Briefing: Education to prepare for the practice of forensic engineering

Abstract

The education and practice of forensic structural engineering should have three goals: first, and foremost, to reduce the number and magnitude of failures; second, to apply effective and reliable methods of forensic analysis; and third, to provide technical support for the fair resolution of disputes.

Structural unsafety revealed by failure databases

“…A generic definition of human error is 'all those occasions in which a planned sequence of … activities fails to achieve its intended outcome' (Reason, 1990). It is negatively related to the standard of good care -'that level and quality of service ordinarily provided by other normally competent practitioners of good standing in that field, when providing similar services with reasonable diligence and best judgment in the same locality and the same time and under similar circumstances' (Ratay, 2012).…”

Forensic Structural Engineering in education

“…19th IABSE Congress Stockholm, 21-23 September 2016 Challenges in Design and Construction of an Innovative and Sustainable Built Environment 1 Introduction: international context Forensic Structural Engineering (FSE) is "the professional practice of determining the cause or causes of failure of a constructed facility and of laying out the technical bases for identifying the parties responsible for that failure" [1]. Dissemination of failure knowledge and more specifically FSE in education has received attention for many years, especially in the USA [2,3]. In this country, failure cases were included by 85% of the civil engineering schools in technical courses, according to a survey in 1989 [4].…”

“…Bosela [5] identified only 12 courses at different US Universities specifically focusing on failure of engineered facilities. This limited number of forensic engineering courses can be explained by the opinion that the undergraduate curriculum already was crowded [2,6].…”

“…Subsequently, various workshops were organized at different locations in the USA, where college and university professors were provided with adequate knowledge to include failure cases in their curricula [2]. These workshops were also held in various other countries, like Costa Rica and China [2].…”