Logic and the construction industry do not always go hand in hand, so the industry, regulators and government officials often jump in to set limits on what a project owner and its design and construction teams can do on a project for the safety and health of the community, project and environment. Many teams complain and chafe under these restrictions but do little more. The best way to come out ahead in the long run is to step out front and lead the way with innovative ideas to make projects better and, at the same time, duck the threat of
These are scary times, and for those citizens living in earthquake country, the times are not just scary, they are terrifying. For starters, a major earthquake is overdue along the Hayward Fault, in the East Bay area near San Francisco: It could happen at any moment. San Francisco has 120,000 buildings, at least 90% of them erected before the adoption of modern building codes in the 1970s. Most won’t flat-out collapse in a city-centered earthquake the size of 1989’s Loma Prieta, but there will be damage beyond repair from the quake and ensuing fire to about a quarter of the
Reviewing and analyzing failures is a crucial element in engineering. As most experienced design professionals know, being able to identify the problem is most often more important than being able to implement well-known solutions. Fundamentally, failure analysis is the diagnosis of the root causes or underlying phenomena of results that are puzzling and costly, such as last year’s collapse of a coal-ash impoundment in Tennessee, or puzzling and tragic, such as the 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis. So why are too few students being exposed to this kind of critical thinking early in their engineering education?
Size does matter for construction folks who, by nature, like telling tall tales about how their project is the world’s tallest, longest or deepest. But the wildest reason ever given for a project malfunctioning has to be that offered for the shower of sparks and released cloud of super-cold helium when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched on last year in Switzerland: Some physicists believed a theoretical subatomic-particle called the Higgs boson (also known as the God particle), which scientists hope to create with the collider, would be so catastrophic to nature that its effects would ripple back in
The money now is flowing from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for a variety of construction projects, ranging from simple paving jobs to sophisticated energy-efficiency revamps of federal buildings. But something is missing—public support. The economic-stimulus funding bill that Congress passed in February allocated $787 billion for the overall economic mission, but only about $130 billion for construction. Tenn-TomWaterway Yet the most visible aspects of the stimulus are the construction projects, and the ones under way do little to lift people’s spirits, give them hope about the future or cause them to open their wallets and start spending again.
Too Early To Jump On Obama for Econ Woes I was greatly surprised by the recent editorial “Conflicting Obama Political Priorities Lead to Paralysis”. The writer of this contradictory editorial is obviously caught up in media-stoked emotion of partisan politics. Unfortunately, the several issues mentioned in this editorial are directly inter-related and linked to the economy. Any engineer worth his salt understands that our current economic problems cannot be adequately addressed without a comprehensive solution dealing with each of those issues. The previous and current administrations had no option but to prop up the large financial services companies, after seeing
The atmosphere has definitely changed in favor of some form of regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S. since the Democrats took control of Congress and the Presidency last November. On June 26, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454) by seven votes, and Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Sept. 30 introduced a Senate version that is even stronger. Related Links: For First Time, EPA May Regulate CO2 Against this backdrop is a proposal by the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the gases from coal-fired
Mike Vorster; 230 pages; $87.75 It is no secret that heavy iron is an important part of the industry. But even as the average heavy-construction firm has 35% of its assets tied up in machinery, decisions to buy new machines, rent others, rebuild old ones or scrap clunkers still happen in isolation of key business leaders. Veteran civil engineer and teacher Mike Vorster demystifies equipment in his new book, which he wrote to build bridges between the front office and the field. “What I hope is that this book increases the CFO’s empathy for fleet management,” he says. The South
Book Reviews: 09/30/2009 Chicago: A View From the Top By Ken Derry 112 pages; $29.95 Working a tower crane on the Trump tower in Chicago was an operating engineer’s dream. Ken Derry shares his unique and spectacular vantage point in a coffee-table book filled with 101 of the more than 700 “aerial” photographs he took during the three-year project. View Slideshow Derry’s book is a must-have for any enthusiast of architecture, construction and engineering. A 30-year crane veteran and shutterbug, Derry, 53, artfully illustrates the fear, guts, skill and pride it takes to build tall buildings. Seeing workers knock sheets
Why not a ‘genius’ award just for construction? The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Fellows Program, sometimes called the ‘genius’ award, annually gives 20 to 30 extraordinarily talented individuals an unrestricted $500,000 stipend, payable over five years. This year, the foundation for the first time has included a bridge engineer among its recipients—Theodore Zoli, from HNTB Corp. The 24 recipients come from all professions, ranging from photojournalist and painter to molecular biologist and applied mathematician. All are selected by a panel of secret nominators chosen by the foundation from a broad range of fields. This should be a
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