Practical Engineering
Media
https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel
Overview
Grady Hillhouse is a civil engineer in Texas whose channel explains the infrastructure nobody notices until it fails: dams, levees, water treatment, the power grid, bridges, roads, sewers. Each video builds a tabletop model in his garage, a sand dam, a clear-walled pipe, a miniature spillway, and uses it to show the mechanism, and the failure, in a way a diagram cannot. He also covers real failures, from Oroville Dam to the Texas grid, with the published investigation reports in hand. His book Engineering in Plain Sight came out in 2022.
Notes
The models are the point. Hillhouse shows soil liquefying and a spillway undermining itself rather than describing it, and the viewer comes away understanding the mechanism rather than remembering a fact, which is the distinction I draw under Knowledge. His failure analyses are also quietly instructive about how complex systems break: slowly, through several small decisions, and never because of the single villain the news prefers.