CLIMATE CHANGE RISKS MUST NOT BE UNDERESTIMATED

摘要

Every so often a news story halts you in your tracks and makes you stop for a moment - and not in a good way. Recent ones that come to mind are the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the collapse of Polcevera Viaduct in 2018 and the Florida International University footbridge failure, also in 2018. As we were finalising the pages for this issue, news broke of another such incident - the fatal derailment of a Scotrail train near Stonehaven, in which three people sadly lost their lives. In this issue we have news of the opening of the replacement Polcevera bridge - now named Genova San Giorgio - and in May we learned that planning for a new Florida International University footbridge is in progress. The public inquiry into Grenfell continues. The civil engineering profession must learn the important lessons from all of these incidents and must go on learning from its mistakes not only to honour those who have lost their lives, but for engineers to progress as professionals. I describe all these events as incidents, not accidents as that implies that no one was at fault and that is rarely the case. It may not be one simple mistake that results in a fatal infrastructure incident, it could be a series of them that results in an unfortunate outcome, but spotting just one of those triggers could prevent future fatalities.