Engineering Catastrophes (2018– ) User Reviews

It's not rocket science.

[usswiteks · 6/10 · 15 May 2020]

I'm not a rocket scientist, but anybody who was around when the Apollo 13 disaster happen knows parts were not used from previous Apollo missions. Absolutely impossible! Why you say? Because only and I do mean only the Command Module comes back to earth! With the astronauts and moon rocks, if any, Everything else is either discarded, ie: first stage, second stage, LEM, in outer space. Or burns up in the atmosphere, take note-THE SERVICE MODULE-.A so called " repurposed part

Not really a review but calling out totally misleading film usage (I miss the discussion forum)

[OlLineRebel · 7/10 · 4 September 2019]

Being a lifelong native of the Baltimore area, I know a bit both what has happened and what film is showing. S2E7 Sins of Ghost Vegas includes long section on Baltimore sewage.

I am very familiar with the massive flood footage they showed. That was filmed toward Catonsville, only several miles from me, and that is the same storm that a second time rubbed out my very nearby Ellicott City in 2016, Memorial weekend, NOT February. Never mind that Catonsville is on the outskirts of the city, not very close to subject Jones Falls and does not empty to it at all. JF goes from north right through the city to the harbor; Catonsville on the west side of the city.

Maybe that is not the point, but it really is misleading and disingenuous to conflate images that have nothing to do with the narration. Makes me wonder how much I can rely on the other episodes.

A superb series

[gdcox · 7/10 · 10 August 2019]

From the point of view of enthralling and educating the public this is an extraordinary series.It also hits high spots in terms of variety, pacing and photography, graphics and human content / sensitivity. Should be compulsory viewing for all politicians and senior civil servants, as well as employed and civil engineers and consultants for cases outside their specialisms .

The name you have for this show is not that of the team tht created it. Thye call it (see Britespark Fims web site)

[gdcox · 7/10 · 10 August 2019]

The name you have for this show is not that of the team that created it. They call it Massive Engineering Mistakes. So please don't criticize them for channels using the word Catastrophy. Also to other reviewers, you should not comment on just the talking heads since the rest of the show is of high educational value and you will put people off.

American Engineers please

[ssanders-04560 · 6/10 · 12 January 2022]

Pretty interesting show. All of the content is in the US except for the last part of every episode is in Europe. Every engineer has a unpronounceable name and a heavy foreign accent. Wouldn't it be nice to have American Engineers on an American TV show filmed in America?

Must watch for Civil Engineers

[armstronggfg · 10/10 · 16 April 2020]

As a Professional Geotechnical Engineer, I'm certainly biased but I think this show is fantastic. The before and after visuals complete with detailed but not overly technical analysis and explanation of so many civil engineering failures - and the resulting effects in the design and construction industry - really brings perspective to your career.

Background music.

[melshowell · 8/10 · 8 July 2021]

Love the show but please discontinue the background music with the narrative, annoying as hell.

Unrelated "experts" are a catastrophe

[waynewec · 5/10 · 20 December 2018]

Why would anyone consult with a bio engineer on a dam failure? Or a freaking nanochemist on the topic of civil engineering? It's insultingly bad, especially when you consider they had a "civil engineer" make some comments on a previous topic of the same episode. Could they not be bothered to have the civil engineer talk about the failure mode of the concrete spillway? Or have the chemist talk about the rusting of bridge supports? But at least they tell us super important things in the narrative. Like Mr. "Physicist," "...for engineers this is bridge heaven" I'm very glad to have had an expert tell me that. Wow. So important to know. Besides the cancerous "experts" the show manages to be a worthwhile watch. The narration is quite well executed and topical, and the technical details of the narrative, while being a bit layman, suffice to document the "catastrophe" in question. Overall, a show worth watching while browsing the internet and there's nothing better on - if you remove the "experts."

Great series on what we failed and how we triumph after!

[sameera858-641-937836 · 9/10 · 14 August 2021]

What a wonder gem of a series we have here! Production team has spent lot of time visiting these tragedies and looking for clues.

Documentary is easy to digest even for a regular person.

Great series and waiting for more to come!

Loose the idiot "experts"

[byrdml · 3/10 · 4 March 2019]

As an engineer with 35 years experience, I find their "experts" both laughable and horribly cast.

Insultingly Bad 'Experts'

[auophir-45107 · 2/10 · 12 February 2019]

This show would be halfway tolerable if they got rid of the idiot millennial 'experts' from every field under the sun. What does a twenty-something "neuroscientist" know about engineering?? A biochemist? Added to which, their resident engineering 'expert' is (forgive me) so astonishingly homely it's impossible to look at the screen (sorry, Corina). Good God, just ditch these spurious 'experts' and give us a decent show. What happened to the Season 1 format? At least that was entertaining.

Horrible commentary

[gabrielskinner · 3/10 · 25 May 2019]

Disjointed and scripted commentary by experts from seemingly random fields chime in every 30 seconds on the particular segment. If you're going to give these non-actors a script to read just have one person do it. It's terribly distracting to have five or six different experts give a scripted response about the same thing.

Still waiting for a real catastrophe, or even a definition thereof.

[robbotnik2000 · 3/10 · 1 February 2019]

This four part series was a major disappointment. For one thing, it does not meet the average person's criteria for either disaster or catastrophe. For another, it provides only scant hard information or visual documentation for the actual failures. For a third thing, the hand waving 'explainers' are labeled but are rarely of a profession related to the technical problems they are hand waving about. Probably half of the items discussed concern buildings and roads built over unreliable, sliding, or soft subsurface material. These are not really satisfying engineering disasters so much as poor decision making on the part of the funders. There was a case of a building put together with human leg sized bolts which apparently degrade in place, then break and fall many stories to ground level. How about an example of even one of these broken bolts. Save your time, save your money, watch something else.

Goofy looking so-called professionals

[michaelpflaumer · 3/10 · 18 February 2019]

It's really hard to take people serious that can't keep themselves from physically looking like idiots. Nobody wants to get thier info from somebody that resembles Krusty the clown (corina kwami).

Experts on this show NOT experts

[chrisporcelloengineering · 1/10 · 5 August 2021]

As a licensed Professional Engineer with over 35 years of experience, I find this show laughable with a twenty-something girl who is supposed "Infrastructure Expert" and a guy who is supposedly a "structural" engineer making ridiculous and inane comments like "...to engineers a 4 inch difference is a lot on abridge like this..." Really? That's your take on why 35 people died? I would enjoy watching if a "real" expert presented factual information on why the collapse occurred.

Misleading series title

[FilmCurator · 1/10 · 1 November 2019]

This poorly written series is a joke. Repeticious narration backed up with nonsensical so called experts. It's dificult to take this seriously when their idea of an engineering catastrophe is potholes in a city., with the story backed up by neuroscientists and physicists....what the hell! Stupidity like this show is the reason I cut off my cable in 2001. Tv is just utter garbage nowadays.

There are no Engineering Catastrophes

[scott-26216 · 2/10 · 12 September 2019]

The basic problem with this show is that there are no engineering catastrophes. There are only management catastrophes. Those who hold the purse strings are totally responsible. Scott Jackson, PhD

Please lose the commentary in between!!

[daveReviewsMovies · 1/10 · 6 March 2023]

I like the subject matter. But please stop it with the people reading scripts. Don't insult us. We know that's what they're doing. Additionally, they're saying nothing. For example, one of them had the narrator mention controlled demolition types, and then one of the annoying experts just said the same thing "usually it's done where it's not near people". Yeah, we know.

Discovery, this format sucks. Not only is it insulting , annoying and pointless, but it's actually pushing me away. Judging by other reviews, people are going to stop watching en masse, and good luck making money after that. Shame.

Series is not to be believed

[imdb2014-966-222839 · 3/10 · 27 April 2024]

S4E4 "Terror in Texas": At 5:20 into this episode is a scene that shows fire pillars and huge plumes of black smoke towering over the 'hills and mountains of Texas City'?

Texas City, Texas is coastal prairie. There are no hills nor mountains in this part of Texas. I don't know where the producers found this footage or who they expected to fool, but, those of us that have lived on the Texas Gulf Coast for decades know better!

This is as bad as John Travolta, in Urban Cowboy, exiting his trailer (allegedly set in Pasadena, Texas -- next door to Texas City) with the background full of mountains. Not reality!

Sometimes seemingly, sneeringly outside "experts".

[tsn-48730 · 1/10 · 24 August 2023]

In a lot of ways it's good to examine failures in past engineering failures, especially when human lives have been lost, much the same way we examine airplane crashes to make changes so they never happen again. That said in this program they always seem to find witnesses who have the least expertise to contribute either because they're not experts who were actually there or because they were involved in the rescue and gave a narrow point of view as far as what the actual engineering failure was. Or as witnesses they have an axe to grind.

Of course there's also there's also the occasional absurdity like the man who says he was walking his dog in the middle of the night during the Florida condo collapse (or at least he claims he was a resident? (yeah...uh huh...)) and for his appearance on TV decided to dress in a comic relief type outfit. I tend to question the credibility just a tad?

The also have some engineers who when discussing the failures in engineering that caused the failure seem to revel in them. Especially one man, Greg Szulgit, who seems to always be on the verge of actually giggling in delight at the mistakes that the architects and engineers made, no matter how many lives were lost. Mr Szulgit always shows extremely poor taste and should be removed from the show for an obvious lack of compassion. Delighting in the failures of other engineers may be acceptable in private where he works, but making it so obvious that you are fighting to keep the grin of contempt off your face when people have died, sometimes many people, is extremely cold and just makes a him look like a nerdish jerk who belongs in a lab environment only. There's just something wrong with someone always coming across as near giddy about any disaster caused by even the genuine mistakes of others.