Fixing the Blame: Organizational Culture and the Quebec Bridge Collapse

• Published in: Technology and culture 2004-07, Vol.45 (3), p.487-518
• Main Author: Kranakis, Eda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blame; Bridge engineering; Bridge failure; Bridges; Building failures; Canada; Civil engineering; Collapse; Construction engineering; Cooperages; Corporate culture; Cultural studies; Decision making; Design; Design engineering; Disasters; Engineering; Engineering education; Engineers; Failure; History of technology; Industrial design; Job descriptions; Judgment; Laurier, Wilfrid (1841-1919); Mountains; Organizational aspects; Organizational culture; Quebec; Railway systems; Rationality; Science and technology; Social history; Technological change
• ISSN: 0040-165X; 1097-3729; 1097-3729
• DOI: 10.1353/tech.2004.0137

The collapse of the Quebec Bridge in 1907 remains "one of the world's major structural failures," writes Eda Kranakis in "Fixing the Blame: Organizational Culture and the Quebec Bridge Collapse," one still studied by engineering students as an object lesson. But the common understanding of what caused the partially completed bridge to collapse is flawed, Kranakis argues. The Royal Commission that investigated blamed errors in judgment by two engineers, Theodore Cooper and Peter Szlapka, shaping a view of events that has prevailed ever since. But its conclusions are belied by a mountain of evidence collected by the commission itself during the inquiry and contributed by engineers and public officials subsequently. "The combined weight of this evidence suggests, rather, that the errors behind the collapse were rooted in the project's organizational culture." Kranakis links organizational factors to three crucial technical errors that the commission found to be responsible for the bridge's collapse, and uses that discussion to lead into the broader question of how organizations influence engineering. "One of the ironies of the Quebec Bridge disaster," she concludes, "is that the important organizational lessons it offeredÑalthough understood by many engineers and public officials at the time of the eventÑhave since been forgotten because later analysts accepted the Royal Commission's narrow interpretation of error and causation."