Catastrophic Failure

A catastrophic failure is a sudden and total failure of some system from which recovery is impossible. Catastrophic failures often lead to cascading systems failure.

The term is most commonly used for structural failures, but has often been extended to many other disciplines where total and irrecoverable loss occurs. Such failures are investigated using the methods of forensic engineering, which aims to isolate the cause or causes of failure.

Read more about Catastrophic Failure:  Structural Failure, Catastrophic Failure in Centrifugal Pumps, Computer Failure

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