Engineering Catastrophes

Pretty interesting show. All of the content is in the US except for the last part of every episode is in Europe. Every engineer has a unpronounceable name and a heavy foreign accent. Wouldn't it be nice to have American Engineers on an American TV show filmed in America?

Disjointed and scripted commentary by experts from seemingly random fields chime in every 30 seconds on the particular segment. If you're going to give these non-actors a script to read just have one person do it. It's terribly distracting to have five or six different experts give a scripted response about the same thing.

Why would anyone consult with a bio engineer on a dam failure? Or a freaking nanochemist on the topic of civil engineering? It's insultingly bad, especially when you consider they had a "civil engineer" make some comments on a previous topic of the same episode. Could they not be bothered to have the civil engineer talk about the failure mode of the concrete spillway? Or have the chemist talk about the rusting of bridge supports? But at least they tell us super important things in the narrative. Like Mr. "Physicist," "...for engineers this is bridge heaven" I'm very glad to have had an expert tell me that. Wow. So important to know. Besides the cancerous "experts" the show manages to be a worthwhile watch. The narration is quite well executed and topical, and the technical details of the narrative, while being a bit layman, suffice to document the "catastrophe" in question. Overall, a show worth watching while browsing the internet and there's nothing better on - if you remove the "experts."

This four part series was a major disappointment. For one thing, it does not meet the average person's criteria for either disaster or catastrophe. For another, it provides only scant hard information or visual documentation for the actual failures. For a third thing, the hand waving 'explainers' are labeled but are rarely of a profession related to the technical problems they are hand waving about. Probably half of the items discussed concern buildings and roads built over unreliable, sliding, or soft subsurface material. These are not really satisfying engineering disasters so much as poor decision making on the part of the funders. There was a case of a building put together with human leg sized bolts which apparently degrade in place, then break and fall many stories to ground level. How about an example of even one of these broken bolts. Save your time, save your money, watch something else.

The name you have for this show is not that of the team that created it. They call it Massive Engineering Mistakes. So please don't criticize them for channels using the word Catastrophy. Also to other reviewers, you should not comment on just the talking heads since the rest of the show is of high educational value and you will put people off.