Learning from Engineering Failures Part 2: Why Systems Thinking Matters
by Natalie Springfield, on September 19, 2025
At 9:47 PM on April 20, 2010, eleven workers died when the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The investigation revealed an important lesson for every engineer: this wasn't the result of a single failure, but a cascade of smaller issues whose sum led to catastrophe. The problem was fundamentally a systems failure.
The disaster was a textbook case of how safety margins silently erode and problems snowball. On the Deepwater Horizon, cement job integrity issues, blowout preventer maintenance gaps, and misread pressure tests each pushed the system closer to failure. Communication breakdowns between teams meant warning signs went unheeded until it was too late.
In our Beneath the Build episode, Dr. Allen Bowers, Director of Engineering and Chief Engineer at Geopier, asks, “What lessons can be learned from this incident which informs how diligent engineers, contractors and suppliers operate differently to mitigate risk?”
Engineering and construction never operate in isolation - whether the project is an oil platform, a highway or a skyscraper. In ground improvement work especially, soil conditions, foundation loads, and the structure itself are inherently interconnected. The ground improvement system works in tandem with the foundation to support the structure and each affects the response of the other. If assumptions are made by the ground improvement designer about the foundations or structure that are not true – or when the structural engineer is assuming something about the ground improvement system that is not true – seemingly little issues can aggregate such that a catastrophic failure results.
Using the Deepwater Horizon case study as a launching point, Dr. Bowers described how Geopier, a leading provider of ground improvement solutions, builds systems thinking into its ground improvement approach. Geopier’s culture stresses the need to communicate with the entire design team, evaluate assumptions, consider how the individual system components affect one another, and ultimately engineer solutions that integrate into the whole system—not just the soil beneath a project’s footings. This prevents small oversights from cascading into project- and life-threatening problems.
The takeaway: successful projects require more than strong individual components, they demand a proper understanding of how the individual components work together. Successful ground improvement solutions require more than the traditional siloed approach to engineering. They require professionals who understand system mechanics and are capable of developing synergistic approaches that minimize risk while optimizing performance. By learning from failures like Deepwater Horizon, we can better appreciate the importance of a systems thinking approach to engineering and design resilient solutions.
Watch this Beneath the Build episode with Dr. Bowers to see how these lessons shape stronger, safer builds.
The disaster was a textbook case of how safety margins silently erode and problems snowball. On the Deepwater Horizon, cement job integrity issues, blowout preventer maintenance gaps, and misread pressure tests each pushed the system closer to failure. Communication breakdowns between teams meant warning signs went unheeded until it was too late.
In our Beneath the Build episode, Dr. Allen Bowers, Director of Engineering and Chief Engineer at Geopier, asks, “What lessons can be learned from this incident which informs how diligent engineers, contractors and suppliers operate differently to mitigate risk?”
Engineering and construction never operate in isolation - whether the project is an oil platform, a highway or a skyscraper. In ground improvement work especially, soil conditions, foundation loads, and the structure itself are inherently interconnected. The ground improvement system works in tandem with the foundation to support the structure and each affects the response of the other. If assumptions are made by the ground improvement designer about the foundations or structure that are not true – or when the structural engineer is assuming something about the ground improvement system that is not true – seemingly little issues can aggregate such that a catastrophic failure results. Using the Deepwater Horizon case study as a launching point, Dr. Bowers described how Geopier, a leading provider of ground improvement solutions, builds systems thinking into its ground improvement approach. Geopier’s culture stresses the need to communicate with the entire design team, evaluate assumptions, consider how the individual system components affect one another, and ultimately engineer solutions that integrate into the whole system—not just the soil beneath a project’s footings. This prevents small oversights from cascading into project- and life-threatening problems.
The takeaway: successful projects require more than strong individual components, they demand a proper understanding of how the individual components work together. Successful ground improvement solutions require more than the traditional siloed approach to engineering. They require professionals who understand system mechanics and are capable of developing synergistic approaches that minimize risk while optimizing performance. By learning from failures like Deepwater Horizon, we can better appreciate the importance of a systems thinking approach to engineering and design resilient solutions.
Watch this Beneath the Build episode with Dr. Bowers to see how these lessons shape stronger, safer builds.