Engineering Questions That Fall Through the Cracks: An Engineering Inquiry Framework (EIF) for Identifying Hidden Hazards

Despite decades of advances in engineering standards, process safety, hazard analysis, accident investigation, and computationalmethods, major industrial accidents continue to occur. These incidents persist despite substantial investments in safetysystems, engineering analysis, operating procedures, regulatory oversight, and lessons learned from previous failures.One important aspect of engineering practice is not consistently treated as an explicit engineering function: systematicallygenerating, screening, assigning, transferring, resolving, and closing the governing questions that direct analysis and decisionmaking.A governing engineering question is one whose answer can materially influence safety, reliability, operability,maintainability, performance, cost, or project success.The Engineering Inquiry Framework (EIF) treats engineering analysis as a recursive process in which significant answersgenerate additional questions. Because this branching process can rapidly produce more lines of inquiry than can reasonablybe pursued, engineering judgment is required to identify the relatively small number of questions most likely to govern theoutcome.Representative engineering questions and historical incidents illustrate how the framework can strengthen engineeringjudgment during design, analysis, peer review, hazard evaluation, troubleshooting, and system modification. Its centralcontribution is prospective: rather than relying primarily on accident investigation to reveal which questions should havebeen asked, the framework seeks to identify those questions before failures occur.