Catastrophic failure is a sudden and total failure of some system from which recovery is impossible. The affected system not only experiences destruction beyond any reasonable possibility of repair, but also frequently causes injury, death, or significant damage to other, often unrelated systems. As such, catastrophic failures often lead to cascading systems failure. A cascading failure is failure in a system of interconnected parts, where the service provided depends on the operation of a preceding part, and the failure of a preceding part can trigger the failure of successive parts. ...

The term is most commonly used for structural failures, but has often been extended to many other disciplines where total and irrecoverable loss occurs. Such failures are investigated using the methods of forensic engineering, which aims to isolate the cause or causes of failure. Forensic engineering is the investigation of materials, products, structures or components that fail or do not operate/function as intended, causing personal injury for example. ...

Structural Failure

Examples of catastrophic failure of engineered structures include:

• The Tay Rail Bridge disaster of 1879, where the center half mile of the bridge was completely destroyed while a train was

crossing in a storm. The bridge was badly designed and its replacement was built as a separate structure upstream of the old. Original Tay Bridge from the south) The Tay Bridge (sometimes unofficially the Tay Rail Bridge) is a railway bridge approximately two and a quarter miles (three and a half kilometres) long[1] that spans the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between the city of Dundee and the suburb of Wormit...

• The Tacoma Narrows Bridge of 1940, where the main deck of the road bridge was totally destroyed by dynamic oscillations in a 40 mph wind.
• The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse of 1981, where a suspended walkway in a hotel lobby collapsed completely, killing many people on the structure and those below.
• The Space Shuttle Challenger of 1986, in which an O-ring of the rocket booster failed, and the entire structure was lost,
• The Space Shuttle Columbia of 2003, where damage to a wing caused at take-off caused total loss on re-entry
• The Banqiao Dam failure of 1975 and other dam failures

so how we can fix it The Tacoma Narrows Bridge is a mile-long (1600 meter) suspension bridge with a main span of 2800 feet (850 m) (the third-largest in the world when it was first built[1]) that carries Washington State Route 16 across the Tacoma Narrows of Puget Sound from Tacoma to Gig... View of the lobby floor, during the first day of the investigation The Hyatt Regency hotel walkway collapse was a major disaster that occurred on July 17, 1981 in Kansas City, Missouri, killing 114 people and injuring more than 200 others during a tea dance. ... The launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission 51L/STS-33, the 25th of the STS (Space Transportation System) program, began at an estimated time of 16:38:00. ... The STS-107 crewmembers strike a ‘flying’ pose for their traditional in-flight crew portrait in the SPACEHAB aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. ... The Banqiao Reservoir Dam (Chinese: ; pinyin: BÇŽnqiáo Shuǐkù Dàbà) and Shimantan Reservoir Dam (Chinese: ; pinyin: Shímàntān Shuǐkù Dàbà) are among 62 dams in Zhumadian Prefecture of Chinas Henan Province that failed catastrophically in 1975 during Typhoon Nina. ...

Computer Failure

The term catastrophic failure is occasionally used in computer software to indicate an unexpected error from which the system cannot meaningfully recover.

See also

• Structural failure
• Structural collapse