| Cabrillo
College Library What's
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You can find lists of engineering disasters out on the Web. There are too many to make a comprehensive list, but here are some examples.
The library has about 15,000 electronic books. You can access these from off campus by typing in your library card number.
Here are two of the electronic books you would find if you searched for "engineering failures"
The Library provides access to many online databases. The one you will use most, probably, is Academic Search Premier -- it provides indexing for about 8,000 periodicals, and full text articles for just over half of those.
Another large periodical database is MasterFILE Premier. Try it out as well.
Look for newspaper articles that were published around the time the disaster occured and later. You can limit your search by time periods. Use the Advanced Search modes. For articles from the last several years, use ProQuest Newspapers (NY Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor)
For older articles, use the Historical New York Times
Here's a search for stories about the "Love Canal" disaster (carcinogens from a dump began leaking into a canal in Niagra Falls, New York). The story broke August 2, 1978. Notice the last line which limits the search to stories that refer to "love canal" published after August 1, 1978. (I left it open-ended, but you could specify a closing date if you wanted.)
Google is the "biggest and the best" search engine But, believe it or not, there are others that offer special features. Give these a spin:
You may want to look for pictures and images of your disaster. You'll run across some in Web searches you do. But here are other sources you can try:
How to Get to this Page on the Internet
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A
Practical Guide to Engineering Failure Investigation by Matthews,
Clifford London Professional Engineering Publishing, 1998. 
Case
Studies in Reliability and Maintenance, by Blischke, W. R., Murthy,
D. N. P. Hoboken, N.J. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2003. 
.
With the Advanced search screen, you can most efficiently
search more than one term at a time. Click on the little box next
to the word Full
text to limit your search to fulltext articles on the database.
