There are many fascinating and wonderful bridges in the world. Some as simple as a log going across a river, while others are eye-popping and functional. I have chosen to write about Bloukrans Bridge located in Nature's Valley, South Africa. 

The Bloukrans Bridge is an arch bridge that spans over two small peaks. It is the tallest road bridge on the continent, towering 708 ft in the air. It was built in the early 1980's, and designed by Liebenberg & Stander Western Cape Ltd. It crosses the Bloukrans River, and is made from reinforced concrete. Some of the design constraints on this bridge had to be that obviously it would be able to hold itself up. It also had to be able to hold the road traffic that goes on top of it. Because of the fact that it is very near to the sea, the engineers had to make it withstand wind, as well as thermal stress due to an average temperature of about 86 degrees Fahrenheit in South Africa. 

Overall, I think that this bridge is fascinating because while it has a very simple design, it is also very eye catching due to the setting around it. It is also the highest place in the world with commercial bungee jumping. 

This video detailed some famous engineering failures, and how we learned from them. It also showed some of the greatest successes of engineering. It showed some of the different types of failure including structural failure, fatigue, etc. 

Some of the causes of structural failure are bad design, poor communication between the engineer and the builders, bad workmanship, and poor maintenance. One of the prime examples of this was the Kansas City sky-walk collapse in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The sky-walk collapsed from the ceiling. At the time it was the deadliest structural failure in the history of the US. During the investigation, an architectural engineer noticed that the actual bridge, differed significantly from the design of the original sky-walk. Due to the poor workmanship and communication, the bridge collapsed killing 114 people, and injuring 216 more people. 

Stresses and materials are important in a structural failure because things are built with a certain factor of safety. If something is stressed beyond its factor of safety, the likelihood is that it will collapse. Materials are also important because it is difficult to predict when a certain material will collapse or not. For example in the video, they performed an experiment, where a lot of people bent paper clips until the paper clip broke. While a majority of the paper clips broke in 7 tries, there were paper clips that broke in 1 bend, while others broke in as many as 13. This illustrated how difficult it is to predict the strength of materials in a structural failure. 

The cliché goes "You learn more from your failures than your successes." And while this might be cheesy it is true. In engineering especially this is true because to save further disasters happening, it is vital to learn from other disasters. In engineering, failure is inevitable. There will always be someone that overlooks something, that leads to disastrous consequences. However, every one that gets hurt or dies in that failure, will have died in vain, if the same mistake is made again. The sad truth is that the only way to truly learn is through failure. 


Engineers today can experience failure without risking human life, by putting new designs to rigorous testing processes with subjects that are not human. For the first step, engineers can build a scaled down model of the project, and test it without risking human life. Next they can build bigger, life size models and test them with things such as carts full of metal, and heavy animals, before opening them to the public.