It Would Be Scary…

…If there were no engineers in the world, we would be living in a very different, very scary place. Of course, there are all types of engineers, but the ones I am talking about are the ones that design our buildings, roads and bridges. First and foremost, the primary focus of these engineers is the safety of those that will be using the buildings, roads and bridges that they are designing. Without engineers to determine what must be done to make them safe, havoc would ensue.

Half of all bridges would fail, skyscrapers would tumble under their own weight and roads would be riddled with potholes, cracks, puddling, extreme curves and more which would all contribute to some seriously scary driving conditions. Imagine if our roads were all laid down with no engineer work done ahead of time to determine that they would be safe and operate in such a way for a certain period of time. It would all just become guess work. Constructions agencies would most likely begin over-constructing their buildings, roads and bridges which would create huge costs… all because no one would be sure just what was needed.

Just look at the recent Minnesota bridge collapse that happened. Dozens of lives were lost due to poor engineering judgment. Well just imagine if there were no engineering judgments at all. I would venture to guess there would be bridges collapsing every single state and a lot more frequently. For every piece of poor engineering judgment, there are hundreds of good engineering judgements made that SAVE lives. That is an engineers job. Some people dont knwo that engineers even use what is called a safety factor (often called a fudge factor) to account for the possibilty of any unseen variables that could cause a problem.

Without engineers, the world would be a much more uncertain, unsafe and unhappy place. Next time you are cursing the engineers for something that you see as a mistake, remember that without them, things would be a LOT worse and the vast majority of what they do indirectly saves lives everyday. If there were no engineers, it would definitely be scary.