Reviewing and analyzing failures is a crucial element in engineering. As most experienced design professionals know, being able to identify the problem is most often more important than being able to implement well-known solutions. Fundamentally, failure analysis is the diagnosis of the root causes or underlying phenomena of results that are puzzling and costly, such as last year’s collapse of a coal-ash impoundment in Tennessee, or puzzling and tragic, such as the 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis. So why are too few students being exposed to this kind of critical thinking early in their engineering education?
Members of professions demand the right to be self-policing. The reasoning goes that only members know when other members have crossed the line ethically or have been negligent in exercising professional judgment. If design professionals want to maintain public trust, they must be strict in their policing and get to the bottom of failures. The core of engineering is technical knowledge developed from study and experience. No other experience is more valuable than the experience of failure, and it must be shared honestly and completely.