With the vast amount of infrastructure around the world, several collapses have happened and likely will continue to happen. Rather than taking structural failures as something to be fixed and then forgotten, engineers study failures in detail to understand why they happened and try to make sure they don’t happen again.

Structural failures are usually caused by oversights or factors that were previously unknown. When a structural failure occurs, engineers immediately begin work on analyzing it. First, they secure the site and review the original plans for the structures. This allows them to check for any mistakes in the final product, such as if a structural component in the blueprint is missing in the final structure which then might have caused a collapse. Then, they document visible damage and use non-destructive tools to find hidden or miniscule damages. This data is then put through several computer models to try and pinpoint the root cause of the failure. Some models can simulate the building under high stress conditions to see how the structural failure actually occurred and lets them find out what went wrong in the structure of the building.

With the data collected, engineers then begin the process of preventing future collapses. If required, building code is updated with new rules to ensure that a similar failure won’t likely happen again. For example, they could implement a rule that makes blueprints have highlights on small but important structural details to make sure they aren’t missing in the final product. Engineering education could also be changed to teach engineering students to watch out for problems like those. Sometimes, material strengths and uses are reviewed if the cause of the failure was a material being too weak or not a right fit for the purpose.

Engineers have to account for structural failures to make sure that future buildings don’t collapse the same way. Learning from failures is how engineers make innovation in safety code and prevent future accidents that could have dangerous consequences. They treat failures as not something to be fixed, but something to be learned from.