Mistakes Young Engineers Make-Ignoring the Basics of Load Paths 

Why Understanding Forces and Stability is Non-Negotiable 

One principle lies at the heart of all civil engineering projects- all loads imposed on a structure must have a route to the ground. It sounds simple, almost obvious, yet many young engineers underestimate just how critical this concept is. Civil engineers are held to a higher standard than most other professions. More than design and build, civil engineers must adapt and create solutions to rapidly emerging challenges.  

Structural engineers must ensure that every beam, every slab, every column, every connection will successfully transfer loads from where they act, through the structure, and ultimately into the foundation and the soil below. This chain of force transfer is called the load path. If that path is continuous and reliable, the structure stands. If it’s broken or misunderstood, failure is inevitable. Understanding and correctly designing these paths is critical to ensuring a structure’s stability, prevent overloading of specific components, and avoiding failure.     

In classrooms, load paths are often presented in idealized diagrams — arrows neatly moving through beams and columns into perfectly rigid supports. Even in most projects you will work on as a professional, load paths are relatively straightforward. For example, in high rise building, the load traverses through the slab or floor to primary beams, to the columns and down to the foundations. In bridge, the structural load is transferred from the deck to the piers and down to the piles or foundations.  

In other cases, the load path is not so simple and is harder to design for. If the structure is irregular, meaning it has a non-uniform distribution of mass, stiffness, or strength, or geometrically discontinuous configurations, or when dealing with dynamic forces like wind, earthquakes, or moving vehicles, then it its load path becomes more complex. In an atrium, for example, the load path is transferred sideways.  

Young engineers who ignore this complexity risk designing systems that work on paper but fail in practice. It’s not enough to know how to size a beam; you must know how that beam connects to the slab above and the column below, and how those columns transfer loads into the soil. Stability is not a local problem — it’s global. 

A structure is only as strong as its weakest link, and ignoring the basics of load paths is how those weak links slip through unnoticed. It is important to determine what will happen if a load cannot follow an expected load path. If one load path is missing will find another. In a suspension bridge with corroded wires, it will transfer load to others. If remaining wires can’t handle added stress, progressive overloading occurs, leading to cable failure and extra strain on surrounding cables. 

Case Examples of Failures Due to Oversight 

History is full of sobering reminders of what happens when load paths are neglected. Most failures occur will structure is being constructed or altered. The designer needs to know that either the load path they have determined can accommodate the loading, or that a temporary support can be installed to withstand these loads until the structure reaches its permanent state.  

Here are a few notable failures.  

The Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse (Kansas City, 1981): This was caused by a late design change to a connection detail during construction. The initial design was to have continuous steel rods running from the ceiling to support the 2^nd floor walkway then to traverse to the 4^th floor walkway. The manufacturer proposed instead to use a separate set of steel rods to simplify assembly. Now, the 4th-floor walkway was now directly connected to the ceiling via rods. This meant the 2nd-floor walkway was suspended from the 4th-floor walkway.   

The oversight disrupted the intended load path, leading to a sudden collapse that killed 114 people and injured over 200.  

Here was a failure to carefully trace how loads would move through the revised design. Had they done so, they would have realized that it doubled the load on the 4th-floor box beam’s hanger rods. The box beam became the sole support for both walkways, causing it to split open, slip, and trigger the progressive failure, leading to the disaster. The continuous rod design would have avoided this problem.    

(The Sampoong Department Store Collapse load path, Seoul, 1995): Columns were altered and weakened to make space for escalators and air-conditioning units, ignoring how these modifications disrupted load paths. When the roof slab cracked under the load of air conditioning units, the entire structure crumbled, killing more than 500 people. The department store building used a flat slab system, meaning the loads were transferred directly from slab to column, instead of through the beams.  

The mistake was failure to consider that the concentrated load would cause a ‘punching-shear’ type failure to occur via the column to slab.  The columns of the 5^th floor, were oriented directly above those below, as would normally be the case in most such structures. This meant the load from the 5^th floor columns went directly to the slab below. Furthermore, the slabs did not have adequate thickness or reinforcement standards. This caused a reduction of capacity to carry the loads and the excessive weight by the live loads caused by people above.  

Everyday Failures on Smaller Projects: Even if they don’t make headlines, engineers see countless cases where a missing connection detail or a misjudged foundation load path results in cracked walls, uneven settlements, or beams that sag long before their design life. These may not be catastrophic, but they are costly — and entirely preventable. 

The common theme in these failures is not ignorance of equations, but the failure to trace forces through the structure with care and skepticism.  

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