What I find most fascinating: that this actually happened in the US.
The tensioning guys should have known about engineering strain aka the diameter starts to thing out on a tensioned rod before it fails.
(Oilbreh's comments)
This may be very, very preliminary and I may be completely wrong, but this could be an early sign of things to come: worsening quality control of engineering projects.
Numerous reasons abound:
* more women in engineering field
* quality of engineers dropping - one of my professors in undergrad showed me a plot (about a decade ago) - average score on test versus year. He'd taught the same course for 3 decades, administering basically the same tests over and over again. The average score was dropping, slowly, but surely
* loss of incentives for engineers to do quality work - slightly hard to focus full-time on job when you also have to spend time on self-improvement and game
* cannibalization of engineering fields - name of the game today is computer science/AI/machine learning/etc. What this implies (from my experience) is that a lot of quality kids are now in CompSci majors instead of more traditional engineering fields such as civil engineering
It's probably a combo of these fours, and more. And there's probably also some feedback loop, e.g.:
fewer people going into engineering in general --> fewer students in Civil Engineering --> departments have to make classes easier to attract more students --> attract more women --> being an engineer doesn't make you an attractive man to women (hypergamy always looking for something better than her) --> fewer people going into engineering in general, and so forth
I would not be surprised, though I hope I'm wrong, to see more engineering failures in the future. This could range from "simple" projects such as bridges to chemical industry disasters to Intel chips failing, etc.
