Structural integrity and failure
Items are constructed with structural integrity to prevent catastrophic failure, which can result in injuries, severe damage, death, and/or monetary losses.
It is a concept often used in engineering to produce items that will serve their designed purposes and remain functional for a desired service life.
Builders, blacksmiths, carpenters, and masons relied on a system of trial and error (learning from past failures), experience, and apprenticeship to make safe and sturdy structures.
This need to build constructions with structural integrity led to great advances in the fields of material sciences and fracture mechanics.
[7] The 1940 collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge is sometimes characterized in physics textbooks as a classic example of resonance, although this description is misleading.
[13][14] Officials expressed concern about many other bridges in the United States sharing the same design and raised questions as to why such a flaw would not have been discovered in over 40 years of inspections.
On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-storey commercial building, collapsed in Savar, a sub-district in the Greater Dhaka Area, the capital of Bangladesh.
[31] On 29 June 1995, the five-story Sampoong Department Store in the Seocho District of Seoul, South Korea collapsed resulting in the deaths of 502 people, with another 1,445 being trapped.
In April 1995, cracks began to appear in the ceiling of the fifth floor of the store's south wing due to the presence of an air-conditioning unit on the weakened roof of the poorly built structure.
Five hours before the collapse, the first of several loud bangs was heard emanating from the top floors, as the vibration of the air conditioning caused the cracks in the slabs to widen further.
Amid customer reports of vibration in the building, the air conditioning was turned off but, the cracks in the floors had already grown to 10 cm wide.
At about 5:00 p.m. local time, the fifth-floor ceiling began to sink, and at 5:57 p.m., the roof gave way, sending the air conditioning unit crashing through into the already-overloaded fifth floor.
On 16 May 1968, the 22-story residential tower Ronan Point in the London Borough of Newham collapsed when a relatively small gas explosion on the 18th floor caused a structural wall panel to be blown away from the building.
The tower was constructed of precast concrete, and the failure of the single panel caused one entire corner of the building to collapse.
[32] On 19 April 1995, the nine-story concrete framed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma was struck by a truck bomb causing partial collapse, resulting in the deaths of 168 people.
The bomb blew all the glass off the front of the building and completely shattered a ground floor reinforced concrete column (see brisance).
[33] The Versailles wedding hall (Hebrew: אולמי ורסאי), located in Talpiot, Jerusalem, is the site of the worst civil disaster in Israel's history.
At 22:43 on Thursday night, 24 May 2001 during the wedding of Keren and Asaf Dror, a large portion of the third floor of the four-story building collapsed, killing 23 people.
In the September 11 attacks, two commercial airliners were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
Temperatures became high enough to weaken the core columns to the point of creep and plastic deformation under the weight of higher floors.
[35][36] On 24 June 2021, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story condominium building in Surfside, Florida partially collapsed, causing dozens of injuries and 98 deaths.
[40] Repeat structural failures on the same type of aircraft occurred in 1954, when two de Havilland Comet C1 jet airliners crashed due to decompression caused by metal fatigue, and in 1963–64, when the vertical stabilizer on four Boeing B-52 bombers broke off in mid-air.
On 8 August 1991 at 16:00 UTC Warsaw radio mast, the tallest man-made object ever built before the erection of Burj Khalifa, collapsed as a consequence of an error in exchanging the guy-wires on the highest stock.
On 17 July 1981, two suspended walkways through the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Missouri, collapsed, killing 114 and injuring more than 200 people[41] at a tea dance.
