Great miscalculations: The French railway error and others | Hacker News Reader

Great miscalculations: The French railway error and others

bbc.co.uk

86 pointsmsantos51 comments

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No such list is really complete without the first rendition of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)

For reasons, which become immediately obvious, it was lovingly nick named "Galopping Gertie"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw

Incredible how much of a beating it took before it finally collapsed. It's also a lot more flexible than you'd expect.

If you watch a speeded up version you can see a torsion wave travel down from one tower to the other, and then reflect back again. Quite impressive.

Someone made a wind based energy generation system based on the same principle but the name escapes me, it was all over the news a couple of years ago.

I was looking for this in the list and was disappointed not to see it. This was emphasized multiple times during my degree. The point of introducing this catastrophe to us was to show that there are lives in our hands and we have to do our best to keep people safe.

These were structures and aircraft classes so the point was extremely important.

Was that really a "miscalculation", though? I thought it was a never-before-seen aerodynamic effect that nobody could have predicted in advance. It's not as though the engineers incorrectly declared it safe against torsional-mode aerodynamic flutter.

The list is missing the Hyatt Hotel Walkway Collapse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Hotel_disaster

The contractor made a small design change to make things easier for themselves and ended up causing a bolt to hold twice the weight it was intended to hold. 114 people were killed and 216 were injured.

Holy shit, that was gruesome:

> Those people who could walk were instructed to leave the hotel to simplify the rescue effort; those mortally injured were told they were going to die and given morphine. Often, rescuers had to dismember bodies in order to reach survivors among the wreckage. One victim's right leg was trapped under an I-beam and had to be amputated by a surgeon, a task which was completed with a chain saw.

(Also, how do you format a quotation on HN??)

The first one is not a mis-measurement. They knew some of the platforms were not to the norm, and that they had to be adapted by RFF. The person who started the info to blame on the SNCF is linked to a region that doesn't want to pay for the normalization of the platforms.

The whole affair is really blown out of proportion because it is very understandable in layman terms. On the other hand, it seems that the Louvois pay system [1] has cost about half a billion euros to French tax payers and does not work either. But since it is a complex sw product it is much harder to find an obvious culprit and it will be swept under the rug...

[1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logiciel_unique_%C3%A0_vocation...

Lots of blame to go around here, a few sackings but no one got sued. $1.2 billion dollars worth of software that probably still doesn't work as required.

http://www.zdnet.com/au/ibm-should-have-been-disqualified-fr...

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/technology/states-health-pay...

Half a billion Euros for a system that doesn't work - that's a bargain. Here in the UK our systems that don't work cost a lot more than that - £10 billion and counting:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-s...

And it's 5m€ out of a total 14b€ enveloppe, which includes 4b€ for infrastructural refections and improvements.

I am surprised the Denver International Airport Baggage System fiasco (http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_id=2086) did not make the list. It is one the greatest failures of this sort ever, and is often used as a case study of what not to do. The baggage system cost tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars and it never worked a day. For that price in the mid 90s we could have gotten a light rail system in the entire Denver metro area (one that is finally being installed now for a much higher price).

Speaking of airports, the opening of Heathrow Terminal 5[1] was not without problems..

    On the day of opening it quickly became apparent that the new terminal was
    not operating smoothly, and British Airways cancelled 34 flights and was later
    forced to suspend baggage check-in. Over the following 10 days some 
    42,000 bags failed to travel with their owners, and over 500 flights were
    cancelled.

Of course, Berlin's new airport[2] is in another league:

    Originally planned to be opened in 2010, Berlin Brandenburg Airport has
    encountered a series of delays due to poor construction planning, management
    and execution. [...] any dates prior to late 2016 are considered unlikely.

Originally budgeted at €2.8 billion, already in 2012 that number had increased to €4.3 billion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Heathrow_Terminal_5#Open...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Brandenburg_Internationa...

Wow, I've never even heard of that one. I'm guessing it didn't make the list because this more of a list of projects screwed up by a single miscalculation, not just big project failures.

The nearly 300 metres high Citigroup Center[1] in New York had a change during construction:

    original design for the "chevron" load braces used 
    welded joints. But during construction, to save labor
    and material costs, bolted joints were used instead

Which led to:

     Wind tunnel tests with models of Citigroup Center revealed the wind
     speed required to bring down the building; wind of this speed
     occurs on average once in 55 years. The building has a tuned mass
     damper, which negates much of the wind load. 

     If electric power failed, say during a hurricane, the damper would
     shut down and a much lower-speed wind would suffice; wind of this
     speed occurs on average once in 16 years.

The joints were welded in secret.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center

I think the more interesting point to note here, is BBC's toedipping into this type of listicle content.

In a recent internal report[1], BBC was suggested to be mindful of Buzzfeed's stragegy. To quote from the article:

>The report, commissioned by BBC head of news James Harding from Sir Howard Stringer, also said that the BBC's web presence lacks "character and personality" compared with younger rivals such as Vice Media and Buzzfeed.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/21/bbc-news-buzzfe...

It's not really true that the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because of the metric/English mismatch.

The team knew well before arrival at Mars that there were anomalies in the location of the probe. Thanks to management incompetence quite similar to that which led to the loss of shuttles Challenger and Columbia, no course correction maneuvers, which could have saved the mission, were allowed.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/why-t...

So now even BBC takes their content from Reddit threads.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/262ymz/france_mis...

I had higher expectations from the BBC.

In a more hilarious and trollish side there is of course the unforgettable KTVU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qvjNSYRMu4

And people wonder why PR firms are strong. They are strong because there aren't any proper journalists left.

This was the funniest thing i've seen in a long time. Thanks. I suspect it dawned on her that something was wrong when she read the names aloud, but then managed to stay admirably serious.

I am truly saddened #6 is in an article by the BBC. Perhaps they should add a humor section for the page hits.

I present to you the norwegian entry caused by inaccurate calculations.

http://home.versatel.nl/the_sims/rig/sleipnera.htm

There's also the Citicorp Center:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center#Engineering_cr...

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/structural-integrity/

The cancer of listicles has even spread to the BBC? So sad. Let's not encourage this.

To be fair, BBC's "Magazine" section has always had this kind of stuff.

Yeah. They should really make it a different colour or something to stop people getting annoyed.

Reminds me of this joke. Apologies for any hurt feelings.

"A perfect world is where the British are the police, the Germans are the engineers, and the French are the cooks. A worst-case world is where the British are the cooks, the Germans are the police, and the French are the engineers."

There's also an extended version of that joke involving Italian car mechanics and Swiss lovers.

And yet another one involving the culture of Canada wherein Canada had the opportunity to have American engineering, British culture, and French cuisine. Instead, they opted for American culture, British cuisine, and French engineering.

This joke does not work in Belgium, as we consider French cuisine an inferior version of ours. (The story goes that the cooks of Louis XIV came from Namur).

It's not so much a joke as it is a reflection on the history and development of Canada.

Is the story about the Laufenburg bridge accurate? I would never have thought that bridge builders would have used altitude above sea level as a basis for building, instead of some local, direct measurement.

The local direct measurement IS altitude above sea level. The problem is that they weren't using the same reference points.

And the description says that they did consider the difference between two reference points - 27cm. They just considered the difference in the opposite way. So instead of 27cm - 27cm = 0 difference they ended up with 27cm - (-27cm) = 54cm difference in the levels.

Not using the same reference points is the odd part. If they were building a tunnel, it would make sense, but for a bridge they could see from one side to the other. They should have been able to set a reference point on one side and translated it across to the other side. That's a direct measurement, and it doesn't matter at all where that reference point is relative to sea level or anything else.

It sort of sounds like 1 side did the opposite of what they were supposed to when they started the work, laying it out above a measure instead of below (or the other way around).

If they really were so precisely wrong, whatever reference they used seems pretty sensible to use.

A joke from a fictional movie makes the top ten? Have there really been so few real-world engineering and design fiascos?

Someone didn't read the whole paragraph for the real world example: Black Sabbath's massive Stonehenge in 1983...

Poorly-sized props from a Black Sabbath tour in 1983 make the top ten? Have there really been so few engineering and design fiascos?

I always like to point out this little snippet about the MCO:

http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/#MCO

Like several of the others, it was mostly a documentation and communication problem.

Something to remember next time people rally against comments and documentation.

And a management failure: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/why-t...

I'm growing to fear and avoid any system that treats every physical measurement as an unexplained dimensionless number, as most programming languages have for the past few decades. We can do better.

Monitorama hosted a great talk by Pete Cheslock about the Vasa warship project. Available on Vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/95284690

NASA is working in imperial units? Why?

The units problem was incidental and really management casting about for blame: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/robotic-exploration/why-t...

I believe it was contractors.

toss in the Big Dig and that high speed rail in California if they ever intend to build it. Basically far too many transportation oriented projects get really over budget and suffer multiple design changes.

Recently France was chided for buying 2000 trains that were the wrong size. Even in this day and age of computer power its amazing how simple things pass by

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