Not really ideal…

11 Responses to Not really ideal…

1. Nemesis says:

   October 21, 2019 at 21:44

   Seems to be a few of these crane collapses lately – I wonder if that is the outcome from all that ‘education’ of the ‘engineers’ who are trusted to put those cranes up in place based on what they have been ‘taught’.

   I have a mate who is an electrical engineer who often reminds me of the lack of standards that are now expected whenever he needs to hire.

   He also tells me that their real education, if they are hired, begins with him!
   • Darin says:

     October 22, 2019 at 02:02

     This one wasn’t a crane collapse, it was a structural collapse of the building under construction.
     https://youtu.be/8M_uCv3GMw4
     They used a product called Versa Deck which is a heavy corrugated steel floor deck panel which reinforced concrete is poured on top of to form the floors.What looks like happened to me is they overloaded the floor that started the collapse by stacking too much material on it.
     The cranes stayed upright, barely, but it was deemed too dangerous to dismantle them in place, so they decided to demo them hoping they would fall onto the damaged building. One went as planned, the other not so much.

     Your friend is right, the older generations of engineers, the ones that built the world we live in now, are retiring and dying off and the ones coming up behind them are of a lesser quality. Lesser quality as in they don’t hold a candle to them.
     This is also another side effect of the war on white males. Destroy the demographic that produces the overwhelming majority of engineers and then suffer the consequences.
     Witness the result of an all female design team-
     https://www.osha.gov/doc/engineering/pdf/2019_r_03.pdf
     • Cadwallader says:

       October 22, 2019 at 08:12

       “Don’t hold a candle to them…” there are engineers where I live who wouldn’t know which end of a candle to light. In New Zealand there are railway routes which were first developed/constructed in the 19th century. The engineers of the time had, of necessity, genuine abilities in mathematics and designed to those principles. Engineering today, is based around computer modelling and we know how unreliable that practice is when we have climate predictions which are idiotic.
       • Darin says:

         October 22, 2019 at 13:09

         That’s like the Apollo space program, much of it was designed with slide rules and pencils, this was before pocket calculators even existed.
     • mawm says:

       October 22, 2019 at 11:22

       The older generation of engineers were university trained and standards were policed by a professional engineering body. Now just about any tertiary educational facility produces “engineers” and the professional oversight has been eroded by governments and other interested parties usually under the guise of preventing anti-competitive (anti-trust) behaviour.
       • Darin says:

         October 22, 2019 at 13:10

         Over here the term engineer was slapped on everything, “sanitation engineer” was my favorite.
         • mawm says:

           October 23, 2019 at 19:14

           Mine was the “acoustics engineer” for the guy tapping the train wheels to detect cracks.
     • Rick says:

       October 22, 2019 at 21:11

       You’re not kidding. I don’t deal with engineers (mostly structural) much these days, thankfully. A recent project I was going to bid was cancelled before bid selection. I don’t know if I was in any way responsible for that.

       All I did was note that a key steel beam was not properly anchored. The details were lacking. I called up the C.E. to ask about the apparently non-existent end ties. He said he would, but didn’t, get back to me. The next thing I heard was the project had been cancelled. I lost about 10 hours. I don’t know how much they lost on cancelling a ~$20mm project.

       I knew a C.E. who had made a fortune from the building boom in Las Vegas. He closed his firm when it became too difficult to find qualified engineers.

       One university of which I am quite familiar used to enjoy a very high ranking for engineering and architecture. Today they rank very low. As with other uni, they are encumbered with social justice BS. Imagine that, applied science brought low in our time. The FSU bridge fiasco is a fine example of that.
       • Darin says:

         October 23, 2019 at 13:53

         It’s really disheartening what’s been going on and steadily getting worse in the last couple decades. I’m not an engineer, but I have been in the business long enough that I came up through the ranks and paid attention the whole way.
         Over the years the quality of drawings has gone into decline, both in terms of attention to detail as well as standards and conventions. Used to be there might be one or two minor errors in a set of prints, now they typically number in the dozens and some are quite serious. I got bad enough a few years back that I taught myself CAD so I could produce my own production drawings and have the engineer sign off on them before I ran the parts. Now I have several from different companies that hire me to produce their prototype and production drawings because as one of them put it-“you’re much better at dimensions and tolerancing than we are” shame I don’t make the same scale on payday they do
         • Nemesis says:

           October 23, 2019 at 14:43

           According to Breitbart News in an article I believe was up last week, 40% of liberal universities will be bankrupt over the next few years.

           I guess that’s a start in getting things back to normal .
           • Darin says:

             October 23, 2019 at 15:13

             Too little,too late,the damage I am afraid is already done.
             So much engineering and technical prowess has been lost, much of it sold for scrap and or carted off to the third world.
             Strategic items even that once we had multiple suppliers for have now become single points of failure as we are dependent on single source vendors that are often times foreign. High voltage transmission transformers come to mind. Not a single North American supplier left.