Engineering Disasters

[Hornbein]

It's always nice to read about other people's major screwups.

 

[jedishrfu]

I remember some of those stories, but I never heard the actual horror stories that caused the recall.

One toy not mentioned in this video was Clackers. It consisted of two acrylic balls attached to a common string with a ring halfway between them.

Kids would grab the ring and begin moving their hands up and down to make the clackers hit each other, but before long, they started doing it so forcefully enough that the clackers would hit on both the downswing and the upswing.

The result was that some clacker balls shattered, and the kids and their nearby friends often got hit by these super-sharp acrylic shards.

 

[difalcojr]

Little kids will swallow or try anything small, put it in their mouth, even if it's not colored. I swallowed a penny and another time a nickel on a dare when very young. I bet some of those 5,000 uranium-238 rocks got taken out of the bottle, smashed up, and tasted, eaten, by some curious little kids. Magnetic buckyballs were really lethal!

 

[difalcojr]

Kids would grab the ring and begin moving their hands up and down to make the clackers hit each other, but before long, they started doing it so forcefully enough that the clackers would hit on both the downswing and the upswing.

Same principle, maybe, with the paddle ball, though not too dangerous. Get it going really fast, and it gets a little tilted, misses the paddle on the backswing, and bonks you in the head or body. Remember that happening; fun, though.

 

[difalcojr]

 

[DaveE]

I'll vote for the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse in KC, 1981. It killed 114 people and injured 216.
Maybe not the worst disaster, but the simplest to understand once you read about the cause. A deadly misunderstanding of basic physics and unauthorized modifications of the engineering design.

Dunning-Kruger on display, one drawing says it all:

 

[jedishrfu]

What about the escalator failure in Italy in 2018?



Football fans of a Russian team took the escalator going down. Without warning it began to accelerate injuring 24 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Rome_escalator_accident

The accident was traced back to shoddy maintenance where certain protective systems were intentionally disabled because they would stop the escalator periodically requiring yet another maintenance visit. Some maintenance records were forged as well.

 

[bob012345]

Brand new bridge collapses in China;

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/nearly-2500-foot-long-bridge-collapses-china-rcna243388