With the need to learn from ‘near misses’ being one of the outcomes of the recent forensic engineering conference in London, this book offers a good start by providing a useful selection of failures as well as ‘near misses’ of concrete structures. The author's undoubted expertise in design and construction with concrete, attained over half a century of working experience with a major consultant in the UK, is evident from the introduction right through to the end. Three features of the book are critically appraised below.
The author has contributed to most of the structural design guides produced by the concrete industry, as well as the reinforced concrete detailing guide of the Institution of Structural Engineers. This makes the advice offered in abundance in the book invaluable indeed. Examples include many cases that prove the importance of detailing reinforcement properly and interpreting design codes appropriately.
As expected, most of the things that can go wrong with concrete are covered in the book, including design, detailing and construction errors and combinations thereof. Nevertheless, as human error appears to be present in most cases where failure is caused to occur, lessons learned from human error could have been analysed further.
It is appreciated that failed projects are not named in the book; however, some of these failures are already publicised around the world and there is a lot of information about them on the web. It would therefore have been beneficial for the reader if these well-known failures had been named and properly referenced for further reading. This would also have increased the number of references, which is particularly poor for a book.
Although this reviewer agrees with the author that training is required to improve the quality of concrete structures, it is disappointing that there is no reference to forensic engineering in the book. After all, forensic engineering drives learning from failures and then using the lessons learned to prevent future reoccurrences. Overall, the reviewer enjoyed reading this book and recommends it to colleague students, practitioners or academics with an interest in failures in concrete structures.
