On May 12, 2008, a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake in the Sichuan province of China caused nearly 90,000 people to lose their lives, with hospitals and schools filled with children ...

A new report, coauthored by Northwestern University faculty including Professors Emeritus Stephen Carr and William Miller, ...

On March 26, 2024, the famous Francis Scott Key Bridge of Baltimore, Maryland, collapsed after a head-on collision with a large container ship, sending several passenger vehicles on the bridge flying ...

The field of engineering evolves daily. The marvels of engineering far outweigh the failures/disasters. These failures and/or disasters result when engineers and designers push boundaries by building ...

Massive wildfires, major hurricanes and other natural disasters are occurring more frequently than in the past. A new National Academy of Sciences Engineering Medicine (NASEM) report, which included ...

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 ...

Graduate school was not always part of Casie Venable’s (PhDCivEngr’20) plan. Growing up, she had family members in the construction industry and was surrounded by people who had both a passion and ...

Fighting a two-front battle is never an ideal arrangement, but it is something we must consider. After all, we will almost certainly face another natural disaster in the coming year, on top of the ...

So begins a typical episode of Well There’s Your Problem, a self-described “podcast with slides” on YouTube. Each installment explores a different engineering ...

The Ashtabula train disaster and bridge collapse was the worst train disaster of the 19th century, claiming the lives of 97 people. The engineering and structural failures that caused the collapse of ...

We call them engineering disasters. But is that a misnomer? Certainly tons of the “engineering disasters” of the 20 th Century had nothing to do with the engineer. Many of those calamities came from ...