Things fail. That’s the nature of life. In theology and the subject of Oneness of God, all those which are created have a finite life. Some fail sooner, some later. Only He remains, as He has neither beginning nor the end.
Man-made objects would surely fail. We expect that. Civil, structural, mechanical, and electrical objects fail. Either they fail, or we put an end to their service life. The later happens when, from engineering perspective, we deem these objects as not being able to perform the functions they were designed for. Or, it is becoming costly to operate and maintain them.
If engineering objects fail at or after a certain design or expected life, that’s okay. We call that normal “aging” or normal “wearout”. What’s not okay is when these objects fail early in its life or they fail during their prime. We call the former, “infant mortality” and the later, failures during “useful life”.
It’s the job of engineers’ and, at times, those in authority to investigate and understand why things fail early or during their useful life. The objective is to learn, not only the physics of how these objects fail, but more importantly, to unravel the systemic issues that had led to the failures. That’s the only way to avoid recurrence.
This week’s suspension bridge collapse in Kampar is the case in point. Early news reports I gathered in the wee hours of Tuesday point to possible “infant mortality”. Otherwise, those kids might have been packing the bridge and/or they were jumping up and down in such a way that caused the bridge to sway at certain destructive frequency, called natural frequency. Another possibility is wind speed at the time of incident, which caused the bridge to sway at its natural frequency, leading to the collapse.
It’s clear that the bridge experienced “infant mortality”. The investigators’ job is to learn why. In engineering, “infant mortality” would typically point us to issues in either design, in the quality of construction/installation, or in the materials used for construction (or combination thereof.)
We then have four hypotheses. The bridge collapsed because:
1) It was either poorly designed, poorly constructed, or due to the use of defective or inferior materials, or
2) The kids were packing the bridge to the extent that their sheer weight exceeded the load bearing capacity of the bridge, or
3) A number of excited kids were jumping up and down, or swinging side-to-side so as to cause the bridge to sway at its destructive natural frequency, or
4) The local wind at the time was blowing at a speed and frequency, enough to match the natural frequency of the bridge (and this didn’t have to be a strong wind).
The job of the investigators’ then is to run through the physical evidences available, eyewitness accounts, local meteorological record, design blueprints, as-built drawings, purchase orders, and other similar documents to validate or reject the four hypotheses.
After all the physical causes are established, they would need to look at the underlying causes that address the systemic issues mentioned earlier. Any evidence of corrupt practices would need to be investigated further.
I do not wish to provide all the clues. But, I surely hope the investigating team know how to proceed in their investigation.
When our infrastructure start collapsing all around us unexpectedly, we need to be very concerned. Human lives are at stake. Our future as a developed society is at stake. Otherwise, we will remain as a nation of people stuck with its third-world mentality.
