Learning from the Kolkata Overpass Collapse

On Thursday Mar. 31, around noon, the busy Rabindra Sarani-KK Tagore Street crossing in the city of Kolkata, India (population 4.5 million) was crowded with shoppers and people having lunch in open-air eateries.  Crowds that a Westerner would consider to be a mob scene are routine in the Indian subcontinent, and the density of street-level shops makes many thoroughfares almost impassible by automobile.  To alleviate this congestion, in 2008 the Hyderabad-based construction conglomerate IVRCL won a bid to construct an overpass that would carry vehicular traffic above the existing street.  Construction began in 2009 and was due for completion in 2012.  But the firm ran into financial and land-acquisition difficulties, with consequent project delays, and so last week one of the last parts of the projected 2+ kilometer-long overpass was still under construction above the street.

By Wednesday, Mar. 30, a long straight section of the overpass was complete, and concrete was poured that night for a section next to a turn at the crossing, where steel girders already were suspended above the road.  At about 12:25 PM Thursday, some 300 feet (100 meters) of the overpass collapsed onto the street below.  As of Apr. 2, the death toll stood at 27, but more were missing and over 100 people were injured. 

While the cause of the collapse is under investigation, the IVRCL firm has been charged with culpable homicide and three members of the firm have been arrested.  This is after one firm representative termed the collapse "an act of God."

The construction phase of any large civil-engineering project is fraught with hazards that only good planning and expert supervision at all times can avoid.  As a civil-engineering professor interviewed about the tragedy pointed out, right after a poured-concrete structure is set in place, the weight of the newly poured material must be supported by temporary scaffolding before the concrete sets.  In contrast to the finished product, which office-based engineers can design at their leisure to withstand known stresses, temporary scaffolding is erected onsite in an ad-hoc way, and may have hidden defects that would require more engineering knowledge to avoid than the onsite construction workers and supervisors have.  It was apparently one such defect that led to the disaster in Kolkata last week.

From videos shot during the collapse, it appears that few if any pedestrian or vehicle barriers were in place to keep people away from the construction site.  Admittedly, this would have been difficult, like temporarily shutting down Times Square in New York City for construction.  And businesses on the street undoubtedly would have complained if large sections of the surface street had been blocked off, impairing access to some shops.  But events have proved that the tradeoff would have been worth it, if excluding traffic from under the most hazardous parts of the overpass during construction would have saved lives.

While some commenters on Indian news sites complained that such things are never allowed to happen in the so-called First World, only a year ago I reported in this space about a similar but smaller-scale accident involving overpass construction, right here in Texas.  While a prefabricated-concrete-beam overpass was being built over the busy I-35 freeway near Salado, Texas, a truck carrying an overheight load struck one of the beams before it had been firmly fixed in place.  It shifted and knocked down several other beams, one of which killed the driver of a pickup truck.  Again, this accident could have been prevented by diverting traffic from underneath the overpass, but the result would have been permanent miles-long backups on I-35 that might have provoked angry citizens to mount a protest march at the Texas Department of Transportation. 

Any complex engineering project is a series of compromises with safety, expenses, schedules, personnel, and other resources all in the mix.  In the West, a relative abundance of resources has led engineering organizations to err on the side of more money traded for more safety.  In India, as the comparatively poor track record of fatal building and construction collapses attests, getting the project done cheaply sometimes takes priority over getting it done safely.  India is a democracy, and it may be that the current level of construction safety reflects an increased urgency to solve the nation's civil-engineering needs faster and with fewer resources than Western-style engineering would allow.  It is bad enough when a privately-owned building collapses.  But a public-works project such as an overpass inherently affects more people, and carries more potential for harm.  This is why most public-works project specifications require licensed professional engineers to supervise the design phase.  But the best designers in the world will be unable to prevent onsite accidents if the people who actually do the construction are not capable of understanding the hazards and engineering challenges involved.

At least three members of the IVCRF firm have been arrested in connection with the tragedy and charged with culpable homicide.  The degree to which they are responsible is now going to be determined by the legal process, which may take months or years.  Regardless of the fate of the engineers and managers involved in this accident, to prevent future tragedies like this a sea change will have to take place in the entire construction industry in India. 

I have mentioned before a simple safety code that was once emblazoned on bronze plaques in Bell System telephone exchanges throughout the U. S.:  "No job is so important and no service is so urgent—that we cannot take time to perform our work safely."  That was back when the Bell System was a monolithic nation-like organization, and it could afford hundreds of bronze safety plaques.  But everyone working in a business that creates potential hazards for its own employees, and especially for innocent bystanders, can afford to make the Bell System safety creed their own.  And something like this could go a long way toward making Indian construction sites and buildings safer places to be.

Sources:  I referred to reports on the Kolkata overpass collapse carried on the National Public Radio website at http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/02/472797620/after-overpass-collapse-in-kolkata-firm-charged-with-culpable-homicide, ABC News at http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-02/indian-authorities-arrest-three-more-over-bridge-collapse/7294848,

the Times of India at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Kolkata-flyover-collapse-Its-an-act-of-god-says-builder/articleshow/51634766.cms, The Week at http://www.theweek.in/news/india/what-caused-kolkata-flyover-collapse-experts-speak.html, and The Wire at http://thewire.in/2016/03/31/photo-gallery-after-the-kolkata-flyover-collapse-26961/ and http://thewire.in/2016/04/01/kolkata-flyover-collapse-18-dead-over-60-injured-26907/.  My blog article http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-bridge-too-close.html,

"A Bridge Too Close," about the I-35 accident appeared on Mar. 29, 2015. 

Should Engineers Be Licensed?

Not long after I chose electrical engineering as a major in college, someone asked me if I was planning to take the EIT exam.  What was that?  It stands for “engineer in training” and it is the customary first step in obtaining a Professional Engineer (PE) license.  To the best of my recollection, it didn’t cost that much and I went ahead and took it, not so much because I wanted a license but because I was the kind of nerd who couldn’t turn down a chance to see how well he did on standardized tests.  By the time I graduated, I had learned that you had to “practice” for a specified number of years to take the next exam to become a full-blown PE, and in the meantime I had not been able to find anyone who could tell me what good it would do to have a PE license.  So I dropped the whole thing.

Doctors and lawyers in Texas, just to choose a state I’m familiar with, must have licenses issued respectively by the Texas Medical Board (a government agency) or the State Bar of Texas (a private organization authorized to grant licenses to practice law).  You can go to jail for practicing medicine without a license, and the penalties for violating legal codes of ethics include “disbarment,” which effectively ends your career as a lawyer.  But the codes of ethics of most engineering organizations do not have the force of law, and the great majority of practicing engineers are not licensed, at least not in the U. S.  (The laws of many other countries for licensing engineers more closely resemble those of the medical and legal professions here in the U. S.)

Why can you practice engineering without a license here, but not doctoring or lawyering?  The doctors and lawyers have to answer for themselves, but it turns out that for engineers, every state (that I know of, anyway) has something in their laws concerning the engineering profession called an “industrial exemption.”  The gist of the exemption is this.  If an engineer works for a private firm whose products are sold outside the state where the engineer is employed, then the state regulations don’t apply.  The federal government is not in the business of licensing engineers, so that is the reason why you don’t need a PE license to work as an engineer in most firms.

The industrial exemption doesn’t cover everyone.  Public works such as roads, bridges, and buildings that are all in one state are not regarded as interstate commerce, and so many engineers working for certain civil-engineering firms must sign off on plans as licensed engineers.  Also, there are situations in which engineers who work directly for the public, such as consulting engineers, find it helpful if not essential to be licensed.  And there is the prestige factor of being able to list “P. E.” after your name, but that’s a pretty silly reason by itself. 

The National Society of Professional Engineers, for one, would like it if every engineer were licensed.  That organization performs a function similar to the state bars for lawyers, in that it operates the examination system for licensing of engineers and investigates alleged cases of unethical behavior by engineers.  However, the power to revoke licenses lies not with NSPE, but with the state boards of professional engineers who issue a person’s license in a given state. 

All this seems rather obscure and complicated, but most political things are.  Would we be better off if the federal government, for example, issued engineering licenses, and no one could be hired as an engineer even by a private firm without possessing such a license?  That is similar to what’s happening in the medical profession today, as more and more doctors join clinics and hospital-run HMOs rather than try to make it alone in private practice.

If such a thing were to come about, there would be some good effects and some bad effects.  The good effect, for engineers, anyway, is that average salaries for engineers would probably increase, simply because the supply of engineers would go down while the demand stayed the same.  However, a bad effect might be that universal licensing requirements for U. S. engineers might encourage the ongoing trend to outsource engineering to countries outside the U. S.  Of course, you could try passing laws about that too, but you might succeed only in making an entire firm wash its hands of the U. S. altogether, if it got too expensive to do engineering here.

Would we enjoy better-engineered products under a universal licensing law?  Somehow I suspect that competition and quality control give us products that are the best our money can buy most of the time already.  Microscopic state control of every aspect of manufacturing, from engineering to marketing and distribution, was tried for decades in the old Soviet Union.  And the products that resulted were not renowned for their attractive characteristics, although there were exceptions. 

Much later in life, when I was contemplating a move from Massachusetts to Texas and wanted to get a job teaching in the latter state, I found out that some schools encouraged their applicants to have a PE license.  So I looked into what would be involved in getting one in Massachusetts.  It turned out that for someone with enough years of experience, you could avoid taking an exam altogether and simply assemble a lot of documentation on your career and appear in person before the state board of licensure.  I did so, and I remember one of the members asking me if I intended to practice engineering or just teach it.  I told him frankly what my reasons were, and he said something like, “Well, if that’s all you’re going to do with it, I guess it’s OK.”  So I walked out of the hearing with a PE license, which I have maintained to this day.

 As it happened, nobody much cared at Texas State University (or Southwest Texas State, as it was called then) whether I had a PE license or not.  But the certificate looks nice on my wall, and I get to put “P. E.” after my name, for what that is worth.

Should every engineer be licensed?  On the whole, I think such a law would cause more problems than it would solve, even for the engineers who might think they would benefit from the restricted market of engineering talent that would result.  But at the same time, I think it is a good idea for every engineer at the start of his or her career to consider becoming licensed, because it can’t hurt you, and it might help both you and the people you are obliged to serve.

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia article “Regulation and licensure in engineering” and the websites of the Texas Bar Association and the Texas Medical Board.