Practical Engineering
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2026
18:27 · 5.4M views · May 18, 2021
Practical Engineering summarizes the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure, explaining the engineering details behind the incident. It also discusses how operators and regulators failed to keep downstream residents safe.
Pointed to as a detailed engineering walkthrough of a major dam incident, and as a parallel to software failures.
3 comments from Hacker News
Practical engineering has a good detailed walkthrough of what happened at Oroville dam from an engineering perspective: this video
> making it default is often a huge waste of $ for problems you/most don’t have. It's the opposite — knowing the exact spec of your program up front is vanishingly rare, probably <1% of all projects. Usually you have no clue what you're doing, just a vague goal. The only way to find out what to build is to build something , toss it over to the users and see what happens. No developer or, dear god, "stakeholder" can possibly know what the users need. Asking the users up front is better, but still doesn't help much — they don't know what they want either. No plan survives first contact with the enemy and there's no substitute for testing — reality is far too complex for you to be able to model it up front. > You don’t iterate the foundation of a house. You do, actually. Or rather, we have — over thousands of years we've iterated and written up what we've learned so that nobody has to iterate from scratch for every new house anymore. It's just that our physics, environment, and requirements for "a house" doesn't change constantly, like it does for software and we've had thousands of years to perfect the craft, not some 50 years. Also, civil engineers mess up in exactly the same ways. Who needs testing? [1]. Who needs to iterate as they're building? [2]. [1]: this video [2]: this video
I know how to operate a hose! How hard can it be to manage a large stream? It's "just" more water: this video