<p>It’s not <em>exactly</em> what you’re describing, but take a look at it because it might interest you anyway…</p>
<p>Forensic structural engineering (also called forensic engineering, failure analysis, or diagnostic engineering) was my gig for a couple of years before I decided I needed to learn more about how things are designed before I could figure out how things went wrong. The common path is civil engineering for undergrad and structural engineering for your masters degree (1.5-2 years), and then you start working for a failure analysis firm. You crawl around structural collapses and figure out what went wrong by working backwards from the ‘scene of the crime,’ so to speak… My old firm reconstructed TWA Flight 800, moved a lighthouse inland a few miles, investigated the collapse of the twin towers, examined the ENTIRE Boston Big Dig project for the State of Massachusetts, and figured out what happened with the bridge collapse in Minnesota. You can train to eventually do things like rappel from capital domes and shimmy underneath historic structures, and you never know when the big one will hit and you’ll have to go to SoCal and take pictures of rubble for a couple of months.</p>
<p>It’s a really interesting job, and while it’s not precisely what you have in mind, it’s a career that usually attracts the same sort of people as traditional forensic science, though not as many people are really aware that it’s a career option. PM me if you want more info.</p>