Things don't always work the way they were intended to work. Sometimes those failures
are almost imperceptible as they build incrementally, and other times, they happen in a terrible, overwhelming instant.
"You could argue, legitimately, that engineering is the study of failure, or at least consideration of ways to avoid it," said Benjamin Gross, the Associate Vice President for Collections at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, which specializes in science, engineering and technology.
These catastrophes are reminders that "engineering is a human activity," Gross told Live Science. "Disasters of this sort aren't just based around the technologies."
And so, when calamity strikes, people often ask three questions: "What went wrong? Who's to blame? What could have been done differently?" Gross said. Given the complexity of modern engineering projects, answers can be hard to find, but they may influence and improve the next attempts to cross the great expanses.
Here are 10 of the worst engineering disasters in U.S. history. https://www.livescience.com/55619-engineering-disasters.html
