Welding lessons learnt from a recent failure

摘要

The Southern African institute of steel construction (SAISC) is a trade organization representing and looking after the health and wealth of the greater structural steel industry in South Africa. One of our major objectives is to ensure the steel structures are easy to design to modern codes and standards and by disseminating this material and training ensure that only "good" steel structures get built. From time to time we come across situations where good lessons can be learnt due to unfortunate experiences of others. In the case at hand, a collapse of a major steel structure occurred. SAISC is not there to judge who, why or what was the cause but rather to identify good "lessons" where practicing engineers can benefit from and hopefully never fall into the same trap as others before them. What follows is my opinion as to what happened in a failure some years ago. Even if I am not totally correct as to the actual causes of failure (as in most engineering failures there are numerous items that contributed to this failure situation) there are numerous design based and construction issues from others may benefit.