From causing a whole massive lake to dry up to buildings toppling over,
here are unbelievable expensive engineering mistakes
Shanghai Lotus Riverside Complex
In 2009, The Lotus Riverside Apartment complex collapsed in a dramatic fashion and toppled over almost completely intact. This brings a lot of concern with the safety standards in China and how their rush to modernize so quickly might result in catastrophes like this one. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither should these apartment complex building. You can only imagine the horror if people were actually living inside! The building was almost completed but construction workers were told to dig underground garage. The ultimately caused the tower to completely topple over and the soil near the bank of the river to become unstable. The government imposes safety checks on construction sites, but something obviously went wrong here and it cost them the life of one worker. The collapse of many structures in China have been often linked to corruption. It’s safe to say the inhabitants in the nearby buildings must a little weary.
Chernobyl
Arguably the worst nuclear disaster of all time took place in the near the Soviet town of Pripyat and the land here will never be the same. This was classified as a class 7 nuclear disaster and no one saw this coming until it was too late. This image here shows the explosion that happened at the Chernobyl power plant, on April 26, 1986 on day that would forever change history. Even after 30 years goes by, this place still extremely radioactive. Dust of the explosion sent harmful particles all over europe, with chernobyl being the epicenter. This image here shows the eerily abandoned control panel of reactor number 4 and it looks completely consumed by dust.The it’s cost over 250 billion dollars to clean up and much valuable land would become the victim. Certainly a costly miscalculation on someone's part.
The Ford Pinto
The pintos will forever go down in history as being one of the most costly and unsafe engineering blunders. It was mass produced and people were lining up to buy this cheap alternative to othe r cars at the time. The pinto was designed with a vulnerable gas tank near the rear bumper. Something such as a fender bender had the ability to ignite the fuel that was being leaked out. Any type of sparks that were made from the impact, resulted in huge flames. Further collision tests were done which show how frightently flammable it was. The final recall called for 1.5 million vehicles Pinto’s reputation was too damaged to ever make any kind of comeback
Abay Dam
If you build something on your territory that could negatively affect surrounding countries, should they still have the right to do it? This dam is Ethiopia has created tension with neighbors such as Egypt and Sudan over rights to the water of the Nile River. This could turn out to be a huge mistake in the future, considering the nile has always been Egypts main source of water. People from around the world have invested in this project which costs over 4 billion US dollars. Countries like China have heavily invested in Ethiopia’s infrastructure recently and another drought in this country could seriously set them back in to drought and feminine. On the other hand, this hydroelectric dam could make Ethiopian fairly wealthy with agriculture, a surplus of water, and plenty of power. Egypt is expected to be completely out of water in 2025 so we imagine someone here won’t be happy. Any mistake on the dam could have a huge consequences. Media companies like aljazeera have openly mocked this project. Sudan is trying to stay neutral. Sounds like the countries need to get together and have a dam talk.
Just a little too Wide
341 trains in france were produced in 2 years and the company SNCF has paid a ridiculous amount of money for. It cost them roughly 68 million dollars to fix the mistake on top of the price already. Some person just wasn't using their rulers correctly and the trains turned out to be too wide to operate on the train tracks! This kind of error should not have happened and we imagine someone had to have lost their job because of this one! They either had to fix the trains or fix the rails and they chose the rails.
