On May 12, 2008, a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake in the Sichuan province of China caused nearly 90,000 people to lose their lives, with hospitals and schools filled with children ...

Natural disasters do not destroy buildings evenly. By studying which fall and which are left standing, engineers can develop new strategies for the future. Win McNamee/Getty Images When you first see ...

More than 35 years later, the post-mortem on one of the country's worst engineering disasters appears to be simple. A contractor asked for a change in an original design. The change was approved by ...

On March 26, 2024, the famous Francis Scott Key Bridge of Baltimore, Maryland, collapsed after a head-on collision with a large container ship, sending several passenger vehicles on the bridge flying ...

Necessity is often said to be the mother of invention. Vermont engineer and hydrologist Stephen Farrington is proving that disaster can also be the impetus for creative problem-solving. Vermont news ...

Graduate school was not always part of Casie Venable’s (PhDCivEngr’20) plan. Growing up, she had family members in the construction industry and was surrounded by people who had both a passion and ...

Ilham Siddiq survived the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami and is now using his firsthand disaster knowledge to evaluate the effectiveness of recovery policies. Siddiq, a civil ...

ENR editor Tom Sawyer traveled extensively to project sites, disaster areas and war zones far afield and close to home. As the last entry in ENR's 150th anniversary coverage, he offers some thoughts ...

The Ashtabula train disaster and bridge collapse was the worst train disaster of the 19th century, claiming the lives of 97 people. The engineering and structural failures that caused the collapse of ...

We call them engineering disasters. But is that a misnomer? Certainly tons of the “engineering disasters” of the 20 th Century had nothing to do with the engineer. Many of those calamities came from ...

San Diego aerospace engineer Wesley Melvin Dreyer spent decades pushing the boundaries of aviation—from developing top-secret defense projects to helping uncover the cause of the Challenger disaster.