About 20 years ago, I wrote the following: “What do you see? You see the ruins of a building. It has burnt down. There are pathetic little burnt bundles of bits strewn around everywhere. And the coroner (the coroner!) is there. He’s investigating what could have possibly caused this three-alarm, fifty-engine fire. Which hideously burnt to death over 200 people, many of them children. He steps forward to, say, Arnie, who is emerging from the ruin.

“‘Yessir!’ Arnie knows what it was, and so do you; it was . . . an electrical fault. ‘Yup. Seems the guy who designed this building didn’t take account of . . . the possibility . . . of an electrical fault.’ Arnie and the coroner nod grimly. ‘When these wires shorted out, would the fault cause a fire?’ The guy just hoped it didn’t happen! And, as you and I and the TV know, boy, was he found out the hard way (look at all those burnt bundles).”

I wrote it to illustrate the ‘hollywood effect’, whereby the incompetence of engineers, in this case electrical engineers, is a given. I wrote it to show it was wrong to assume that electrical engineers were, in fact, incompetent. I hoped to bring to the attention of the public that a great deal of thought went into electrical installations and that an ‘electrical fault’ is very unlikely.

The wheel has turned. Three years ago, I was asked by a property owner to inspect the electrical installation in a building. My inspection showed that there were a number of defects. Oddly, some cables were too small for the current they were expected to carry and some too large. The power supply from the municipality was way too large – the building could never draw all the power available. The installation was, in fact, quite well done.

It was time to have a beer with the electrical contractor, who I knew from many years before. Off the record, he told me that the whole building’s electrical design had been done by a person who called himself or herself an ‘electrical engineer’ but had no qualifications at all, not even matric. So, I got the electrician to give a price to make the whole thing safe, gave it to my client and forgot about it. However, on a recent site visit, I saw the same thing: the same design errors, the same over- and underdesign and, yes, the same so-called engineer. I went to discuss the matter with my client and, I swear, he said: “Perhaps you’re wrong” – meaning that the so-called engineer was right and I was wrong.

My client went on to explain that I came from a “different era” and he said that, in my time, we designed and built things like a Rolls-Royce or a Mercedes-Benz when what was actually needed was a simpler vehicle. He wagged his finger at me: “Value engineering! That’s the way!”

Well, I thought, to carry the motor vehicle analogy further, he has a car that has a 900 kW gas turbine engine and a 10 ℓ fuel tank and runs on bicycle wheels made from titanium. So, I let it go. But how, I asked myself, can his grasp of reality be so unhinged? I think it is because, in this time of connectivity and smartphones and apps, just about anything seems possible. Nobody really needs to know how things connect together and how they work. If something is working, it is assumed that it is okay and well designed. If it stops working, then all you need to do is find the app or appropriate ‘workaround’.

There is no concept that something has been built with fundamental flaws and can still be working. My structural engineer friend and I were drinking the other day. I asked him if it was all falling apart. Yes, he said. In Cape Town, there were at least two bridges he would never drive across. This is because they were designed by somebody who knew nothing about bridge design and had just adapted a previous bridge design. Probably true. But a sobering thought.