The Charles de Gaulle Airport Collapse
The Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, France is the largest airport in France and the second busiest airport in Europe. Every year, millions of passengers and hundreds of thousands of flights depart and arrive ...
The Hindenburg Disaster
By 1937, giant hydrogen airships were sailing through the world’s skies, ferrying thousands of passengers across oceans and continents. These airships, also called zeppelins, promised quicker transport times than ...
The Sinking of The Titanic
It’s an old adage that sometimes the unthinkable happens. Well, sometimes the unsinkable happens too. In the early morning hours of April 14, 1912, the largest luxury passenger liner ever built...
The Chernobyl Disaster
The town of Pripyat in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine was new, pleasant and boasted both prosperity and job security as the location of the advanced, modern Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant ...
Lessons Learned: The Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC)
Unlike the Twin Towers, WTC 7 was not directly hit by an airplane, yet it collapsed completely, making it the first known instance of a tall building brought down primarily by uncontrolled fires. This article aims to explore the structural causes behind the collapse of WTC 7 from an engineering perspective.
BP Refinery Explosion
The vapor cloud found an ignition source - most likely a running vehicle or a spark from a nearby contractor's trailer - and ignited. The resulting explosion was equivalent to approximately 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of TNT, and it was felt up to five miles away.