Engineers Week turning ideas into reality

The close of this series was intentionally saved for National Engineers week! Sneaky, right?  These Civil Engineers are clever and adaptable as proven by the evolution of processes and tools we use.
While rigid standards from more or less applied theory was helpful and useful as this industrial nation connected with rail lines, highways and utlities to support not only industry but the workers and their families.  Push-back and the demands for more sensitivity to environmental issues, future economic prosperity and healthy communities through broad and expansive community outreach lead to changes in policy leadership as well as educational training.  Policy shifts from NEPA to the new Livability/ SmartGrowth and Community Partnership signal shifts in the importance of collaboration and the triple bottome line.  Forty years ago environmental engineering (a topic within Civil Engineering) was emerging just as sustainability is emerging in university curriculums today.

Specifically Context Sensitive Solutions, a brand of design and alternative analysis process looks deeper than prescribed standards and back to theory for determining how  to build solutions that fit 21st century sensibilities.  As we celebrate Engineers Week with it’s popsicle stick bridge centerpiece for highschool competition, we know that this new crop of engineers will learn how to make that bridge from sustainable materials, less intrusive and fit within the local context and applying sustainable construction practices.  It just makes sense and as CH2M HILL’s Jacque Rast will say its’ not only fun but creative.

Happy 60th anniversary National Engineers week.

This year, my E-week started with a construction tour put on by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) San Jose Branch on Saturday at Moffatt Field in Mountain View (aka NASA) of a new “Sustainable NASA” office building.  The building we toured will be LEED Platinum, consume 25% of the energy a comparable office space would consume, has bioswales and low maintenance plants for landscaping, and will measure the amount of energy used down to individual cubicles!

Tour Group at NASA

Tour of NASA Building

Another great program that I will be using when I visit the Burke School in San Francisco next week to do an engineering activity with middle school girls is the Engineer Your Life campaign.  It’s a great campaign that promotes the field of engineering to girls in a positive way, and strives to eliminate the stereotypes that so often deter girls from pursuing a career in the field.  I’m also happy to be participating again in the annual Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) conference at Contra Costa College at the end of March.  EYH is about exposing math and science careers to girls from the East Bay that wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to meet someone from a related field.

EYH 2010

CH2M Hill is a proud sponsor of E-Week.  Most US offices will be planning outreach events for this week.  Contact the local office to find out if the office in your community is planning a local event!

Western Region Younger Member Council

February 11-12th was the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Western Region Younger Member Council (WRYMC) Conference in Costa Mesa, California.  WRYMC brings together younger member leaders from ASCE’s west coast Regions (8 & 9) for professional development, council business, networking, awards, and technical tours.  Attendees were from Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.  Sessions included “Supercharge Your Career – Career Development for Younger Members” and “Connecting With People.”  Saturday afternoon also included technical tours of the John Wayne Airport Expansion and the Orange County Water District (OCWD) and Orange County Sanitation District’s (OCSD) Groundwater Replenishment System in Fountain Valley, a 2009 OPAL award winning project.

Being the transportation nerd that I am, I chose the JWA tour on Saturday.  The tour highlighted the expansion the airport terminals, parking facilities, and baggage handling systems.  A few stand out facts from the tour were:

- The entire design was completed in 3D Revit, with no CAD drawings

- The parking structure is the first post-tension buckling resistance braced parking structure.  It’s so large you could fit 3 space mountain rides in it, and it was designed with such a high safety factor that it could be used as an emergency shelter in the event of any earthquake.

-JWA has 100% baggage screening.

-JWA is the 43rd busiest airport in the US in terms of passengers.  They plan for their passenger capacity to go from 8.4 million to 10.8 million (hence need for expansion and doubling the number of gates!)

WRYMC Members at JWA Tour (Photo By: Ben Espiritu)

If you’ve ever flown in or out of JWA, then you’re aware of their very strict noise and curfew requirements.  Because of the adjacent cities surrounding the airport, not only is the airport’s footprint at its maximum, but the take-off leaves uninformed passengers a little nervous.  Once the airplane exits the airport noise boundary the engines suddenly goes silent.  In my case on my return flight Sunday night, the yelping of the puppy in the row in front of me and the loud water polo players behind me became suddenly apparent.

What this all means is that JWA cannot expand in the future, and the expected population growth of the region will require other means of transportation for regional trips.  Can we say High Speed Rail to Anaheim?

I also got an update on the sustainability front at the conference, ASCE announced during the conference that the new Infrastructure Sustainability Institute (ISI) plans to release their sustainable infrastructure raiting system to the public in April.  The rating system is a collarboration between ASCE, ACEC, and APWA, and looks at infrastructure sustainability as well as community context.

And a special shout out to my WRYMC 501(c)6 research committee.  Our hard work paid off, and working together we’ll continue to encourage more engineers to become advocates for infrastructure!

In defending my civil engineer sorority/fraternity, I offer three points:

• engineers solve problems - most problems solved are at the clamoring of the public and are often driven by policy
• planners and policy makers have had a hand with engineers in getting us here
• it is an evolutionary process and engineers are still solving problems in a smarter and more sustainable ways

First civil engineering is one of the oldest engineering professions and was so named to differentieate it from military engineering.  The American Society of Civil Engineers defines Civil Engineering as:

“Civil engineering is the design and maintenance of public works such as roads, bridges, water and energy systems as well as public facilities like ports, railways and airports.”

Civil engineers work primarily within the government realm – on infrastructure that serves society.  Historically engineers are engaged to solve problems set out by society.  That’s right civil engineers are solving the problems that YOU, society,  have asked them to solve. And often the part of the solution related to how wide the road ought to go and how wide it should be are often determined at political level. The Eisenhower Interstate  Highway System was defined by law and policy.  Civil engineers solve how to build it safely and efficiently. In the last 4o years they solve problems to also reduce impacts to the environment.

Next, transportation infrastructure decisions are inextricably linked to land use decisions (often guided by planners) and those decisions are driven by the economy (often driven by consumers).  Sprawl was not built in a day nor was it built to keep freeway bypasses and beltways company.  Simply put in the cartoon Pogo “We have met the enemy and he is us”.

Finally, sensibilities evolve and we adapt to address these new paradigms.  Environmental regulations and growth/land use legislation such as Washington’s Growth Management Act have lead to changing perspectives on design.  Not so much that designs are less safe or follow different standards, rather that designers and engineers prioritize environmental impacts or other attributes in assessing alternatives.

While we can’t change how and why we got here,  we can look at ways to do better in our next and final segment where we will discuss solving these problems in new ways.

Top posts for the past week:

Natural Deficit: Earth's Overshoot Day

1. Earth Overshoot: The Case For A Sustainable Economy

2. Crazy Commute in Vancouver, BC

3. Green Streets & Highways Conference – ASCE Nov 14-17

Other brilliant posts during the week were (in order):

• A little sweat never hurt anyone!
• California is a Place: Godspeed
• Google’s servers go green with 20 year deal for wind energy

ASCE is hosting the Green Streets and Highways Conference in Denver, Colorado on November 14-17, 2010.  As the first conference on this topic it will serve as an interactive conference on the state of the art and how to achieve sustainable outcomes.

From the conference website the conference is for :

…”transportation engineers (road and bridge designers, traffic operations, drainage, materials, and construction), environmental analysts, conservation planners, landscape architects, transportation planners, and transportation policy makers – those professionals on the frontline of improving the performance and sustainability of our streets and highways”

The conference will feature a coordinated session with T & DI and ITE.

Be there for this first of it’s kind conference.