He's neither a Nostradamus of engineering failure nor a psychic service you can dial for bridge-safety predictions, but Henry Petroski may be the closest thing we've got. Petroski is a professor of civil engineering at Duke University and design guru who has extensively studied—and sung the praises of—spectacular design failures, saying they lead to major progress. This was the subject of his book Success through Failure.
He's also known for popularizing the theory that there's major bridge collapse every 30 years; extrapolating from the West Gate Bridge disaster in 1970, the world was due for another major collapse in 2000. It seems we may have gotten it only seven years late. He theorizes that bridge collapses happen approximately every 30 years because that's how long it takes a new generation of engineers to emerge and then ignore the old lessons, to disastrous results.
