Guidance
Lessons learned
Anonymised accounts of incidents, near misses and jobs that did not go to plan — and what the profession took from them.
Published by the Institute · reviewed
As an industry, demolition can do more to talk about lessons learned: before a project, during it, and after it. The knowledge exists — it sits with the engineers who were there — but it rarely travels beyond the firms involved, and so the same failures recur across the sector.
This library exists to move that knowledge. Every entry is anonymised before it is reviewed: the submitter’s identity is held separately from the record and never published with it. No firms are named, no projects are identifiable, and nothing here is an apportionment of blame.
Building the library. The Institute is seeding the library from its own material and from member submissions, each reviewed before publication — contribute one.
Browse by category
Recent entries
The first reviewed entries will appear here once approved for publication. Members can already submit accounts, named or anonymous, from the members’ area.
What a full entry contains
The account
Each published entry sets out the context of the works, the condition of the structure as found, the planned sequence and the point at which the plan and the reality diverged. It is written by or with the engineer involved, and reviewed by the Institute before publication.
The engineering
Where the lesson turns on a technical point — a load path, a temporary works assumption, a plant selection, an isolation that was not proved — the entry sets that point out properly, with the reasoning. This is the part that stops the same failure happening on someone else’s site, and it is the part that is usually missing from how the industry talks about incidents.
What changed
What the team did differently afterwards, and what the Institute would recommend more widely. Where an entry has implications for published guidance, that is stated.
Contribute
Submit a lesson
If something on one of your projects taught you a lesson worth passing on, the Institute wants it. Submissions are anonymised before review — your identity is held separately from the record and is never published with it, and you decide whether the Institute may come back to you with questions.
You do not need to be a member to contribute, and you do not need to have all the answers. A near miss that was caught is as useful as an incident that was not.