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While collecting this short list of engineering disasters, I decided that to qualify as a disaster, an event had to involve loss of life, and the larger the loss of life, the larger the disaster. This ruled out a couple of famous engineering snafus, such as the "swinging" Tacoma Narrows Bridge that suffered a wind-induced collapse in 1940 (as seen in this famous video). It also disqualified NASA's loss of the $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 that made it close to Mars before an engineering mistake in not converting pounds of force to newtons doomed it.
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An engineering disaster also had to hinge on engineering. This ruled...