A student in my class last night asked about the factory collapse in Bangladesh so I was required to hold forth on something I know very little about. The only thing I do know for certain is that it could have been easily prevented and there is no person on the planet who can reasonably say "aw shucks, these things just happen, you know." Unfortunately, I'm also fairly certain that there are people with wealth and power in Bangladesh who are saying that exact sort of thing in private circles. A culture of negligence and fear creates situations like this and it is not undone easily.
The worst structural failure in the U.S. in recent years is still the Hyatt Hotel walkway collapse. The lesson learned from that is that redundancy in structural systems is important, and perhaps more significantly, redundancy in peer reviews is a critical part of the design process. I've gotten more cautious as a designer, but I still make mistakes. I like to think that it's harder for two people to overlook something than one person. In Bangladesh, a lot of people noticed that something was going wrong in the days and weeks leading up to the collapse, and that only compounds the horror.
No comments:
Post a Comment