Engineering: Engineering Disasters

These resources are useful for background information in understanding types of engineering disasters, approaches to their mitigation, and lessons learned.

Videos
Modern marvels: More engineering disasters (2011)

Engineering disasters (1999)

Great disasters (2006)

eBooks

• 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.
• 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.
• Schlager, N. (1994). When technology fails: Significant technological disasters, accidents, and failures of the twentieth century. Gale Research.
   

Print Books

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

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

I recommend these specific search tools and websites when searching for information on a specific engineering disaster incident.

• 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.")
• OnePetro has articles about oil spills.
• JSTOR is helpful for finding information on older disasters, from around the time they happened.
   
• 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.