Archer Library: Engineering: Engineering Disasters

Choosing A Disaster

Videos
Modern marvels: More engineering disasters (1999)

Engineering disasters (1999)

Great disasters (2000)

Website
Learning from Building Failures is a compilation of building failures with summaries, from the Architectural Engineering Program at the University of Texas.

Online Books
Lancaster, J. F. (2005). Engineering catastrophes: Causes and effects of major accidents (3rd ed.). CRC Press.

Delatte, N. J. (2009). Beyond failure: Forensic case studies for civil engineers. ASCE Press.

Kletz, T., & Amyotte, P. (2019). What went wrong?: Case histories of process plant disasters and how they could have been avoided (6th ed.). Butterworth Heinemann.

Mahaffey, J. A. (2014). Atomic accidents: A history of nuclear meltdowns and disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima. Pegasus Books.

Penna, A. N., & Rivers, J. S. (2013). Natural disasters in a global environment. Wiley. Many examples, with discussions of engineering aspects.

Pfatteicher, S. K. A. (2010). Lessons amid the rubble: An introduction to post-disaster engineering and ethics. Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 2 describes some disasters that may be of interest.

Print Books
Lawson, D. (2005). Engineering disasters: Lessons to be learned. ASME Press.
Archer Library TA 169.5 L39 2005

Schlager, N. (1994). When technology fails: Significant technological disasters, accidents, and failures of the twentieth century. Gale Research.
Archer Library Reserve TA 169.5 W44 1994

Andrews, G. C. (2014). Canadian professional engineering and geoscience: Practice and ethics (5th ed.). Nelson Education.
Archer Library TA 157 A6825 2014 Note: Most chapters have case studies at the end, and many of these case studies are engineering disasters that occurred in Canada.

Finding Information About a Disaster

Quick Find can be used to find articles and books on specific disasters.

Google searches, although usually producing links to many web pages that are not suitable to be cited as sources, often do provide links to official reports and other useful documents.

Google Scholar is useful for finding scholarly articles, reports, and miscellaneous literature (gray literature) on specific disasters. (Before using Google Scholar, see "Changing Google Scholar Settings for Off-Campus Access.")

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has reports on transportation accidents in Canada.

The National Transportation Safety Board (US NTSB) has reports on transportation accidents in the United States.

The NASA Technical Reports Server has reports and articles on NASA accidents.

OnePetro has articles about oil spills.

JSTOR is helpful for finding information on older disasters, from around the time they happened.