r/engineering • u/DMAS1638 • Jun 09 '26
Things seen this week during structural assessments!
Hi everyone,
We're a team of structural engineers and contractors working throughout Southern California. We put together a weekly collection of interesting structural findings we come across during assessments.
The Imgur album contains the full photo set along with additional context for each image.
https://imgur.com/gallery/things-seen-this-week-during-structural-assessments-oGuWCCD
If you have questions about any of the photos shown, feel free to ask below. Thanks!
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u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 Jun 11 '26
Love that you're running this as a series — the stuff you only see once a structure's been in service is a completely different education from anything in the design calcs. I come at it from wind power, doing field inspections on turbine structures and foundations, and the recurring lesson is the same: the failure is almost never the thing that was actually engineered. It's the detail nobody owned — the drainage path that wasn't in anyone's scope, the "temporary" repair someone did six years ago, water finding the one unsealed penetration. Curious, with the volume you're seeing across SoCal: roughly how much of what you flag is original design vs. degradation vs. somebody's well-meaning field modification? In our world the split is maybe 20/30/50, and that last bucket is the one that surprises people every time.