| There was a big story in Sweden in 2008-2009 when a bridge collapsed due to a faulty drawing, killing one person and badly injuring two others. Two were construction workers on the bridge (killed and injured respectively) and a person in a car passing under the bridge (injured). The engineer had specified a 7 mm thickness of a part of a metal beam that was supposed to be 25 mm. She argued that the manufacturer should have realized that the drawing was a preliminary draft because it was undated, it was missing other information, and was "clearly" underdimensioned, but it was still manufactured and put in the bridge without anyone noticing until the collapse. The reason the story was extra covered in engineering magazines at the time was because the prosecutor argued that the responsible design engineer should go to prison, and three others (the owner of the design firm, a manager at the construction firm, and a coordinator who led the project) should get suspended sentences. No one from the manufacturing firm was prosecuted. The result of the trial was that the designer got a suspended sentence and a fine, and the design company was fined 1.5 million SEK. All others were freed. Most people agreed that the lack of process was to blame (the design should have been checked by someone else at the design firm, they should have clear markings on preliminary drafts, things shouldn't be manufactured without a formal handshake, and so on), but it's still an interesting question where the line should be on personal responsibility. Some forms of negligence in the workplace should be criminal, especially if it results in people dying, but it's pretty harsh if an individual engineer is personally responsible for putting a 7 instead of 25 (possibly due to copy-paste of work in progress) in a drawing or in a piece of code. It's hard to draw a clear line of the responsibility between the individual engineer and the company that they work for, which should have processes to catch these things. Links (in Swedish): https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kistaraset https://www.nyteknik.se/bygg/ingenjoren-darfor-rasade-bron-i... (has photos, including the drawing that says 7 mm instead of 25 mm) |
https://www.nordkalk.com/news/news/archive/2016/04/nordkalk-...