LEARNING FROM PAST FAILURES HELPS TO PREVENT FUTURE MISTAKES

I was reading an interesting article about geotechnical engineering disasters that I found searching the internet called, Systemic Causes for failure of geotechnical works around the world. The first thing I read was, Bea (2006) reviewed about 600 well document cases, over a 20 years span, where things went wrong on civil engineering projects. It concluded that in about 80% of the cases, failure was due to human, organizational and knowledge uncertainties, as opposed to engineering issues.

We young engineers should do our duty to assure not to contribute to future disaster and maybe even prevent them. You may not notice, or you may say “We are just beginners, we don’t do any design work.” But as entry level engineers we are asked to do preliminary work which leads to design. This is usually the first step that goes into an engineering project.

As a young geotechnical engineer, I am primarily the person that performs all the soil testing in the lab. Once I complete running all the soil tests, I hand the data and results to our design engineer, which then will start the design phase of the project.  If these labs test are not accurately representative of the site condition, the design engineer will be already heading into a potential disaster.

Believe me, I know that you may be in an engineering firm that doesn't provide any mentorship or doesn't   teach you correctly how to be a great engineer, and all they are concerned about is maximizing their profits. But just remember that society puts their trust in us as engineers to provide safe infrastructure. So we have the responsibility to educate ourselves throughout our career.

Here is a nice link to a PDF on procedures and standards on Soil Mechanics Laboratory Testing from Continuing Education and Development, Inc  that I found just searching the internet and refer to often.

I have observed other engineers at my job running soil testing analysis in our lab and felt that they were rushing and/or being sloppy while performing different procedures. Remember, these are the same engineers training me so that I can perform future soil testing analysis for our design engineer. I wasn't sure if the data and results were being affected but I didn't want to have any doubt about my work. I believe that if you do things correctly from the very beginning of your career, it becomes habit to always do things correctly, which in turn eliminates, or at the very least, minimizes errors and mistakes. Putting emphasis on minor things early in your career, in my opinion, is what will separate you from being any other engineer to becoming a great respected engineer in your field.