EG2401 Tutorial 310th September 2015

Anisha MathewKarunya Venkat

Tiancheng Li

Q1. Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse

Causes?

Overload?

Design issues?

a) Causes of the collapse

- Change in the design due to constructional difficulties (design error: overloading of beams for holding up the second and the fourth floor walkways)

- Lack of communication between Jack Gillum and Associates, and Havens Steel (misinterpretation of preliminary sketches as the finalized drawings)

- Failure to detect the flaw in the design (placing of bolts in the weakest structural point in the box beams)

- Added weight of party guests

b) Type of accident

- Human error and negligence

- Factual error regarding the design

- Prevention of accident: 1. Prior to Construction – Peer review, frequent

meetings and complete communication/understanding between both parties, adherence to the given design

2. After Construction – Maintenance Checks

• Party responsible for approval of drawings – Engineers from Jack D. Gillum and Associates

• Party responsible for ensuring that all applicable building codes are adhered to – The Board of Professional Engineers

• Party responsible for ensuring that construction follows drawing specifications – Havens Steel

Q2. Ford Pinto

a) Acceptable design in Engineering Practice? - Because it was a conventional and approved design used then.- Design: Gas tank and rear axle separated by only 9 inches- However ‘safety first’ was not considered

b) No, it wasn’t sufficient as it still put human life in jeopardy. Even though, risk-benefit analysis was taken into account, it failed to address the value of human life and focused only on the monetary benefit.

c) Management failure (Engineering design, even though vulnerable to risks, was approved by the federal code)

d) No, it’s not entirely appropriate to the the cost-benefit ratio as that takes into account only monetary benefits and not the societal benefit. Also, it doesn’t take into account human and emotional characteristics which form the basis of human safety before all.

‘Balancing Approach to Negligence?’

The balancing approach assumes that if an accident has a very low probability, and there is a cost associated with preventing it, a defendant is not liable if he does not take precautionary measures.

Relates back to the Ford Pinto Case!

Q3. Drug Testing

Company A being a large manufacturer of medicinal drugs will pump in large amount of capital into research, followed by in-house drug testing.

Implications of publishing unfavorable results in journals:- Loss of face value in the Market- Loss of customer trust- Showing the wastage of huge amounts of money (into

research)

Implications of publishing all results:Additional implicit regulation on the research of drugs, leading to an inadvertent increase in the quality of drugs tested and produced.

Consumers will be fully aware of the potential risks a particular drug entails, regardless of how trivial the test results may appear. Details of side-effects will be given.

For example: A certain drug after being tested has a 0.01% chance of inducing harm to a fetus when consumed by a pregnant patient. The above proposal would include this piece of information to all consumers, thus ethical in ‘right to information’ ( in agreement with right ethics)