Alan Weisman's lovely book World Without Us speculates a bit about this, basically saying that more recently built structures would be the first to collapse because they've all be engineered so close to the line. Meanwhile stuff that already been standing for 100+ years like the Brooklyn Bridge will probably still be there in another 100 years even without any maintenance just on account of how overbuilt it all had to be in an era before finite element analysis.

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ortusdux 4 days ago | parent [-]

There was an aluminum extrusion company that falsified test records for years. They got away with it because what's a few % when your customer's safety factor is 2. Once they got into weight sensitive aerospace applications, where sometimes the factor is 1.2, rockets starting blowing up on the launch pad.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/aluminum-extrusion-m...

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aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4 days ago | parent [-]

Should have resulted in jail time. A monetary fine is no deterrent.

	▲	Scramblejams 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It did result in jail time. The linked document states that the testing lab supervisor was sentenced to 3 years. (Not sure how much of that time was actually served, apparently he was suffering from dementia.) More info: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/08/company_supervis... Also a correction to GP: They were payload deployment failures, they didn't blow up on the pad. More here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/nasa-finally-conclud...