Safety is an important aspect for engineers regardless of their discipline. Electrical engineers, aerospace engineers, civil engineers, and mechanical engineers are each concerned with the safety characteristics of their projects and the level of tolerance that can be built into a project regarding failure. When loss of life-either singly or large numbers of fatalities-are a possibility, there is a direct relationship to the actions that engineers will take when designing or evaluating systems ("Safety Engineering," 2008).
Civil engineers have a particular interest in safety since the civil engineers design bridges, roads, and other infrastructure projects that have the potential for significant loss of life if they fail. There have been spectacular failures of civil engineering projects, including the Hyatt Regency hotel collapse in 1981 and the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940. "Galloping Gertie," as the bridge was known, was a suspension bridge whose failure led to new testing methods for vibration and aerodynamics for bridges across the country. These new testing methods incorporated wave phenomena and harmonics in their analysis (Zasky, n.d.).
The Hyatt collapse resulted in 114 deaths, more than 200 injuries, convictions of engineers who approved critical design changes, lawsuits totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, and changes in the ways that engineering design changes are to be reviewed and implemented. The changes resulting from the Hyatt disaster have improved safety procedures in the engineering field, but the convictions of individual engineers serves as a powerful reminder of the responsibility that civil engineers take on as a part of their profession ("Hyatt Regency," n.d.).
Safety cannot be separated out from the day-to-day functions of a civil engineer. Safety needs to be integrated in all of the functions that a civil engineer performs, whether design, re...