> The lack of documented concern from the contracted engineers about the inconsequentiality of the cable pullouts or the safety factors between Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the failure is alarming.

This is crazy. Basically cables were pulling out for months and years and no one raised the alarm? In many industries that could be a criminal or career ending malpractice. Are the "contracted engineers" liable?

In chapter 5 they go into how the ownership was transferred to the University of Central Florida (UCF) at the start of 2018, after the hurricanes in 2017.

It seems unlikely that UCF had adequate time and resources to review and understand the Arecibo Telescope's original 1963 design, the 1974 upgrade, the structural inspection and maintenance records produced for nearly 50 years, [...] and the key factors, such as the wire breaks and cable pullout of the sockets and their significance on the strength and integrity of the structure.

The measured cable pullout may have appeared "normal" to [the UCF staff] and was not on their radar as signs of structural distress. The lack of concern may be because a small cable pullout was present from the beginning, and no one in authority had previously raised an alarm

But yeah, seems weird no-one of the contractors tried to raise an alarm.

I bet there’s a r/MaliciousCompliance in Spanish out there somewhere about how UCF cancelled existing maintenance contracts and hired new companies to keep an eye on the equipment, and did it so rudely that the old company didn’t hand over important warnings like this.

Discontinuity could explain problems like this readily.

These are Professional Engineers, not your run of the mill fake 'engineer' in software development. They have licenses and certifications. They don't just ship bugs. When they say that something is fine, it is fine. They have certifications. They have licenses. They are professionals. If something failed, it must have been management. Professional Engineers do not make mistakes. They are real engineers.

I wouldn't overinvest your confidence in these licenses and certifications. A "Professional Engineer" is just a Bachelors level engineer who took one extra test. It's extremely common for MechE and CivE. As far as certifications go it's not quite the same as, say, passing the bar exam or finishing med school.

But it is different than that cert you receive after taking a 2 week bootcamp on Python.

> A "Professional Engineer" is just a Bachelors level engineer who took one extra test

At least for mechanical, it's 4 years' working experience, documentation of sufficiently advanced projects, and sign-off from 3 other registered professional engineers who are familiar with your work.

A guy I worked with took the mechanical design variant. I don't know how the HVAC variant is. The test is over the most advanced stuff you learn in your degree; the "specialist" portion of the test (what your concentration is in, e.g., HVAC, thermal/fluids, or machine design and materials) is ~25 questions and you have 4 hours to complete it, in addition to the other 4 hour comprehensive portion that's the same for all takers.

On top of that, to keep your license, you need to complete some amount of classroom education every year.

As far as coursework goes, the coursework for some of my upper-level mech E classes was usually identical to a graduate-level course, the only difference being graduate students do a research paper+experiment for a final exam and undergrads do a traditional written exam since they had access to funding and we did not.

imo this comment is dismissive and glosses way too heavily over the rigor that goes into even the "lowliest" of engineering programs.

This is how PEs should be certified. Sadly, licensure of PEs varies by state.

In Florida, the title of "software engineer" requires a license. To obtain the license, you only need to pass the national engineering (I forgot the exact name of the organization) exam for software engineering. The national exam was withdrawn some years ago. I wrote the Florida Engineering Board about it, suggesting that they needed to update the requirements.

Their response? Florida doesn't distinguish between PE specialties; prospective software engineers should just get a PE license in another field. They suggested electrical engineering.

So in Florida, the PE signing off on your buildings's wiring might be a chemist, or the PE supervising a bridge construction might be only trained in electrical engineering.

Texas has a similar thing going on (technically), but you still have to pass an NCEES[0] exam, which is not easy.

Also, if (in Texas) you stamp something outside of your area of expertise and it comes up in a review, it's viewed as if you never had the stamp in the first place[1]

[0]: https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/

[1]: https://pels.texas.gov/downloads/lawrules.pdf - rules 133.97(b) and 137.59(b)

> Professional Engineers do not make mistakes. They are real engineers.

My _literal_ engineering 101 case studies on "engineering failure":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge

Are all failures traced down to the underlying design and engineering. Granted, they are famous because they are rare. I almost linked the Columbia disaster but that is sufficiently murky between engineer and management.

Stop being elitist.

This one wasn't long ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...

Btw, the cult of the professional engineer is apparently much stronger in Canada, to the point I've actually impressed women by calling myself a software engineer despite the lack of iron ring. I wonder if this makes up for them being paid peanuts?

I think people are missing that you're being satirical (maybe there is a better word for it?). Unless I'm the one being wooshed.

I agree. Maybe on the internet we really do require /s just to make sure everyone understands, but it looks to me very much sarcastic.

It's 100% sarcasm. The capitalization should have made it obvious to anyone. The only place I've seen struggling with recognizing sarcasm is hackernews.

Software developers are very sensitive to being attacked as 'not real engineers' and it turns off the humor detector.

Every time that somebody calls me a software engineer I correct them that I'm a software developer. The word engineer has specific meaning and unless an accredited university gave you that title you should not be using it.

I realize that HN has many actual software engineers, but it seems like every frontend dev today calls himself an engineer. Even on the Laravel website, the default job title for new members is software engineer.

In most fields, there is a distinction between an engineer, who designs solutions, and a technician, who implements them. It is a bit blurred for software as it is common for one person to do both the design (an engineer job) and the code (a technician job), in fact, it is common for the design to be expressed in code. And because of the two, the title of engineer is the more prestigious one, they are all engineers.

I remember seeing technician jobs for programmers (not "developers"). The difference was that engineers were expected to have a masters degree (5 years) while technicians were expected to have a associate degree (2 years). The contract also was different, usually with a fixed schedule and a lower pay excluding overtime, as any overtime was expected to be paid. But for the job itself, there was essentially no difference between a junior engineer and a technician. Now, listed technician jobs are becoming rare.

Note that it is in France, where degrees matter more than in the US and employment is more regulated, the distinction probably wouldn't be as meaningful in the US.

> The only place I've seen struggling with recognizing sarcasm is hackernews.

I honestly don't know if this is sarcastic or not...

Anyone in the field will likely say that they wouldn't trust half of their colleagues or themselves.

It's pretty much how professional prestigious positions work. Beneath the gilding there's duct tape repaired with super glue.

That's how software works. But professional engineers are professionals. They have certifications. They have an iron ring. It's real.

I'd like to live in the world you imagine we live in.

Are you Canadian? I thought I was making a joke upthread about Canadians having a weird unearned respect for engineers, but apparently it's actually true.

As someone who works in a company with 10,000+ professional engineers*: yes, yes they do make mistakes. Despite what you seem to think, they are actually human beings. Good processes understand this and have multiple layers to catch and correct mistakes. But it's hard to fight limited data. Plenty of engineering decisions are still made based on numbers in photocopied tables from two or three studies from 50 years ago, each having a dozen or two data points. It's surprising how limited some of the data is that these Professional Engineers are basing their decisions on.

*Edit: okay, I don't know exactly how many are officially PEs vs. junior engineers or something, but at least that many are "PE-track".

They are not saying engineers don't make mistakes.

They are complaining that developers who can crank out garbage with no consequences and take home $200k+ aren't respected as much as civil engineers who have to get licences and suffer accountability and take home less.

The poor baby.

I'm not sure by your tone if this is sarcasm, but it has been shown by formal proof that if something failed the root cause must be an MBA.

The Minneapolis I-35W bridge that collapsed in 2007 supposedly had bad gussets. Yet it had barely passed previous inspections; in 2005 it was deemed to have met "minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as it is".

In 2005 the US said it was in the same condition as 75,000 other bridges in the US: 'structurally deficient', which is also what the US called it in 1990. I'd guess that the same quality of decisions brought down Arecibo. Gotta pay the piper.

But that would have required spending money. And why would the engineers be liable? They weren't being paid to fix it.

You go to school and learn that 2+2=4. You get a consulting job and learn 2+2= whatever the client says it is.

I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the consulting engineer was incompetent. Sometimes a bureaucrat tells you to sharpen your pencils and come back with the answer That fits the budget they have if you want to keep your professional services contract going.

They specifically stated a lack of documented concern by the engineers. First thing you learn as a contractor is CYA.

Yea and that's a violation of professional ethics. Being corrupt or working for a corrupt organization in no way justifies it. Professionals are trusted by society to act responsibly even when it's against the interests of their clients or employers.

Specially licensed professionals.

If only you knew how bad things really are.

However bad they are, it's the fault of the engineer. You can't excuse that with "but everyone does it".

Since the design had a factor of safety of 2, and no other cables exhibited pull out at such high safety factors, checking such things might not even have been on the checklist.

> Basically cables were pulling out for months and years and no one raised the alarm?

And what if they did? Then what? My guess is the conversation went something like this:

"Okay, cables are pulling out. Raising this issue will not magically make money appear to fix it as nobody wants to fund this. Tell me, how much do you like your job? If you flag this, you may lose your job directly and if the project gets shut down you may lose your job indirectly. So, how about we bury this as much as possible, cross our fingers and bank as much money as possible in the meantime, eh?"

It creates a paper trail that transfers liability from the individual to their employer, which then incentivizes them to make it safe somehow, even if that means shutting down and demolishing the whole thing. Better that than somebody getting killed.

Hmmm. I was just looking this over a couple of days ago.

On Nov 19 2020, NPR was already reporting that "Sean Jones, Director for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate at the NSF, said the telescope will be dismantled. ... after receiving ... the engineering assessments, we have found no path forward that would allow us to do so safely..." https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936677582/world-renowned-arec...

In retrospect, it seems that, -at its age- the design got in the way of repairs. The scope made possible a lot of great finds in its day, but it'd become too weak to save.

And further:

The reliance by the consultants (before and after the first cable failure in 2020) on a perceived allowable pullout of one-sixth of the cable diameter, which should only be seen at loading at 80 percent of ultimate cable strength, does not align with the AASHTO M 277 standard guidance. The committee, therefore, disagrees with the suggestion made in the Thornton Tomasetti, Inc. (TT) 2022 report, Arecibo Telescope Collapse: Forensic Investigation,13 to use the D/6 limit as a threshold for slip monitoring.

Sounds like it was a blind spot for the engineers due to the normally bulletproof service history of zinc spelter cable terminations in structures.

>normally bulletproof service history of zinc spelter cable terminations in structures.

They're relatively new, they're relatively expensive (which saves them from being used in the worst of the applications) and like most things inherent to steel cable and whatnot they tend to get employed in situations where safety factors are generous. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

I am not an expert, I read this in the report: The long-term zinc creep failure of the Arecibo Telescope sockets and the subsequent cable pullout has never been documented elsewhere despite a century of zinc-filled cable spelter sockets use. 17 The type, size, length, and fittings of the cables used in the Arecibo Telescope (whether the original cables constructed in the 1960s or the auxiliary cables installed in the 1990s) were catalog-selected items, not at all unusual, with decades of proven performance. Exten-sive structural modeling of the Arecibo Telescope, independently confirmed by laser cable sag surveys, validated that under all static and cyclic loading conditions, the cable loads barely exceed half the nominal cable strength. While PLC can occur at stresses well below yield, such a creep failure has never been reported in spelter socket zinc.

I think we might need to send some microbiologists to do their own forensics.

You have a mechanical failure that can’t be seen in the labs and isn’t reproducible at other sites. Suggests something environmental.

Like when natural fiber army gear starts dissolving in the jungles of Vietnam.

Could be direct action, or a side effect of a chemical in plant or animal detritus. Like pigeon poop on car paint.

The paper posits that it’s due to low frequency electromagnetic induction in the tethers from the observatory operations, which is a pretty unique environmental factor.

Oooh.

Active galvanic action will ruin your day.

Not galvanic action, apparently, but rather a sort of phase creep within the zinc as a result of putting some of it in an excitation state. They aren’t sure though, as there hasn’t been much research on the topic.

> Exten-sive structural modeling of the Arecibo Telescope, independently confirmed by laser cable sag surveys, validated that under all static and cyclic loading conditions, the cable loads barely exceed half the nominal cable strength.

I have a feeling such measurement and modelling might have been wrong.

It's easy to miss some oscillation mode, particularly high frequency longitudinal wave's in the cables, which couldn't be picked up by a laser survey due to the kilometers per second these waves travel.

I would be curious if there are any accounts/reports of people working there - especially engineers - that could verify the claims of no alarm being raised when the first structural failures started showing up. It is often the case that people on the ground report such things but when "reports" are written for the higher ups, facts get "massaged" according to expectations.

Bearers of bad news get shot.

Everyone working in large corporations knows this.

being a bearer of bad news is a sign that you are not disagreeing and committing.

I was on the suspended section about a year before collapse - everyone could tell it was about to fail. Visible stress in rusty beams, old cables, and failing concrete. I think it just came down to underfunding at the end of the day - there was no money available to ask for even if the alarms were louder.

And for most applications it was obsoleted by the larger new telescope in china, so there was no large push to turn that ship around from the wider scientific community.

Is this flaw something an LLM could have caught? (Or do I have an inflated understanding of their abilities?)

I think absolutely not, for several reasons. First off, the report mentions this failure of the zinc filled sockets never been reported elsewhere before.

Secondly, even if it had, the report mentions that written documentation of inspections and so on was spotty and inconsistent.

That said, if the failure mode had been published before, and inspections and maintenance was written down in a consistent and detailed manner, then perhaps an LLM-based tool could have linked the two. I'm thinking of a RAG-like search thing that compared inspection reports with published documents. Alternatively just assisting a human in finding relevant published reports.

As a sailor that uses similar fittings in sailboat rigging… the idea of not treating a cable pullout from a terminal as an emergency is absurd. If that happened on a sailboat rig I’d assume it had a remaining strength of zero and will fall in seconds or less- and take the most rapid possible action to keep the structure from coming down by deloading the shroud and rigging an emergency replacement.