Structural Failure Quotes

No one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most.

When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls--the World.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

Pressure hulls collapse at the speed of sound. Once that starts, you're inside your own little imploding atomic bomb, and you're gone.

(The) chain of command has failed over the years, obviously, for a lot of reasons.

A bridge shouldn't just fall down in the middle of America. Not a bridge that's a few blocks from my house. Not an eight-lane highway. Not a bridge that I drive over with my family every day, along with tens of thousands of Minnesotans. But that's what happened.

I do believe that it's the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics that World Trade Center tower 7-building 7, which collapsed in on itself-it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved. World Trade Center 7. World Trade [Center] 1 and 2 got hit by planes-7, miraculously, the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.

[On 9/11:] ... those towers represented human triumph over nature. Larger than life, built to be unburnable, they were the Titanic of our day. For them to burn and fall so quickly means that the whole superstructure we depend upon to mitigate nature and assure our comfort and safety could fall.

What is commonly overlooked in using the computer is the fact that the central goal of design is still to obviate failure, and thus it is critical to identify exactly how a structure may fail. The computer cannot do this by itself . . .

One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.

When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fell with it?

Are you familiar with 9/11? Building 7? You know what was in there? All the Enron stuff. I guess that building went down on its own.

… a rotten plank, upon which no man could trust himself without sinking.

I never believed 9/11, because I had engineering training at GA Tech, and I could tell when a building is being blown up by explosives. Any fool can look at those films and see the buildings aren't falling down, they're blowing up.

I drilled holes in the floor of the club, and it's sinking.

I do believe it is the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower Seven, building seven, which collapsed in on itself.

When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.

Very slight violence will break that which has once been cracked.

The bridge fell away into the chasm, and the Cyclops howled ... with delight, because he was standing right next to us.

In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was "nonlinear, catastrophic structural exasperation," or to put it another way--as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career--the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it was.

A failed structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows us incontrovertibly what cannot be done, while a structure that stands without incident often conceals whatever lessons or caveats it might hold for the next generation of engineers.

When a building is about to fall down, all the mice desert it.

You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.