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I'm unaware of any liability that can be picked up through rendering an opinion on a design. I have participated in forensic engineering / expert witness cases in geostructural matters. In fact, the opinion of an engineer as an "expert witness" is often codified in law as retaining no liability. Asking questions and drawing conclusions is not something that presents any risks besides you being possibly proven wrong later. If you don't stamp the design to be constructed, then there is no liability.

I would be very interested in any law or regulation you can find that says otherwise.

I would also add that most of the involvement of engineers during lawsuits is to establish exactly what state of practice is in the local area. It would be hard to do that if all these other engineers didn't have or couldn't give an opinion.

Acting as an expert witness and sounding off unbidden are somewhat different.

It's also not so much a matter of law as it is professionalism.

I used to be a structural engineer in Canada (EIT, left before getting PENG) and one of the projects I was involved with was analyzing a collapsed building to determine fault.

Being an expert witness is completely different than being an engineer talking to the public. Generally speaking an engineer close to the details of the project is going to know more than you. If you have concerns, you call up the engineer and you have a discussion. If he's dismissive you still have the choice to escalate the matter, but it's usually to someone in the government, not the public at large. Engineers need to be trusted by the public and shooting your mouth off about another engineer degrades public trust.

bsder said: "As a licensed Professional Engineer, you have to be quite careful criticizing other engineers. As long as the engineer signing off met "standard practices", he is covered and saying that he is not could get you in quite hot water."

I am disagreeing with the statement that you could get in "quite hot water" by noting that the only liability you are exposing yourself to by stating your opinion is looking stupid. Yours and my opinions on public trust and how someone should conduct themselves is orthogonal to the question.

So basically the code of ethics says you don't get caught arguing and doubting each other's work in public because it makes all engineers look bad. To me that sounds like a thin blue line, just not blue.

> I would also add that most of the involvement of engineers during lawsuits is to establish exactly what state of practice is in the local area. It would be hard to do that if all these other engineers didn't have or couldn't give an opinion.

An engineer in a lawsuit as an expert witness is a VERY different beast from making public statements about an engineering failure.

Much of the way this is being played out in the press is that the statements by the outside engineers are implying that the engineering firm didn't due sufficient analysis.

That's a statement that they do NOT have the facts to support and falls under "libel". Under a "libel" charge, the defendant has to prove that the statements made are true rather than the plaintiff showing that they are false.

In addition, it's quite easy to take a known failure point and then backfill the analysis to find the mistake. The more interesting question would be to take the design and give it to a firm that doesn't know about the failure and see if they can find the flaw in the analysis.

Can you elaborate? This seems like a very perverse system. Why is criticism viewed to be so dangerous?

As long as both the critic and the criticized are supporting their arguments with reasons and engaged in dialogue, the outcome should be net good for everyone.

On one hand, speculations during an ongoing investigation do not do anything good. Ruining someone's career without actually having all of the facts is poor form.

On the other, criticising a collegue for a mistake that is only obvious in retrospect is also poor sportsmanship.

After you've dropped a bridge on dozens of occupied automobiles, your career is ruined, full stop. No one in TFA claimed that the mistakes were "only obvious in retrospect". All 4 experts independently identified strut 11 as being far too weak, after less than a weekend of study. The original engineer whose firm was paid millions of dollars should have performed the same analysis they did over the weekend, at least.

1. Accidents happen. If the original engineering firm followed accepted practices then it doesn't matter how quickly someone else found the flaw after the flaw was made evident by the collapse.

2. "After you've dropped a bridge...": Until the investigation is complete, no one has any business assigning responsibility. (In fact, the investigation probably won't assign responsibility; that will be the job of the court system in the subsequent lawsuits.)

http://to70.com/why-aviation-safety-experts-dont-talk-about-...

> Why is criticism viewed to be so dangerous?

Criticism, behind closed doors or strictly in the company of other engineers with the correct training and experience, is not dangerous.

Criticism shared with non-engineers amounts to second-guessing and degrades the trust of the public in the profession as a whole, which has tangible negative outcomes for everyone.

Imagine if every project you'd been on had another developer bending the ear of management saying "oh, that's the wrong editor...oh, that's not the right algorithm to use..."! It'd be awful.

For mechanical and structural engineering, both much more difficult and unknowable than software, it is of the utmost importance not to foment doubt and uncertainty in people who are by definition unqualified to properly understand the criticisms and weight them.

"Scandal" should be avoided because it "degrades the trust of the public in the profession." An age-old saw trotted out to justify the cover-up of diverse kinds of negligence and malfeasance in all manner of professions the world over.

It works precisely until there is a scandal too big to cover-up.

There are always degrees of uncertainty in any physical engineering project. It doesn't help anybody to have the general public being told to second-guess the work.

Why do you think otherwise?

All four experts in TFA independently identified the same problematic strut, "11", after a weekend of unpaid work. That doesn't sound like "uncertainty" to me.

> Criticism shared with non-engineers amounts to second-guessing and degrades the trust of the public in the profession as a whole, which has tangible negative outcomes for everyone.

Also makes it ever so easy to bury the negligence and mistakes. Leaving the public devoid of trust and potentially with some very tangible negative outcomes. For instance:

"Yes your condition should have been identified, it's clear from the first X-rays in your history. No it's too late to do anything about it now, you just have to live with it. Put that in writing? I couldn't possibly do that."

Repeat several times.

Applicable to many of the professions in varying degree.

Thank you for your informative input. In this case, the article is not naming a specific engineer, though I realize that it will ultimately come down to a small number of people. If, as claimed, the calculations used did significantly under-represent the forces on the strut that failed, that would seem to be a matter of physics, regardless of how it came about.

The Citibank tower continues to sway and creak, more noticeably than most comparable buildings, in a strong wind.

Correction to my own post: The article does name FIGG's chief engineer, but it is not claiming that he personally acted in a willfully reckless manner or encouraged/coerced others to do so.