NOTHING succeeds like success, but in engineering failure is inevitably more revealing. Thus the recent sudden collapse of several large concrete ceiling panels onto a car travelling through one of the tunnels of Boston’s “Big Dig”, killing a passenger, has revealed more than did years of safe and uneventful use.
The Big Dig is the nickname for the relocation of a notoriously jammed section of elevated highway into tunnels directly beneath downtown Boston. With a price tag of $15 billion, it is the largest civil engineering project of its kind in US history. Among the technical factors that made it…
