Engineering Catastrophes

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.

From the point of view of enthralling and educating the public this is an extraordinary series.It also hits high spots in terms of variety, pacing and photography, graphics and human content / sensitivity. Should be compulsory viewing for all politicians and senior civil servants, as well as employed and civil engineers and consultants for cases outside their specialisms .

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?

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."

Being a lifelong native of the Baltimore area, I know a bit both what has happened and what film is showing. S2E7 Sins of Ghost Vegas includes long section on Baltimore sewage.

I am very familiar with the massive flood footage they showed. That was filmed toward Catonsville, only several miles from me, and that is the same storm that a second time rubbed out my very nearby Ellicott City in 2016, Memorial weekend, NOT February. Never mind that Catonsville is on the outskirts of the city, not very close to subject Jones Falls and does not empty to it at all. JF goes from north right through the city to the harbor; Catonsville on the west side of the city.

Maybe that is not the point, but it really is misleading and disingenuous to conflate images that have nothing to do with the narration. Makes me wonder how much I can rely on the other episodes.