HARDING MEMORIAL LECTURE | BTS
WHY DID THAT HAPPEN – FAILURES BELOW GROUND
Mike King of MK Tunnelling Limited provided the Harding Memorial Lecture to the British Tunnelling Society a year ago. This meeting report was prepared by Mike King and a longer version of the paper will soon be made available on the British Tunnelling Society web site
INTRODUCTION When a failure occurs, there is a tendency to blame an external environmental culprit (often the ground) and then progress through an aggressive adversarial dispute to determine where the fault lies. Blaming the physical world around us does not align
with the general experience of why failures occur, where it is often demonstrated that it is people that make the mistakes - it’s simply part of our human nature. And our culture also needs to change if we are going to take any real advantage of learning from failures, rather than burying causes in confidentiality agreements and legal bureaucracy. As we already know, we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes, but our systems do not support this adage and we are therefore not taking advantage of important learning opportunities.
WHAT IS A FAILURE OR AN INCIDENT? For the purposes of the discussion, it was considered that the following definition could be used to describe an incident or failure: An unacceptable difference between the expected and
the observed performance, or a failure to follow a process or to meet a required result. The key words here were considered to be ‘difference’
and ‘meet required result’, in other words things did not turn out as expected. This opens up a very wide range of possible events that could be considered as a failure - from minor water leakage to catastrophic structural collapse and a fatality. The majority of the project data on failures that is readily available concerns some sort of collapse, had a significant impact on cost
and program, or was an event that significantly affected third parties. This is not surprizing because they are the incidents that attract news coverage and capture the public imagination. Although the discussion was therefore based upon this type of incident, it should be remembered that ‘failure’ can also apply to the less newsworthy incidents that affect projects on a more regular basis. Not all incidents or failures get recorded, or at least
do not get reported beyond the confines of the project. Some of the more obvious reasons for this include: ● Too minor an impact. ● Unpredicted event, but no impact upon the project. ● Confidentiality agreements limiting open discussion. ● Developing issue over the longer term outside of any contractual requirements.
In addition, the combined effects of some projects’ remoteness and all of the construction activity that has been undertaken before the development of the internet or social media is likely to have limited the spread of news in many cases. This limits the pool of data to incidents that have been reported widely through the press or at conferences but shouldn’t restrict the consideration of general causes to just that group. Unfortunately, we can also add to the above list
the fact that a fatality, if not the result of another cause affecting construction, has not historically been measured as a failure.
THE DATA The main existing and publicly available sources of data on failures are listed in the references 1, 2 and 3.
Table 1: Fatalities within the construction industry (10 year periods) Year
1982-1991 1992-2001 2002-2011 2012-2021
Workers 1284 850 612 376
Public 113 50 46 45
Total 1397 900 658 421
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