December 11, 1993, a landslide
with the force of TWO hundred jumbo jets slammed into the foundations of the Highland Towers
apartment complex in Malaysia.
The Highland Towers complex consisted of three 12-story residential buildings built at the
base of a steep hill just outside of Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur.
The retaining walls and drainage system had been poorly designed, and maintenance was
pretty much non-existent.
The situation grew more dangerous when another development company began construction on
a ridge just above Highland Towers.
The land was stripped and exposed to erosion, and some of the drainage pipes were blocked
with branches.
Ten days of non-stop rain put an enormous amount of pressure on the pipes.
At various points on the hill, the pipes burst, and the water content of the soil rose to
dangerous levels.
Eventually, a landslip took down a large retaining wall.
A colossal one hundred thousand square meters of mud slid into Block One, carrying it forward
and eventually snapping the building!.
Three people were pulled out alive on the first day, but 12 days of frantic searching
failed to unearth any more survivors.
After many years, urban legends grew that the towers were haunted!
However, any hauntings that took place had to stop around June of 2019, when the towers
were finally demolished by the city.
3 - Deepwater Horizon Explosion The single largest oil spill disaster in history
was back on April 20, 2010.
The Deepwater Horizon Offshore Drilling Unit suffered an explosion, causing a massive oil
leak into the ocean!
The unit, called a MODU, was owned and operated by Transocean, and was drilling for BP in
the Macondo Prospect oil field about 40 miles southeast off the Louisiana coast.
The Deepwater Horizon had frequent issues with maintenance that were never taken too
seriously.
Internal BP documents showed that BP engineers had concerns as early as 2009.
They were afraid that the metal casing that BP wanted to use might collapse under high
pressure.
According to a number of rig workers, it was understood that workers could get fired for
raising safety concerns that would delay drilling!
Preliminary findings from BP's internal investigation indicated several serious warning signs in
the hours prior to the blowout.
Equipment readings indicated gas bubbling into the well, which signaled trouble.
The heavy drilling mud in the pipes initially held down the gas.
BP appeared to have chosen riskier procedures to save time and money.
And executives often did this against the advice of its own engineering staff or contractors!
If you ignore enough warnings, you’ll eventually pay the price.
That’s exactly what happened to BP.
Loss of life, loss of profit, loss of reputation is what happened to BP with the single biggest
environmental catastrophe in recent history!
2 - Sampoong Department Store, South Korea On June 29, 1995, in the span of just 20 seconds,
the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea fell to the ground!
Criminal negligence, blatant disregard for ethical engineering practices, and shoddy
construction led to the largest peacetime disaster in South Korean history.
The problems can be traced almost exclusively to the future chairman of the building, Lee
Joon.
Under his insistence, the building was changed from being an office building to a department
store halfway through its construction.
To install the escalators, several key support columns were to be eliminated.
Later, Joon had an extra floor added to the building.
Despite serious warnings, Joon simply hired his own company to do work other companies
refused to do.
Not only was the building not meant to support an extra level, but this extra level was made
with a thick, extra heavy, heated floor!
Air conditioning units that were added to the roof quadrupled the load the structure
was designed to sustain.
To make matters worse, the building was constructed with substandard concrete and had only half
the 16 steel reinforcing bars it needed.
Also, the concrete columns were thinner than necessary and were reduced even more when
fire shields were installed around the escalators.
In April 1995, extensive cracks were spotted, yet nothing was done.
These fractures grew exponentially worse on the day of the disaster, but because management
didn’t want to lose the day’s revenue, they refused to evacuate the building!
Top executives, however, left as a precaution.
Seven minutes before the collapse, the building began to pop and crack, and employees sounded
the alarm, but it was too late to avert disaster, and a total of 1,500 people were trapped inside.
1 - Royal Plaza Hotel, Thailand On August 13, 1993, at around 10:00 in the
morning, the once splendid six-story Royal Plaza Hotel in Thailand came crashing down
in less than 10 seconds.
That’s around 1.6 seconds per floor!
Rescuers dug through the rubble with jackhammers and crowbars, desperately searching for signs
of life.
Trapped survivors had been using their cell phones to call for help.
A pregnant woman was pulled from the mangled pile of steel and debris 2 days after the
collapse.
Police detained the owner of the Royal Plaza Hotel, the architect, and an engineer over
allegations that three stories had been added to the building in 1990 without proper architectural
review.
Also, a huge amount of water was being stored on the roof of the hotel ahead of an expected
water shortage.
Here’s what’s next!