Venkatesh Rao wrote a blog post today Stress Failures versus Decay Failures. It reminded me of three other resources I recommend on how things break. The first is about how things literally break. For example, why the steel in the Titanic was brittle.
The other two are about how complex systems break.
A classicon the subject of complex systems failure is Systemantics (now known as The Systems Bible). I’ve been meaning to read it ever since Raymond Chen recommended it.
Somewhat relevant: The Birnbaum-Saunders distribution
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/apr/section1/apr166.htm