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From Lessons from the Malahide Viaduct collapse, a post-mortem on the serious failure of the main Dublin-Belfast railway line here in Ireland in 2009:
This failure is a reminder of the mundane but typically critical role played by human factors in structural collapse. By 2009, it appears that the knowledge and information relating to the scour susceptibility of the Malahide Viaduct resided in the heads of a number of individuals who had left the [Iarnrod Eireann engineering] division, rather than in a formal system that was accessible to the engineers responsible for the structure. In an era where the concept of a ‘job for life’ is becoming more uncommon, and with engineers moving ever more frequently from job to job and role to role, often taking corporate knowledge with them, this failure highlights the very real risks faced by asset management organisations, due to the threat of corporate memory loss.
(via Brian Scanlan)
Tags: memory-loss memory institutional-memory corporate companies organisations history malahide iarnrod-eireann ireland rail engineering post-mortems via:bscanlan reports