Maybe it was a suggested approach toward a certain homework assignment. Or even just a short comment left on an essay.

Civil engineers have been sharing on ASCE Collaborate the best advice they’ve ever received from a teacher or professor. With the new school year starting, it’s a great time to look at some of the highlights from the conversation (and be sure to log in and contribute your own memories):

Horacio Galicia-Gaona Ing., S.E., M.ASCE

Project manager, ARGA Constructora SA de CV, Morelia, Mexico

“Just seeing this topic … returns me to the first grade of civil engineering studies at my alma mater Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, in the class ‘Civil Engineering in Mexico,’ taught by the then-Faculty Director Ing. José Muñoz Chávez, who, with his singular style, in his class told us: ‘Mathematics and physics are a science but … engineering is an art,’ to refer to the fact that engineers must be like artists to make our work something that helps the welfare of society.

“I remember that in those moments I felt inspired by that class to take advantage of my time at the university. Now I always try to keep in mind that my role as a civil engineer is to make my work contribute (to people’s) well-being.”

James Williams, P.E., M.ASCE

Principal, owner, POA&M Structural Engineering PLC, Yorktown, Virginia

“To paraphrase: ‘Attention to detail on the simple aspects (project reports, etc.) provides the promise that the same attention to detail was applied to the more difficult aspects.’

“I pass this along to clients following some visual inspections of structures, structural assemblies, and structural elements, particularly where some general contractors are involved. If they are not going to utilize professional standards of care (and follow the design plans or minimum code requirements) for the structural items that one can actually see, the promise that the highest standards of care are utilized in those structural elements that one cannot see are in question.”

Luis R. Vásquez-Varela, Aff.M.ASCE

Head of the Civil Engineering Department, Universidad Nacional de Colombia – Manizales Branch

“When studying different pavement design methods, my teacher used to say, ‘There are no good or bad design methods; there must be good information about traffic, subgrade, and materials. That makes the difference.’”

Dennis Wilson, P.E., M.ASCE

Associate project manager, Transportation Engineering, Folsom, Pennsylvania

“The best piece of advice, or rather mindset, that was taught to me by a professor came during the preparation of my senior design project, and more specifically, our final presentation.

“The advice was to always refer to ourselves during the presentation as ‘we’ rather than ‘I.’ For example, ‘We designed this portion of the project to solve this problem,’ rather than ‘I designed.’ It’s a simple concept, but one that can be very impactful.

“The point was to instill that sense of team and community into our engineering work. Though we all may work on individual pieces of the puzzle for (sometimes very long) periods of time, it’s important to remember the big picture and that we won’t get there without the help of everybody involved.

“I have carried this with me into my career, and always try to keep in mind that when working on an engineering solution, we are all on the same team working toward the same goal, even if we all may have different roles or specialties in how we get to that end goal. Even when working for a client, although the relationship can sometimes become more adversarial depending on things going well or poorly, we are still working toward the same goal, and we are on the same team, and I find it to be important to convey it as such when discussing the project with those outside of the team.

“I thank Dr. Oyler at the University of Pittsburgh for that advice.”

Join the conversation on ASCE Collaborate.

The post What’s the best advice you’ve ever received from a teacher? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

Perhaps the scariest aspect of the Flint water crisis (read Civil Engineering magazine’s article here) is the notion that it was merely the tip of the iceberg when it came to the problem of lead pipes and drinking water in the United States.

So, in the aftermath of the crisis – now more than a half-decade ago – civil engineers have been busy working on that proverbial iceberg, taking lessons learned from Flint to ensure water quality in communities across the country.

Civil Engineering Source asked several ASCE members to share their perspectives about how civil engineers can work to prevent “another Flint.”

In the aftermath of the Flint water crisis, what’s the most important thing civil engineers can do to help prevent a similar tragedy in other parts of the country?

Richard Fernandez

P.E., ENV SP, M.ASCE

Principal engineer, Aquario Engineering, San Diego

“One, water-quality lab technicians can be obligated to report toxic drinking water quality results to the public agency responsible for the delivery or regulation of the water.

“Secondly, hold all executives involved with the negligent stewardship of ratepayers’ drinking water quality personally responsible. This would send a signal to all involved in the industry that there are real consequences for not having the public’s water quality a priority.

“And another thing that civil engineers, ASCE, and other standard-bearers can do is endorse and enact a higher professional standard of care when making significant system changes that impact drinking water supply and the associated water quality. It’s especially necessary when the affected community includes a significant Black population or other minorities.

“This is what equity is about – providing a higher standard of care, especially for folks that are underserved.

“If a higher standard of care was taken in Flint during the analysis of switching water supplies, operating the water system, and encountering toxic water quality, this might have been prevented.”

Jean-Louis Briaud

Ph.D., P.E., D.GE, Dist.M.ASCE

ASCE President; Distinguished Professor, Texas A&M University

“JEDI [justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion] should be a human reflex and should permeate everything we do naturally. We are not there yet and need a reminder from time to time.

“When it comes to infrastructure, we need to be sensitive about the impact of new construction on the life of citizens. Of course, it is not possible to make everybody happy, but we need to consciously optimize infrastructure systems and consider many factors, including need, efficiency, cost, safety, and equity.”

Elise Ibendahl

P.E., PMP, F.ASCE

Global technology lead, flood modeling and planning, Jacobs, St. Louis

“As an industry, we need to embrace the concept of OneWater, fully recognize that all water has value, and understand that simply ‘fixing a problem’ doesn’t address other related entrenched issues.

“With increased priority for social equity worldwide, we’re working with water utilities across the globe to proactively adopt water equity and social and environmental justice initiatives that prioritize community benefits through capital investments in water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure. And by expanding the view of infrastructure beyond water, such as roads and bridges, we can look for opportunities to share investment with water-related needs.

“For example, if we’re building a new road or development we need to ask, ‘What can we also do to improve access to clean water while that area is torn up?’ This requires a collaborative, shared table for infrastructure projects that includes the community, policymakers, planners, and others in addition to engineers to make sure that multi-functional opportunities don’t pass us up.

“When everyone has a seat at the table, it can be a longer and harder process, but the outcomes are more sustainable from an economic and environmental perspective; outcomes that are inclusive of all stakeholders and enable us to overcome generational infrastructure inequities.”

Read the Civil Engineering magazine article about the lasting effects of the Flint water crisis and more from the “Equity and infrastructure: How infrastructure influences social equity” series.

The post What can civil engineers do to prevent another Flint water crisis elsewhere? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

The recent reconsideration of a major interstate expansion project in Texas (read Civil Engineering magazine’s article here) has reignited conversation around the ways civil rights and community needs intersect with infrastructure.

These conversations, of course, go right to the core of what the civil engineer’s role is when designing and building infrastructure projects.

Civil Engineering Source asked several ASCE members to share their perspectives about how to best integrate community needs and civil rights into an infrastructure project:

What is the best way to integrate community needs and civil rights into an infrastructure project?

Kimberly Pugel

S.M.ASCE

Doctoral candidate in civil engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

“There’s no question that infrastructure addresses people’s needs and transforms lives; the real question is whose needs does a project serve? The needs of the more privileged, powerful, or vocal? Or of the more vulnerable, underrepresented, or hard-to-reach?

“Equitably integrating the needs of all citizens into infrastructure projects should start from the early stages of project design. The National Environmental Policy Act’s current scoping process, which requires public comment periods or public hearings after the final design has already been selected, in no way provides equal, meaningful opportunities for engagement. Meaningful engagement should be a collaborative process between all relevant stakeholders (including industry, governments, community representatives, and other interested parties) to explore issues and identify solutions together. Collaboration is different from public input; being collaborative means that all parties bring their knowledge and perspectives to the table, learn from each other, and create solutions that no single entity could have developed by themselves.

“My doctoral thesis has focused on the ways that diverse stakeholders can identify and solve complex infrastructure problems collaboratively, such as unsafe or unequal access to water or sewage systems.”

K.N. Gunalan

Ph.D., P.E., D.GE, F.ASCE

Senior vice president, AECOM, Salt Lake City, Utah; ASCE 2020 president

“It all starts with an in-depth understanding of the ‘purpose and need’ for the infrastructure project. This needs to be followed by an appreciation for the environment (project setting) and history, as well as genuine concern for those that may be affected by the project.

“Yes, we have all of these steps outlined in the federal National Environmental Policy Act process. But it takes leadership to implement them in a fair and equitable manner.

“Given the long history of infrastructure development, we have a number of both good and bad examples of how to integrate civil rights and community needs. The best way is to engage the community at the outset; make sure that everyone and all the concerns are heard, documented, and addressed. The majority of concerns arise from not being heard. It is all about communication!

“You need to make sure that the project does not disrupt people’s lives; does not impede opportunity for the community to grow and prosper; that it enhances and does not diminish the environment or the quality of life.”

Bob Prieto

A.M.ASCE

Chairman and CEO, Strategic Program Management LLC

“Two out of three large infrastructure projects fail. Given this simple and shocking fact, it is worth asking ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ when responding to the question, ‘Can we better address social justice and community concerns?’

“Let me limit the causes of failure to two:

“First, the owner has never clearly defined the strategic outcomes that the project is to accomplish, nor obtained agreement on them or continuously communicated them. Second, large infrastructure projects rarely fail technically; they fail because stakeholder needs and concerns have never been addressed adequately.

“So, in addressing social justice and community needs, we must begin with stakeholder engagement. This is very different from stakeholder management, which is often more akin to manipulating a set of stakeholders towards somebody else’s predetermined outcome and solution. Stakeholder management has clearly failed to deliver success.

“Social justice and achieving community needs requires early and continuous engagement of both direct and often indirect stakeholders in defining what is to be done; what is to be accomplished; what is the outcome collectively desired. Engagement requires an ability not just to listen but to understand the context of the comments received. Listening is not enough.

“Finally, engagement is even more. It is about the stakeholders – the community – taking a role in leading and having a meaningful stake in success. Social justice and meeting community needs are not veneers to be applied at a later stage in a project.”

Kelly Farabee

P.E., PTOE, M.ASCE

Complete Streets project manager, S&ME, Tampa, Florida

“Our jobs as civil engineers are so important. We have the ability to drastically alter people’s lives – either for the good or the bad.

“Just look at the interstate highway system in the United States. On the one hand, it has enhanced connectivity throughout our nation. On the other hand, we can’t ignore the fact that many disadvantaged communities were sacrificed in the process of constructing the system.

“If we are to avoid such tragedies in the future, I believe we need to remember our past mistakes and learn from them. We need to approach projects from every angle to identify potential negative impacts to different members of the community. In particular, we need to take special care that disadvantaged or vulnerable groups are not taken advantage of just because they don’t have the same resources or political clout as other groups.

“Finally, we have to listen. We have to take the time to listen to the community in which we are working. How do they live? What challenges do they face? What do they love about their community? If we can better understand the needs of the local community, then we can find solutions that truly enhance their lives.”

Read the Civil Engineering magazine article about the suspension of the I-45 expansion project and more from the “Equity and Infrastructure: How Infrastructure Influences Social Equity” series.

The post What is the best way to integrate community needs and civil rights into an infrastructure project? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

But his Canadian visa expired, so he returned to his home in Hawaii, where he turned his passion for learning and creating to civil engineering. While a student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, he engaged in no less than six internships, even working two of them at once. Taga interned at the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, known as NAVFAC, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; the Hawaiian Dredging Construction Co. in Honolulu; the U.S. Army Futures Command, for which he worked remotely; Walt Disney Imagineering; Disneyland Architecture and Engineering; and NASA’s Glenn Research Center.

After graduating with a civil engineering degree in 2019, Taga — one of ASCE’s collegiate New Faces of Civil Engineering in 2020 — landed a position as launch site integration manager for NASA. Here’s how he did it:

Civil Engineering: You started your career in visual effects. How did you become interested in civil engineering?

MT: I was at a point where I was starting over, so I looked at articles that ranked different careers. Civil engineering was always near the top for job satisfaction and low pressure. I was living in Hawaii, and I saw that civil engineering was one of the top majors for graduates from the University of Hawaii. From there I cold-called and emailed some local firms. I asked to sit down with their younger engineers to see what they thought of their jobs, and I got good feedback; they all seemed to like it. So I just decided to dive in.

I conducted those informational interviews to confirm my research and make sure this was a viable option. That’s part of the engineer in me; you always want to double- and triple-check before you put your neck out.

There is so much to like about civil engineering. The fact that you get to build things, work with so many different people, and work on so many kinds of projects is great.

What were your favorite courses at the University of Hawaii?

I enjoyed geotechnical engineering. It was really engaging and made me think about things that I otherwise wouldn’t have given a second thought to.

And I enjoyed my materials of construction course. It combined empirical knowledge with being able to create concrete mixes; it was my first foray into actually putting something out into the real world.

How did you conduct your job search?

I tried to keep in contact with everyone I had worked for at my internships. I also hit all the booths at the career fairs. I graduated in the fall, and at the beginning of the semester I began reaching out and applying. By midway through the semester, I was interviewing, and I had the job locked up before I graduated.

Two of your internships were with Disney. How did they help grow your skill set?

My first was with the architecture and facilities engineering group at Disneyland. I was the civil/structural intern, assisting the engineers in keeping the park running. I did a little surveying, I did red-lining and as-builts for drawing sets, and I got to do anchorage designs for some attractions, including the Incredicoaster brine tanks and the Astro Orbiter actuator. I got to put my name on those design packages, which was cool.

I was trying to pursue Disney Imagineering jobs, and I was finally able to get one at a new department, in project engineering at the Imagineering headquarters in Glendale, California. So I went there. I got to work with awesome people on a cool project that I can’t really talk about. It was a project coordination position. Then the pandemic hit, and I had to do another pivot.

How did you become aware of the opening at NASA?

I applied through USA Jobs, but it helped that this wasn’t my first time at NASA. One of my internships was at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. I was a campus planning intern; I spent the summer determining where parking spaces and green spaces would go within the campus’s master plan, which covers the next 25-30 years. That was when I first understood that there were possibilities at NASA for me if I wanted to pursue them.

What is your first engineering job like?

I’ve been here three months, and I am still getting to know the job. I act as sort of the interface between the customers, who have a certain payload — such as a satellite or minisatellites — and the launch services contractor, who might be SpaceX or ULA (United Launch Alliance). I am part of the team that helps coordinate the launches out of the West Coast. I need make sure everything runs smoothly and all the requirements are met.

What was the application and interview process like?

It was different from what I was expecting. At that point I had been interviewing with lots of different companies, including SpaceX, Marvel Studios, and Sony. When I sat down with NASA, it was a virtual format with what is now my team and my supervisor, and they walked through my resume with me, asked about my experiences, and told me a little about the job and responsibilities.

That was in December, and I found out a month later that I had gotten the job. It only took the one interview. That took me by surprise.

I enjoyed my NASA internship, and I like going for things that are a bit different. I like challenges and putting myself in a position in which I desperately have to learn new things. These big companies working with new technology draw smart, talented, passionate people, and those are the kinds of people I want to work with and learn from. So it excited me to have this opportunity at NASA.

How has the job compared with what you expected?

I started during the pandemic when a lot of people were working from home, but I started out in the office because I had to get my computer, a badge, some initial training, and a security clearance. So that was fortunate; it made things easier.

Since then I have been in an accelerated training program to get me up to speed on projects and launches. It’s been a lot, but I like the opportunity to learn. 

What advice do you have for graduating seniors?

My answer, which I realize might not work for everyone, is to always cast a wide net when applying for jobs. Take chances. The worst they can say is no. I was floored when I got that Disneyland internship, and everything just snowballed from there. I find myself to be fortunate.

The post First Step: New engineer pivots from Disney to NASA appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

The Eiffel Tower? The Brooklyn Bridge? The Grand Coulee Dam? All of the above?

ASCE has designated more than 200 projects as Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks.

Civil engineers took to ASCE Collaborate recently to share stories about their favorites. Here are some highlights from that discussion (and be sure to log in and contribute your favorites):

Heidi Wallace, P.E., M.ASCE

Tulsa, Oklahoma

“I didn’t realize ASCE had landmarks until I was in Spain with my dad. We were in Segovia in 2019, looking at the aqueduct, and as we went to walk up the steps I noticed that the plaque said ‘ASCE.’

“I made sure to take a picture of it … . I highly recommend taking the trip if you have the chance. It was incredible to see how precise the construction was with a nearly constant slope considering the terrain changes and the materials being used.”

René Vidales, P.E., M.ASCE

San Diego

“The University Heights Water Tower in San Diego obtained ASCE Local Historic Engineering Landmark status in 2015, with local leaders in attendance. Originally built in 1924, a riveted steel tank raised on 12 steel girders high above San Diego’s early streetcar suburbs, it held more than 1 million gallons of water for a growing city. Now the water tower has become a hallmark for the neighborhood.”

Mitchell Winkler, P.E., M.ASCE

Houston

“Growing up, I spent countless weekends with my father and sometimes mother and siblings exploring the remnants of the Middlesex Canal. The canal, opened in 1803, connected textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, to Boston Harbor.

“It operated for about 50 years before being replaced by rail. It’s been recognized by ASCE with this claim to fame: The Middlesex Canal is one of the oldest man-made waterways in the United States. The canal served as a model for the later Erie Canal.

“My father remains active in the Middlesex Canal Association, while my brother has started leading walks along different sections that remain preserved today.”

Join the conversation on ASCE Collaborate.

The post What’s your favorite ASCE Historic Civil Engineering Landmark? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

Kush A. Vashee, P.E., CAPM, ENV SP, LEED Green Assoc., M.ASCE, has successfully navigated many changes, from growing up in Zambia to moving to the United States, from working in land development to switching to transportation, and most recently, from being an associate engineer to being promoted to project engineer at RK&K in Fairfax, Virginia. Along the way, he has learned the power of clear communications, especially in email, and of asking questions. He advises younger civil engineers to keep learning, prepare for change, practice empathy, and set boundaries.

What are the new responsibilities that come with being a project engineer?
I will be leading design efforts on larger projects and coordinating with other disciplines in our company, which is something I’m really excited about. As a roadway engineer, I’ll work with our water resources group to coordinate things like drainage conveyance and roadside ditches and also with our traffic group for things like pavement markings and traffic signals. I’ll be making sure everyone’s at the same stage and working together.

I’ll also be able to mentor interns and entry-level engineers and do some quality control on some of their work, and I think that’s cool. Coming from that background recently, I know how difficult it can be when you don’t have a mentor or someone to ask questions of, so I hope to provide that. 

Also, my supervisor just recently let me know that I’m going to be attending more client-facing meetings and coordinating with clients. Hopefully that will help me develop my management skills and facilitate my moving up in the company.

Will you be comfortable working directly with clients?
Yes, I did a little of that before, at my very first job out of college. I was working on utility relocations for a site-development project, and one of the clients was Washington Gas, the local gas utility. There was a time when my division manager was on vacation, and my supervisor was out studying to take the P.E. exam, so I was the only person available to attend a couple of client meetings. I was still a graduate engineer at the time. I was terrified, but it was eye-opening.

And I did OK, so that led to my being able to attend more client meetings with my project manager. I was working on the plans while he worked on the management side of things.

What are the chief skills and abilities you developed in your previous positions that helped you get promoted?
Getting better and more efficient at using software programs has definitely helped me. In my first job and in this one, I became proficient in AutoCAD Civil 3D, and in this job, I use MicroStation and OpenRoads. I have also improved my technical skills for specific clients like the Virginia DOT and (two local county departments of transportation); understanding the way different jurisdictions approach their projects has helped.

And at one point my previous supervisor at RK&K went on maternity leave, and I got to take over one of her projects. I did management-level functions, like delegating tasks, working with clients, coordinating the utility work with the utility owners, and getting the various stages of the project ready for submittal. I am still working on that project to this day as the co-project manager. I was lucky to have that experience.

What personal traits or abilities do you believe helped you win this new position?
Communication, delegation, a growth mindset, and empathy. In terms of having a growth mindset, I’ve tried to take every opportunity as a learning opportunity. I’ve advocated if I want to get training in management or specific types of software. I’ve also joined professional organizations like ASCE, its Transportation & Development Institute, Young Professionals in Transportation, and the American Society of Highway Engineers. I am the secretary of ASCE’s National Capital Section Younger Member Forum, and I try to get on the boards of organizations to develop my leadership skills and grow as much as possible.

In terms of having a growth mindset, I’ve tried to take every opportunity as a learning opportunity.

And in terms of empathy, I feel like I relate well to people from different backgrounds. I grew up in Zambia and did some internships there, and there are a lot of differences in how people work. Certain things are valued more there that are valued less here and vice versa. That changed my perspective and helped me learn more about how to work together collectively for the good of a project.

What nontechnical skills have been important in your career?
One skill I learned on the job is how to write good emails. For crafting emails to the client, you want to keep it professional, keep the project goals as the main focus, and let them know what you are doing to meet those goals. You have to convey, without necessarily spelling it out, that you have things under control and the project is moving along. 

What were the most valuable lessons you learned from mentors?
The best mentors pushed me to do more than what I thought I could do and supported me and provided the help I needed. One of my mentors, Lorainne Barksdale, P.E., CFM, who no longer works here, would show me how she was responding to clients’ emails, what she looked for when she was reviewing plans, and how she was able to mentor younger engineers while still getting her own work done. And even though she no longer works here, I contact her from time to time because that is a relationship that I want to keep for as long as possible.

What do you hope to accomplish in this new position?
Honestly, I just want to do a good job. I want to deliver good projects, maintain the good relationships we have with clients, and then help all the engineers I work with succeed.

After that, my goal in the next couple of years is to go up those couple of rungs into project management. I’d like to manage small and large infrastructure projects as well as develop a team of my own.

What is your best advice for younger engineers right now?
Set good personal boundaries. In my previous job, I struggled with saying no, and that led to a lot of stress. I learned that it is OK to say no and that it is important to maintain your own personal health.

Also, as a new engineer, don’t be afraid to ask questions. No one is expecting you to know everything. And build trust with your team and supervisor by showing you are someone who can be relied upon. If you come upon a problem, try to suggest a solution and discuss it with your supervisor, so they see you are someone who is thinking proactively.  

Vashee offers even more advice for younger engineers on his blog at kushvashee.com/blog

This article first appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Keep a Growth Mindset and Lead with Empathy.” 

The post Continued learning and setting boundaries are keys to career growth appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

Taught for the past six years by Allen C. Estes, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, professor and head of the Department of Architectural Engineering at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, and John W. Lawson, P.E., S.E., M.ASCE, a professor in the same department, the course helps students develop a sense of community with those in their major and sets the tone for what comes next academically.

As with most institutions, learning at Cal Poly transitioned from in person to remote to a hybrid form of the two in the last year. This past fall, the course had to make a rapid transition to a hybrid format, taking hands-on exercises and reworking them to accommodate those who were in person and those who were remote. Estes and Lawson answered questions for Civil Engineering about the course and the transition:

Briefly describe ARCE 106. What are the learning objectives for this course? 
AE: By the end of the course, students will know the various systems that a building comprises and be able to explain how these systems are integrated. They will also be able to describe the roles and responsibilities of the various professions involved in creating a building. 

JL: Because our architectural engineering major has a primary emphasis on structural engineering concepts, the course also includes lectures on concrete, masonry, steel, and timber materials. This provides real-world context prior to their coursework in the theory-based statics and mechanics of materials courses. 

What are some of the topics you cover in ARCE 106? 
JL: Making an analogy between a building and the human body, the course is divided into the skeleton (building structure), skin (cladding and architectural features), respiratory/cardiovascular/neurological (mechanical/electrical/plumbing), and feet (foundations, soil, site civil). Each week is devoted to some aspect of these building systems. 

The associated hands-on activities complement the lectures and include construction of arches and catenaries, installation and testing of concrete anchor bolts, nailing timber connections, welding and testing steel, creating and testing trusses in the digital fabrication lab, measuring drainage patterns, researching failure case studies, wiring electrical circuits, and a K’nexercise design-bid-build competition using K’nex toys. 

Why is this course an important element in the ARCE curriculum? 
AE: All freshmen at Cal Poly are accepted into a specific major with the expectation that focused coursework commences early. Freshmen are scheduled into architecture, calculus, and physics courses, and without ARCE 106, they would likely not feel any connection to their home department and its faculty. Many would lack a basic understanding of their chosen major and its focus on the structural engineering profession. This course occurs during their first quarter in college, provides an initial impression, and helps set the tone for what lies ahead. 

During the pandemic, each week there was a Zoom lecture and a hands-on activity. What were some challenges you encountered and how did you overcome them? 
AE: The Zoom lecture was an adequate substitute for the weekly in-person lecture, during which the 80-100 ARCE freshmen were together in a large lecture hall. The ARCE program rarely has class sizes this large, but one of the course objectives is for the ARCE freshmen to develop a sense of community with their cohort, and putting them all together in one room had some advantages. The small-group exercises were replaced by poll questions, which forced some active participation and allowed us to take attendance for this 8 a.m. class. 

The challenges came with the hands-on activities. The class was divided into four activity sections not to exceed 24 students each. We conducted the activities in person and provided virtual accommodation for those students who could not attend. Each activity was very different, so each week required a novel solution. And each activity required a different social distancing protocol. The freshmen all live in the dorms, and if a student on a floor tested positive, the entire floor was placed on quarantine. So we did not know from week to week who was coming to class. This made the assignment of activity teams more difficult, especially if we wanted the teams to prepare something in advance. We overcame the challenges by creating a new solution each week that best accommodated the activity, learning and using the technologies available and conducting rehearsals. 

How was learning conducted for those who didn’t attend the activities in person? 
AE: It varied. For the arches and catenaries activity, we used a smartphone as a camera and tracked one in-person team as they went through the various stations. Those students participating synchronously became part of the team being tracked on the camera. Those who could not attend synchronously viewed the recorded Zoom session in an asynchronous manner.

For the welding activity, we made a video of one team welding, one team breaking the samples, and the instructor posing the questions on the American Institute of Steel Construction steel structure connections. The video was edited on Screencast-O-Matic, and the virtual students completed the exercise asynchronously using the data obtained by the group in the video.

Two of the activities — an introductory presentation and a failure case study report — were conducted synchronously for each activity section, with students sharing their screens for their presentations. For the K’nexercise, the students at home were able to bid the projects synchronously and used the average of the data from the groups who were able to construct the structure in class. 

JL: For the site drainage activity, I tried to get the virtual students to engage with their immediate environment. Students who attended in person identified watershed areas, flow directions, and relevant catch basins on campus. And in order to engage those attending virtually, their assignment involved a similar exercise on the property where they reside. It was quite apparent that many had fun exploring their home’s unique landform in a manner not previously considered. 

What worked? What will you change for the fall? 
JL: We are scheduled to return to in-person classes in the fall, so we hope that these measures will not be needed. One course modification that worked was using the vacant digital fabrication laboratory (known as the DFAB) to create trusses from fiberboard using the laser cutter. Typically, students compete with others on campus to individually access the laser cutters to create their truss pieces prior to class. Under COVID restrictions, DFAB was open only by prior special arrangements, and in response, we took the entire lab section to the DFAB during class hours to cut the truss pieces and modified the exercise accordingly. 

AE: The culminating event for the course is a three-week role-playing exercise that illustrates the role of the architect, project manager, and contractor in the design-bid-build project delivery method. Restricted use of facilities and after-hours access to the K’nex pieces caused us to reduce the exercise to a single class period. The learning objectives of the exercise were not fully met, and if we do this again in the fall, we would try some additional modifications. 

What were the biggest lessons learned in switching to a hybrid format? 
AE: The virtual experience can work seamlessly for large enrollment lecture courses where the students are already largely passive and there is little interaction with the instructors. In fact, the virtual experience can be better because it is recorded and can be viewed later by students who did not absorb all the material during class either because they got distracted, the pace was too fast, or they were not able to attend. The virtual experience is a less acceptable substitute when the class sizes are small, student-faculty interaction is a key part of the course, or the students are engaged in hands-on activities that require supplies, equipment, or close supervision. 

JL: Converting lectures and demonstrations was very time-consuming, as was learning the logistics of Zoom videoconferencing with document cameras, online submissions, exams, and office hours. I can honestly say I worked twice as hard this last year than previous years trying to deliver high-quality teaching. Keeping the virtual students engaged was key but challenging. You have a captive audience in the classroom but not when they are home. I learned that creative ideas must be used to reach out to virtual students so that they look forward to each class. 

What was the most fun/successful activity despite the restrictions? 
JL: We have surveyed the students on their favorite activities over the six years the course has been in effect and used the results to make changes to the least favorite activities. Last fall, the drainage pattern activity got the highest rating from those students taking the course virtually because they were able to participate fully from home and explore in a context they are most familiar with — literally their own backyard. For those participating in person, they felt the wiring of the electrical circuits was the most fun despite the need for mandatory face masks and face shields due to their work in close proximity. Although face shields often fogged up and the additional masks made communication difficult, they were thrilled to enjoy a brief return to close collaboration with their fellow students.

This is a freshmen-level course. Do you have any data on how many students continued in the engineering/architecture track? 
AE: Yes. Our data revealed an average loss of around 20% of our students to other majors, which was another reason for developing this course. After six years of running this course, that attrition rate has unfortunately not decreased, but at least a student changing majors is making a more informed decision. 

How is ethics tied into the course? 
JL: The fall schedule has changed repeatedly over the years, but it usually results in a partial week with an extra lecture. We use that opportunity to introduce the freshmen to a profession, some aspects of professional responsibility, and the canons of the ASCE Code of Ethics. We introduce the principle of safeguarding the public during the anchor bolt activity when the prescribed strengths in the manufacturer’s literature are shown to be significantly less than our test results, indicating an implied factor of safety. The study of building system failures and the behavior of those involved allows the instructor to connect the discussion back to professional ethics. 

Is there anything you would like to say to instructors who may be struggling with the challenges of online content delivery? 
JL: It was obvious to me that the online delivery format is inferior to the student’s in-person classroom experience. Universities may now attempt to leverage this virtual format experiment into a road map for increasing faculty efficiencies in the future with larger course enrollments. Those of us who have now taught both ways can objectively provide input to this possible trend. In the meantime, devise creative ways to engage students who find themselves in their room most of the day. Create assignments that draw upon their room, the attic, the garage, the kitchen, the road out front, or materials they might find in a drawer or pantry. If the amount of course content has to suffer a bit but the engagement is increased, that might be a fair trade-off. 

What do you want your teaching legacy to be? 
AE: I think my legacy will be determined by the effect I have had on the students I’ve had the privilege of teaching. Henry Adams famously stated, ‘A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.’ The problem is that you often can’t identify which students you have influenced the most. So, the only solution is to love them all! 

JL: We can all remember our most inspiring teachers, and they usually had one thing in common: They found unique ways to awaken our curiosity and keep us engaged. Robert Frost said, ‘I am not a teacher, but an awakener,’ and I try to let this guide me too. I strive to awaken my students, and this pandemic has challenged my approaches in a virtual environment. 

An abridged version of this article first appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Civil Engineering.

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Stated differently, the contractor’s burden of proof in these cases is to demonstrate that its proffered “or equal” product functions just as well in all essential respects as the specified product.

Cummins v. Bradford Sanitary Authority discusses a twist on the brand name or equal issue — namely: Who is responsible for changes to the project that result from the contractor selecting a product different than the brand name specified? While the contractor prevailed at the trial court, the jury verdict was ultimately overturned by a Pennsylvania appellate court.

The case
Bradford Sanitary Authority is the owner and operator of a wastewater treatment plant that services the area around the city of Bradford, Pennsylvania. The Authority retained Gannett Fleming Inc. to provide design, engineering, and construction management services for the upgrade of the plant. Part of the project required the construction of concrete tanks containing sequencing batch reactors to treat sewage and other wastewater at the plant. An SBR is a type of bioreactor used to remove sludge from sewage in order to produce clean water for discharge (or in some cases, additional treatment).

GF’s design was based on a continuous-flow SBR manufactured by ABJ Sanitaire, with four separate SBRs installed in four adjacent, contiguous tanks. The design called for wastewater to enter the SBR through two influent boxes, each of which serviced a pair of tanks. Each tank had its own manual gate in the influent box, and the system was designed so that the influent would continuously flow over these gates. Importantly, influent entered the boxes through 20 in. ductile iron influent pipes capable of supplying 13.88 mgd of wastewater.

The contractor’s burden of proof in these cases is to demonstrate that its proffered “or equal” product functions just as well in all essential respects as the specified product.

The specifications authorized bidders to select from any of three acceptable manufacturers: ABJ, Ashbrook Simon Hartley, or Aqua Aerobics. The specifications also stated that whenever multiple products or manufacturers were listed in the specifications, the first-named product constituted GF’s design. The specifications also stated:

If products of manufacturers other than those named first differ from those named first in the Project Manual or on the [Contract] Drawings to the extent that their proper incorporation into the [work …] requires changes to the structural, piping, mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, or any other changes of whatsoever nature, the [c]ontractor shall be responsible for such changes.

There were numerous other provisions in the specifications stating that if a product other than the one first named was used by the contractor, the contractor would be responsible for all costs associated with design changes to any part of the project to make use of the equipment.

Bob Cummins Construction Co. was one of the bidders. Because it received a better deal on the SBR system from Ashbrook than from ABJ, Cummins proposed installing an Ashbrook SBR. Unlike the ABJ system, Ashbrook’s system was not a continuous-flow system. Instead, it was a sequencing system, where only one of the four SBR tanks fills at a time. Cummins proposed to install automatic gates to control influent flow into a tank rather than manual gates or a separate pipe with a valve into each tank. Cummins was ultimately the winning bidder.

Cummins submitted the Ashbrook product data and shop drawings reflecting changes Ashbrook proposed to GF’s design to incorporate the Ashbrook SBR. GF determined — based on assurances from Cummins and Ashbrook during the bid and submittal processes — that the proposed Ashbrook SBR would meet the SBR specifications and, in particular, that it could handle up to 13.88 mgd of influent. After several meetings and some changes, GF marked Cummins’ final SBR shop drawings “reviewed,” and Cummins installed the Ashbrook SBR at the plant.

After the SBR was put into operation, the parties discovered an influent overflow problem. Cummins claimed it was due to the 20 in. influent piping being too small to accommodate the Ashbrook system’s sequencing. The Authority claimed that the overflow resulted from the automatic gates not controlling the flow properly and that a different piping configuration was necessary to accommodate the Ashbrook SBR. The corrective work was performed, and Cummins sued the Authority, alleging more than $600,000 in damages. The Authority countersued.

In the litigation that followed, the Authority argued that the trial court should dismiss Cummins’ claim because the contract placed sole responsibility on Cummins for the defective system. The court refused to dismiss the case, and a jury awarded Cummins $488,243. The jury also found that the Authority acted in bad faith in withholding the contract retention.

The appeal
The Pennsylvania appeals court reversed the jury verdict for almost $500,000 and directed the trial court to either schedule a new trial on any remaining issues or grant judgment to the Authority. Its decision was based on the contract, which made Cummins responsible for reviewing all plans and specifications before bidding on the project and accepting responsibility for changes caused by its use of a product different from what was the basis of the design.

The court stated that a product being listed as acceptable in the specifications (i.e., Ashbrook’s SBR) did not make that product interchangeable with the brand around which the project was designed (ABJ’s SBR). The contract was clear and unambiguous in shifting to the contractor the responsibility and risk for “changes of whatsoever nature” required because Cummins decided to use Ashbrook ‘s system rather than ABJ’s.

The court was not swayed by GF’s review of Cummins’ submittals and shop drawings. The contract, which appeared to be based on the Engineers Joint Contract Documents Committee construction contract, clearly disclaimed any liability on the Authority’s part for the submittal process.

The court also rejected Cummins’ argument that by naming Ashbrook as an additional manufacturer, the Authority made a guarantee that the Ashbrook SBR would fit and function without design changes. The court stated that this might be the case if Cummins’ claim was based on a design specification for which the Authority explicitly stated how the contract was to be performed and permitted no deviations. Citing prior Pennsylvania precedent, the court found the specification here to be a performance specification:

The mere identification of a product or manufacturer does not create a design specification. Where a government agency identifies a particular product or manufacturer by name, but permits substitution of ‘an approved equal,’ such a specification is ‘performance’ in nature and, as a result, carries no implied warranty.

As a result, the risk of meeting the performance goal was shifted to Cummins, and it could not successfully argue that the Authority was liable for the cost consequences of the repair work.

The analysis
There are many nuances associated with the use of brand name or equal specifications. Most state procurement laws put very tight restrictions on the ability of a public agency to specify a product that can only be obtained from a sole source, as this can result in unfair competition and inflated prices. While the Authority did not “sole-source” ABJ’s SBR system, the authors wonder whether it shifted the playing field by making the contractor responsible for design issues associated with using an alternative product. It certainly creates a strong incentive for a contractor to use the brand-name product.

Another point about this case that is hard to follow: If GF’s design was only suitable for the ABJ system, one might have thought that this would have been determined by GF during the bidding or submittal process. Stated differently, if the Authority said to Cummins during these processes, “You can use the Ashbrook SBR, but here are the changes that GF says will need to be made to make it work,” we could better grasp how the contract clause relied on by the Authority and court makes sense. But it seems as if the appellate court ignored the notion that GF was the engineer of record and that this was a project delivered through design-bid-build.

Finally, we note that the American Council of Engineering Companies of Pennsylvania submitted a legal brief in support of the Authority in this appeal. This is not surprising, as it is understandable that ACEC would have a strong vested interest in seeing that the contract language on product substitutions be enforced.

This article first appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Civil Engineering.

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I wish I’d known how important people skills would be for success while practicing engineering and technical endeavors.

Bridges don’t build themselves. Treatment plants don’t operate themselves. Multidisciplined design efforts don’t spontaneously self-organize and coalesce. It’s people, of course, who are the common element in transforming ideas into reality. Whether performing or supervising work, incorporating the work of others into your projects, anticipating and addressing others’ expectations, or revising work plans for unexpected issues, any workplace can be a symphony of people interacting with one another — and one day you may find yourself as the conductor.

Individuals bring with them their own talents, abilities, preferences, baggage, habits, fears, and endearing quirks. Recognizing and working with this assemblage of traits is nearly as important to success as a project’s technical aspects. Refining something from a general concept to the final details requires a critical interaction of efforts in addition to a critical mass of contributors. So being better able to appreciate these influences — and learning to effectively navigate through them — would have been of great benefit.

Like our formal education, this people-focused approach won’t be just a matter of reading a few popular books and starting to tinker with your human subjects. It will take some thoughtful observation and mature sensitivity about the ways that others interact in small and large groups to appreciate what’s going on “under the hood” of your colleagues. That which is said, with expressions and intonation, along with what is not said — by body language, for instance — will provide tips about whether things are aligning well or skidding onto an off-ramp or a dead end. But if you pay close attention and actively participate, you can transform yourself from a spectator into a guide and facilitator.

If your only tool is a hammer, your solution to every problem will be a nail. So load more tools into your tool bag, such as trying the Socratic method, being respectful and inclusive of others’ ideas, recognizing the power of pauses, and using personality test exercises (such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) to benefit yourself and your team members. Growth spurts of emotional intelligence will help identify and create more win-wins in lieu of less satisfying compromises.

It is a blessing that everyone doesn’t think and behave the same. There truly is strength in diversity.

This article first appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Wish I’d Known.” 

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1. How does engineering for disasters relate to managing for disasters? 
One of the things that we do as engineers is to design things that will last through any type of crisis. Whether it’s an earthquake, tornado, high winds, or something else, we try to make the foundations resilient to those types of forces. We design foundations for a crisis. Leadership is the same thing. We have to think about what kind of crisis might happen and plan for it. And just like you maintain a building, you have to maintain your leadership. Reading, learning, trying to improve all the time — these are going to help maintain that foundation of leadership.

2. After a crisis, what is the first step that leaders should take?
One of the things that everybody wants to do is rush forward to get back to normal. But we got into this current problem because we had flaws. We’re engineers; we’re really great at analyzing. We need to have a meeting, debrief, and determine what failed so that we can figure out what worked and what didn’t. If we do that, then we will be stronger for whatever the next crisis is. 

3. What are the top management flaws that can be exposed by a crisis? 
There are five key flaws. The first involves the act of communicating. A lot of people weren’t prepared to have their personnel communicating in a dispersed environment as they worked from home during the COVID-19 crisis. Maybe their employees didn’t have a computer or the correct software, or maybe they didn’t even have a quiet space to work. That needs to be something leaders think about and budget for in the future, so that in case something like this happens again, they’re able to pivot quickly.

In addition, leaders should make a plan detailing how their team is going to communicate for work in a future crisis. We have all these different tools, such as (Cisco) Webex, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Make sure that everybody has and understands the necessary software and equipment. Practice from time to time to make sure that your personnel are maintaining and updating their skills.

The second flaw involves whether you are communicating enough with your personnel. Especially at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, people were not communicating enough at all. They thought they could get away with the weekly or biweekly meetings they were used to, but then we all discovered that people were feeling despondent because they felt isolated. 

The solution for this is for leaders to take the time to really know their people. There are some people who work well autonomously. So as a boss, you have to say, ‘I know I only need to touch base with them every three to four days.’ And you might have others who need more guidance or a more personal touch. This is going to evolve over time, so you need to continually evaluate and track it. 

One of the things that everybody wants to do is rush forward to get back to normal. But we got into this current problem because we had flaws.

Third, people often aren’t set up to creatively adjust their business practices to operate in a crisis. For example, looking at the spectrum of engineering, there is some manufacturing where you have to be there in person. How can you keep your manufacturing going? On the other side, maybe you have engineers who don’t need to be in the office, but how do you adjust your business model to operate at the same pre-crisis performance level?

Solutions to this flaw are probably the hardest to implement. You need to have a flexible mind. Think about barbershops: How did they survive when they couldn’t have close contact between people in their shops? A lot of them just set up outside on the sidewalk. That’s being inventive. Civil engineers need to start thinking about how they are they going to do their business and be flexible at the same time. It’s great to have traditions in your company, but sometimes those need to change in order to survive. 

The fourth common flaw is about failing to build resilience in your teams. How do we deal with the mental health and burnout of people who have been separated from one another for so long? That’s something that we’re all still working on, but there are a couple things we need to think about. One is maintaining positivity. As the leader, if you start to become bitter and jaded, that attitude is going to filter down to your team. Two, you have to have long-term goals and think about where you want to be positioned when the crisis is over. Three, you need to understand that the crisis is temporary and will not go on forever. 

The fifth typical flaw is not preparing for multiple crises to hit at once. If you think about early 2020, we were looking at the crisis as having only one facet, and we weren’t expecting different crises — economic, social, political — to then pile on top of each other. The best way to remedy being in that situation again is to prepare. Create various combinations of crises as part of a brainstorming project. What if we have social unrest and a tornado? How do we respond to that? 

4. How can leaders build loyal and high-performing teams before a crisis?
Leaders need to get their entire team together and practice their response. Make sure that everyone knows what their role is in a single crisis and in multiple crises that hit simultaneously. You have to practice, practice, practice, so that when a crisis does hit, your team knows exactly what to do, and they feel invested in the organization because they are ready to go as part of the team. 

5. How can you maintain your team’s loyalty and high performance during a crisis?
Listen to your team’s feedback and incorporate necessary changes. I look at it as a cycle. When you find something that doesn’t work, you adjust it, try it, and keep going. And, especially in a recovery period as you’re starting to ramp down from the crisis, you still have to keep analyzing what you’re doing. Maybe you just have to scale down or scale up, for example. But you can’t have a static plan. 

6. How can leaders maintain focus on their projects during a crisis and its recovery while managing everything else?
I think that’s just part of what being a leader means. We have to be able to manage all these different facets; both our projects and our people are so important. And the best way to stay focused depends on who you are and how you operate. I’m one of those people who makes a list every day. And I divide my day into projects, people, and other functions. But it’s up to the individual to figure out the best method. 

7. What is the most common personal pitfall that leaders need to avoid in a crisis?
It really goes back to maintaining focus on your mission and making sure that even if you start focusing on a tangent, you know you still have to come back to the core mission. It’s affirming daily, ‘This is what needs to be done today.’ Tiny little distractions will take your attention off your mission, so make time for the distractions if you need to, but maintain your focus. And remember: Keep taking care of your people, keep taking care of your projects, and you will get through this.

This article first appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “How to Lead Your Team through a Crisis.” 

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When confronted by federal investigators with evidence of his involvement, a county employee admits his role as a conduit for the illicit payments and agrees to assist the investigation by wearing a wire into meetings with other participants in the scheme. With the employee’s cooperation, the investigators gather enough evidence to indict no less than two dozen contractors, public officials, and political operatives on charges including bribery, wire fraud, and conspiracy.

One of the indicted contractors is a civil engineer and partner at a local engineering firm, who is recorded making a payment of several thousand dollars to the employee, purportedly to secure the commissioner’s influence in renewing a large consulting contract held by his firm. While the contract is only one of multiple contracts won by the firm over the duration of the alleged bribery scheme, the firm’s other partners reject any suggestion of impropriety in their other procurement activities and flatly deny any knowledge of the indicted engineer’s activities.

In support of their claim, they point to the indicted partner’s efforts to disguise the unlawful transaction in the firm’s accounting. While the engineer initially paid the bribe from his personal funds, he later persuaded a subcontractor to submit a fraudulent invoice to the firm for work the firm’s executive had actually done himself and then used the excess payment to reimburse himself for the bribe.

Though ASCE’s concise new Code of Ethics no longer offers specific details on compliance with this ethical mandate, there are a number of other resources from which engineers can develop procedures for implementing a culture of zero tolerance in their professional workspace. 

In exchange for his guilty plea and testimony against the public works commissioner and other participants, the engineer’s sentence is commuted to time served and three years’ probation. Meanwhile the county official at the heart of the conspiracy is found guilty of accepting nearly a half-million dollars in bribes and is sentenced to 15 years in prison.

QUESTION If this case were considered under the new ASCE Code of Ethics, what provisions would the engineer’s conduct have violated?

DISCUSSION As noted in prior columns, perhaps the most evident change in the new Code of Ethics adopted in October 2020 is its dramatic reduction in word count, replacing the prior code’s roughly 2,200 words of ethical guidance with a document less than a third that size. One concern raised by reviewers during the development of the new code was the fear that forgoing the old code’s more detailed, situation-specific guidance in favor of simple, high-level statements might have the effect of “watering down” its ethical impact — creating the false impression that the Society was lowering its standard of conduct or diminishing the importance of the profession’s most fundamental ethical precepts.

One specific area of concern identified by reviewers of the draft code was its language on bribery, fraud, and corruption. Language banning procurement misconduct is by no means new to ASCE’s Codes of Ethics; as far back as 1961, guideline 2 under Article 9 instructed that engineers “shall not give or receive any payments for the purpose of influencing the selection of an engineer for an engineering engagement,” while guideline 1 under that article similarly proscribed making political contributions to secure work, and guideline 3 cautioned engineers about the use of “extravagant entertainment, gifts, or similar expenditures” to influence clients. 

Yet perhaps the strongest statement regarding the engineer’s ethical obligation to combat corruption in the market for engineering services came in 2006 with the introduction of “zero tolerance” language to ASCE’s Code of Ethics. Housed in the code’s Fundamental Canon 6, this language read: “Engineers shall act in such a manner as to uphold and enhance the honor, integrity, and dignity of the engineering profession and shall act with zero tolerance for bribery, fraud, and corruption.” 

In addition, several new guidelines elaborated on the scope of zero tolerance. Guidelines a and b under this canon directed engineers to be “scrupulously honest” and “not knowingly engage in business or professional practices of a fraudulent, dishonest, or unethical nature.”

Guidelines c and d reminded engineers that this stricture applied to “all engineering or construction activities in which they are engaged” and advised heightened vigilance “where payments of gratuities or bribes are institutionalized practices.” 

Finally, guidelines e and f touted the value of transparency and offered some practical advice for avoiding misconduct, including disclosure of the “names, addresses, purposes, and fees” paid to agents involved in procurement along with contractual certifications of adherence to the “zero tolerance” mandate for all parties involved in a project.

When in 2018 the Task Committee on the Code of Ethics began its work on a proposed new code, structured as a hierarchy of the engineer’s most important stakeholders, the committee was quick to elevate the precepts of Canon 6 into the highest category of ethical duties: the obligations to society. At the same time, however, the task committee felt that the language of this canon could be greatly simplified. In fact, in the earliest draft of the new code, section 1d read simply: “Engineers reject bribery and fraud in all forms.”

When presented to ASCE’s membership for review and feedback, this abridgement of the old Canon 6 drew a number of insightful comments. Some reviewers noted that, while bribery and fraud were perhaps the most common abuses in engineering procurement, the broader term of corruption was still needed to encompass any of the means by which individuals abuse power or authority for private benefit, from simple cronyism to embezzlement, money laundering, and even human rights abuses. 

Others found the word “reject” lacking as compared to the previous code’s “zero tolerance,” finding that the former could be satisfied merely by having no personal involvement in corrupt practices while the latter imposed an affirmative obligation to fight corruption wherever it occurs. More than one commenter opined that engineers should have an ethical obligation to report corruption as an aspect of their paramount commitment to protect the public welfare.

Taking these comments to heart, the task committee revised its proposed language in subsequent drafts, and today section 1d of the Code of Ethics reads: “Engineers have zero tolerance for bribery, fraud, and corruption in all forms, and report violations to the proper authorities.”

In the case described here, it is clear the engineer’s participation in this scheme did not demonstrate “zero tolerance for bribery, fraud, and corruption,” so ASCE’s Committee on Professional Conduct would likely feel the engineer’s conduct had violated section 1d of the code. The CPC might also determine that the engineer’s attempts to influence a public official’s decision-making on a contract violated section 3d’s directive to “reject practices of unfair competition” and that his misuse of company funds represented a failure to meet his section IVa obligation to “act as (a) faithful agent” to his employer.

Though ASCE’s concise new Code of Ethics no longer offers specific details on compliance with this ethical mandate, there are a number of other resources from which engineers can develop procedures for implementing a culture of zero tolerance in their professional workspace. One good starting point is the Anti-Corruption Ethics and Compliance Handbook for Business, jointly produced by the World Bank, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which offers useful commentary on the elements of a corporate anticorruption program.

This article first appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Zero Tolerance for Bribery and Corruption Is Still the Imperative.”

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So it should come as some relief to the Gulf and East Coast states — as well as the nation’s Atlantic territories — that the Biden administration has announced it is doubling the funding available to help cities prepare for storms and will ask NASA to launch new space-based climate prediction technology. 

The administration will boost funding to the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program to $1 billion — a fraction of the cost of cleaning up from just one of these deadly storms but perhaps a decent investment in helping make communities better able to withstand them in the first place. And NASA’s new Earth System Observatory will consist of satellites that use 3D imagery and other high-tech wizardry to offer scientists a better understanding of the interactions between Earth’s atmosphere, land, ocean, and ice. Among other goals, it aims to improve resilience to climate change, disaster mitigation, and forest fire management.

The cities featured in senior editor/features manager Robert L. Reid’s article “Engineers help prepare for hurricane season” might find this extra funding especially useful. They are busy preparing to withstand the onslaught this stormy season has in store for them, and their efforts range from the traditional to the innovative.

Sometimes when battling Mother Nature, the tried-and-true is the most reliable.

In New York City, for example, engineers have installed robust, aquarium-style glass around train station elevators and placed all manner of hard and soft flood barriers around transit entry points as it seeks to prevent another pounding from a storm like 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Josh DeFlorio, LEED AP, ENV SP, the chief of resilience and sustainability in the engineering department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, told Reid that while the authority had a “relatively robust flood program” before Sandy, those efforts “became much more focused and embodied much higher standards after Sandy.”

On Florida’s Atlantic Coast, where multiple hurricanes over the past century have caused billions of dollars in damages and killed thousands, Miami-Dade County has created a systematic way to determine which pieces of infrastructure are most at risk and most critical to the functioning of its communities. Reid reports that as the county replaces equipment at various sites, it uses that matrix to determine how best to spend limited resources. It’s asset management 101 with a disaster-prevention twist.

In Texas, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is constructing a project known as the Sabine Pass to Galveston Bay Coastal Storm Risk Management program. The so-called S2G will include raising existing earthen levees and building new ones as well as constructing approximately 5.7 miles of additional flood wall. Sometimes when battling Mother Nature, the tried-and-true is the most reliable.

Despite — or perhaps because of — all this storm-protection activity, two cities that are most vulnerable to hurricane damage show up on the top 10 list of ASCE’s Best Places for Civil Engineers 2021. Houston, at No. 1 for the second year in a row, and New York City, at No. 7, both offer higher-than-average salaries and plenty of job opportunities for civil engineers — especially in the fields of climate change resiliency.

No list of best places can ever be exhaustive; the right city for any civil engineer is, of course, subjective. But our annual index can serve as a starting point, analyzing some key factors: job openings, cost of living, and the results of ASCE’s exclusive civil engineering salary survey. 

Want to see where your city ranks? Read this issue’s feature article “Best places for civil engineers 2021.”

This article first appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Best Places to Weather the Storms.” Read the full issue here.

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Civil engineers execute remarkable projects to protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare. Some are clearly visible and impressive to the naked eye, such as skyscrapers or large bridges. Some are less impressive by their scale but beautiful by their elegance. And some are simply buried like tunnels or underappreciated like sewer systems. In the mid-1990s, ASCE designated the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.

There is little doubt that what we build is mind-boggling at times and gives us a tremendous sense of pride to be civil engineers. So here, in no particular order, is a list we might choose from today.

1. Burj Khalifa, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2009). Tallest building in the world with a height of 827 meters and foundations going 55 meters deep. It settled only 50 millimeters.

2. Tower of Pisa, Pisa, Italy (late 1300s). One of the most well-known and successful failures in geotechnical engineering.

3. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco (1937). An elegant suspension bridge that set a main span record length of 1.6 kilometers in 1937. It took nearly 30 years before that record was surpassed.

4. Eiffel Tower, Paris (1889). Built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, this 300-meter-tall tower is attractive because of its elegance and harmonic lines. Although, geotechnical engineers might think of it as a big, beautiful drill rig.

5. St. Isaac’s Cathedral, St. Petersburg, Russia (1858). This massive cathedral is most impressive because of its grandiose allure. It was built on soft clay and settled about 1 meter.

6. Channel Tunnel, linking England and France (1994). Tunneling teams started on opposite sides of the English Channel, and through civil engineering magic, they met in the middle 30 meters under the sea.

7. Three Gorges Dam, near Yichang, China (2006). This is the largest dam in the world in terms of hydroelectric power generated. This concrete dam, standing 2.3 kilometers long and 175 meters high, slowed the Earth’s rotation because of its size.

8. Netherlands North Sea Protection Works, southwest Netherlands (1997). A well-thought-out network of protection barriers against the sea when a storm surge combines with high tide. Some are large rotating gates, some have vertical gates, and all are optimized for safety and cost.

9. Panama Canal, Panama City (1914). This timesaving and cost-saving ship route project faced very difficult slope stability problems as well as worker health problems. It remains one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world with a recent expansion.

10. Kansai International Airport, Osaka, Japan (opened in 1994 and expanded in 2007). Building an international airport offshore in 20 meters of water on very soft soil was the challenge. The project was a success with a 36-meter runway on fill that settled 14 meters.

11. Empire State Building, New York City (1931). This American cultural icon is 443 meters high, has 102 stories, and at the time, was the tallest building in the world. And it was built in only 13 months!

12. Itaipu Dam, near Foz doIguacu, Brazil, and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay (1984). This two-country concrete dam is 225 meters high and 7.2 kilometers long. It’s the second-largest hydropower production dam in the world.

13. CN Tower, Toronto (1976). This majestic, slender, and elegant structure is 553 meters tall with a revolving restaurant. It held the height record for a long time.

14. Sydney Opera House, Sydney (1973). This building’s iconic shell-like shape defines the landscape of the Sydney Harbor while the 2,000-seat concert hall manages to create an intimate atmosphere.

15. Washington Monument, Washington, D.C. (1885). This symbolic freestanding column honoring George Washington, America’s first president, was saved by an ingenious foundation engineer who avoided creating the leaning monument of Washington. 

These are only some of the magnificent projects that civil engineers built throughout the world. Each year, ASCE recognizes the best civil engineering projects through the Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement honor awards. 

So, have you chosen your top seven yet? Here are the ones ASCE chose in 1997: 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13. Regardless of which ones you chose, I hope you’ll agree with me that we should be very proud to be civil engineers.   

If you have questions or comments, please email me at [email protected].

This article first appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Civil Engineering.

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That lyric from the classic Led Zeppelin song “When the Levee Breaks” sounds like either a statement of fact or very direct, solid advice. Trouble is, as journalist and author Tyler J. Kelley explains early in Holding Back the River, all too often in the United States’ history, presented with that situation we choose not to move.

A recent case in point he cites is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposal, in the wake of massive Missouri River flooding in 2011, to move levees back to a safer distance from the river. This would have corrected repetitive mistakes stretching back half a century by farmers, who often ignored recommended levee setback distances in order to maximize the amount of arable land — choosing to gamble on short-term gain over long-term reduction of risk and damage from inevitable flood events. The farmers balked at the plan, sinking it politically, and just eight years later, in 2019, history repeated itself to the tune of billions more damage.

As the book shows, though, none of this is terribly unique to the last century of U.S. history, or even dating further back. “Advanced civilizations have always been obsessed with controlling water,” Kelley writes. “A river that overflows its banks and changes its course at will is no place for the immobility of bridges, roads, factories, or power plants, no place for the assumptions of concrete and steel.” This is the essential tension that underlies the book and the struggle it depicts, because “capitalism requires predictability, and private property requires boundaries” — and nature cares about neither.

Kelley’s journalistic approach to his subject serves him well, allowing him to weave stories of the people fighting and affected by this struggle — from farmers to engineers, colonels to elected officials — into detailed explanations of river flow concepts and floodplains, lock and dam construction and function, and the Army Corps’ ceaseless efforts to keep all the plates spinning. At the same time, he drives home the stakes for the entire country, regardless of whether you live anywhere near a major “inland waterway,” because of the importance of both massively productive farmland and cheap river transportation to our economy.

Holding Back the River highlights, at bottom, another key infrastructure issue. And like many of those, while part of the problem has certainly been the lack of money invested in it, an additional one is spending that money wisely, in ways that make long-term sense. This has always been a truism, but as climate change becomes harder to ignore, it is ever more pressing that we learn from our past mistakes. Because eventually, as another Zeppelin song notes, “Upon us all a little rain must fall.”

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Wald also explains several other reasons for this approach. Most significant are that 1) the scientists, engineers, and others dedicating themselves to improving both toilet access and toilet technology unabashedly talk this way (including giving each other borderline scatological nicknames) and 2) the language taboos mirror the ways in which most of us simply avoid talking or thinking about toilet and sanitation issues, to the detriment of all.

With that — and the straightforward declaration that “poo” and “poop” will be her most frequent go-to terms in the book — Pipe Dreams launches into an examination of just how important toilets are as a tool of health, how much of the world lacks proper access to them, and the “new, global toilet revolution — a growing movement that has the goal of upending the way we manage our most basic bodily functions” in the name of health and sustainability.

One such approach is a Dutch vacuum toilet system that collects, concentrates, and anaerobically processes human waste in comparatively small local complexes rather than in a large central plant. The setup produces biogas that helps heat water, nitrogen that is released harmlessly into the air, and minerals that are used as fertilizer. The system even integrates food waste from in-sink garbage disposals to provide additional “fuel” for the microbes digesting the human waste as well as the grey water produced in homes through such water use as dish and clothes washing.

But this is just one example of “the new toilet science” aiming to replace the flush-toilet-to-wastewater-treatment model that many of us are familiar with. The vast array of ideas include composting toilets, facilities that help salvage toilet paper from sewage, smart toilets that will help monitor health and diagnose illness, and many other ideas to collect, treat, or reuse waste more effectively.

Wald readily admits that “no one concept has emerged as a winner” yet but that the champion of the “transformed toilet” derby should ideally be one that prevents both pathogens and human-made pollutants — including prescription drugs and microplastics — from entering the ecosystem; is inexpensive and flexible; is water- and energy-efficient; generates resources, including some that could be sold; and is appealing to use, among other factors.

Engagingly written, meticulously researched and referenced, Pipe Dreams — despite any misgivings you may have about its unavoidably fecal subject matter — is a rewarding and enlightening read.

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In today’s Member Voices article, Kontorovsky outlines five secrets to his success as a civil engineer; tips that could help you too.

Roads require engineers. The road to success is no exception.

But how do you get on that path?

I’m sure you have read similar articles offering you the so-called “keys to success.” The truth is that there is no single “right way” to find success, but there is a “right way for you.” Here are five keys that might help you unlock professional success as a civil engineer.

1. Find yourself the right mentor

Mentors can positively change your path to professional success – whether you are just getting started or have been in the industry for many years. Most people envision the mentor relationship as one where there are highly structured periodical meetings in which the mentor draws a clear roadmap for their future. That is not always the case. While you may find a mentor who structures sessions this way, you should consider this the exception rather than the rule.

One interesting fact is that the person you choose to be your mentor might not even know that you consider them as such, and this is OK. Don’t expect that there will be an official ceremony in which you give the person the title of “mentor.” Be happy with any time that you can get out of them; be a sponge, ready to absorb all the wisdom that they offer you.

While it is possible to expect professional success without a mentor, there is no reason to make it harder on yourself. Under the wings of a mentor, you will increase your odds of meeting your goals in a shorter timeframe.

2. Become a great communicator

Engineering projects become a reality through communication and collaboration across different disciplines. Communication is not just about expressing your thoughts, but also about making sure that others can fully understand the information you are providing.

ABET requires engineering programs to demonstrate that their graduates can communicate efficiently. Communication, be it in oral or written form, is a critical aspect of an engineer’s success. Get out of your comfort zone and take some lessons on creative writing, or join a writing group if you can. The better you get at communicating technical information in an easy-to-follow manner, the more likely people will enjoy hearing what you have to say.

3. Do it right the first time

Engineering businesses need to stay profitable to maintain sustainable operations. One way to increase profitability is by staying efficient (of course). A known efficiency killer is the process of doing things more than once before completing the task at hand, which is something that most supervisors will be concerned about. This can become a significant obstacle for you at work, assuming that you are determined to move up the leadership ladder.

Create processes that allow you to take concrete steps when working on a project or when intending to complete a task at work. Avoid having to redo any work that you had deemed complete. Also, avoid putting such incomplete or inaccurate work in the hands of your supervisors at all costs. It is one thing to create more work for yourself, but it is a different thing to also create more work for others along the way. Make it easy for your supervisors: stay highly efficient.

4. Enhance the life of others

It should not always be about you. Meeting your goals is only half the battle. If you do great work, it will be noticed. If you do great work while you also play a crucial role in bringing up the quantity and quality of the output from your entire team, it will be noticed even more.

People who act as catalysts, bringing the best work out of others, are always valuable assets to any organization. These people can help maintain high and efficient productivity levels while preserving a very positive environment at work.

Do the right thing. As your career starts shaping up to reach new heights, never forget to pay it forward and do the same for others. Whenever possible, come full circle and mentor those who may be starting to walk a path you have already walked.

5. Stay present at work

Arguably, this could be the most important key to unlocking success, and it requires you to be present. Don’t just show up at the office. The secret formula to unlocking massive professional success requires you to go to work without it only feeling like work. You need to be motivated enough, challenged enough, and excited enough to show up ready for anything that comes your way, every day.

This kind of energy must come from within you. If you are not feeling this at the office, make sure to have a conversation with your supervisor or your mentor. If you are passionate about engineering, your drive will push you in unique directions, and your positive energy will be contagious enough to bring others along for the ride. If you enjoy what you do, it will never feel like work.

The keys are in your hands

Achieving your goals requires discipline and determination. And remember, today is always a good day to set yourself up for exponential success.

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Last year Garrett Brogdon, A.M.ASCE, landed his first job out of college as a project engineer I at the Archer Western division of the Walsh Group, working from the construction company’s Atlanta regional office. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering from Georgia Southern University, where he also interned for the Georgia Department of Transportation. While in school, he was an active member in the ASCE student member group, including president for the 2019-2020 school year. Today, he is working on a project at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to help build a de-icing facility and is looking forward to continuing to grow his technical and professional skills.

Here’s his story:

Civil Engineering: How did you first become interested in civil engineering?

As a kid I liked building stuff; I played with Legos and Tinkertoys and built all sorts of things. That grew into, ‘Hey, what can I build that’s functional and can help out?’ Well, I’m from a rural area on the south side of Georgia, so building something to help out meant building chicken coops, dog kennels, and so forth. And it was fun! I thought, ‘If it’s fun and I’m good at it, I might as well make money at it.’ As I got older, I learned that I’m pretty good at math and technical programs like (computer-aided design), so that just led me to this direction.

Eventually I was tasked with creating a horse stable for my family while in college. It was just a small, two-stall structure, but it was challenging and fun to build. I designed it on SketchUp using basic structural analysis techniques I learned in class, then I built it by hand with some help from my family. This taught me a good bit about simple project management principles such as cost management and scheduling. I had to lower the cost as much as possible while also managing the delivery of materials to match my schedule. Since I was still at school at the time, I could only work on the project on the weekends. I had to make sure that the lumber and tools were all ready before I got home to ensure a productive weekend. Overall, it took me around four full weekends to put the structure up, and it was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had.

Before I accomplished this, my courses at Georgia Southern University and my involvement in ASCE helped me build the skills I needed to do this successfully. I was a part of the ASCE Concrete Canoe Competition team at Georgia Southern University for all four years and eventually ended up leading it my final two years. That helped me understand the practical aspects of designing and building.

What were your favorite courses at university?

I liked all the civil courses, but my favorites were probably the concrete design and the materials lab. I liked testing materials and concrete mixes to see the hands-on side of the theories taught in class.

How did your internship at the Georgia Department of Transportation help you?

I was in an office that had good leaders; they taught me how to be a GDOT designer and to adhere to the state standards. I got a lot of experience in Bentley’s InRoads and Microstation, and I helped on a few projects. It was a great experience.

I worked on the design side at GDOT, and that helped me understand what the designers are looking for now that I am on working the construction side for Archer Western. And that works both ways. If you are in design, it helps to have experience in construction to see how it’s actually built. And if you’re in construction, it helps to have experience in design to visualize what the designers are intending. Because what’s first planned and what’s finally installed aren’t always one-to-one.

How did you become aware of the opening at Walsh Group?

I first heard about Archer Western in 2014-2015, when they were working on a couple of big projects in Atlanta. And then when I was in school, they were at our STEM job fair. I went by their booth and talked with their representative and learned a lot about the company. I left them a resume, and later I got an email from them. That led to an interview and eventually my first job. That college job fair meant a lot to me, and I am sure they mean a lot to many other students. They are important.

How were you able to have a professional resume handy at the fair?

I made my own resume, but I had a lot of help. I knew what information I wanted to put on there, but I needed help with the visuals to make it look appealing. Getting feedback on your resume is really important in my eyes. So at ASCE, we helped each other out with that. We had a group that would review each other’s resumes and offer feedback.

How did you prepare for the interview?

I made a list of sample questions I expected them to ask me. I felt like I needed to have all the answers. Then I did two or three practices with other people.

This was at the height of COVID-19, so I knew the interview would be virtual. So I also practiced all the different types of virtual platforms. I thought the worst thing would be to get onto the call and not be able to unmute yourself or something. You only get about 30-45 minutes of an interviewer’s time, and you don’t want to waste it not knowing how to operate the technology.

Once I got to the interview, it went so much easier because I prepared for it. I also found that a bullet sheet helped to remind me of what I wanted to say. It’s important to know what you want to ask the company. Only you know what you want to get out of the company. It’s two puzzle pieces fitting together; both sides have to work.

What did you learn from that process?

I learned that the fact that my resume showed diversified work experiences helped me out a lot. My time with GDOT, my ASCE experiences, the other leadership experiences I had all came together to help me sell myself and get that first interview. Having a nice resume that looks clean and tells what you want to say also made a difference. It was hard to get it all on one page, but doing so helped.

The biggest thing I took from the interview practices is that you have to be prepared to answer why you’re interested in working there and what you are looking for in a job, but also you have to be prepared for off-topic questions, like what got you interested in this field and what makes you passionate about it. Being able to put that into words is very difficult. You can have all the accolades, but if you can’t show the company that you have the drive, you may not get anywhere.

Now that you have been at the job for a year, how does it compare with what you expected?

It’s about on par with what I expected. Right now I’m working on a de-icing facility at Hartsfield-Jackson (Atlanta) International Airport. We’re putting in about 100,000 cu yd of concrete along with a de-icing facility with two reclamation tanks.

I’m on the civil side of the project, so that’s concrete paving, drainage, dirt work, waterlines, etc. The reclamation tanks are sort of like a wastewater treatment plant: There’s a lift station and pumps. So that’s been interesting to learn about.

How does what you do in your job differ from what you were taught in school?

I’ve learned a lot on the job about project management. I think that in school the project management side isn’t touched on enough. We had a cost impact class, so I knew a little about that, but we never went into scheduling much. And scheduling is difficult; it’s a science, and it takes time to perfect.

What advice do you have for engineers just graduating into the field today?

My biggest advice is to get internships for experience. It’s hard to get an entry-level job straight out of college without it. And the other thing is get involved in ASCE. I learned so much at ASCE, it’s hard to quantify. You build bonds with your peers, you get exposed to professionals, and I just can’t stress enough how much it taught me.

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And as professionals in the United States return to the office this year after different degrees of COVID-19-necessitated remote-work setups, the question of dress code is even more complicated than ever.

Here are some highlights from a recent ASCE Collaborate discussion addressing how civil engineers should “dress the part” upon returning to the office (and be sure to log in and contribute your own memories):

Christopher Seigel, P.E., M.ASCE

Woodbury, New Jersey

“I would imagine that dressing a certain way helps people engage a certain mindset. I assume that for some people, a buttoned-down shirt and suit helps them feel ‘on,’ and for other people, comfort helps them focus better. Of course, if you are comfortable in more dressy clothes, then it sounds like you win both ways!

“As someone who went to a school requiring a uniform from kindergarten through high school, I am comfortable in business casual but relish the chance to dress more casually, especially in the summer. It takes me back to my college days, when I got to work on tons of projects with fellow classmates who had many different styles of dress. I always felt that most of them always brought their ‘A’ game to what they were working on, regardless of if they were in a suit or coming to class or lab straight from a sport they played. …

“At the end of the day, I try to focus on the work habits of myself and those around me and pay no more than a passing thought to whether or not their shirt has a collar.”

Heidi C. Wallace, P.E., M.ASCE

Tulsa, Oklahoma

“I find that as a woman it is even more complicated to hit the desired ‘business casual’ look. I’ve yet to find a good alternative to the khakis and polo look. Women’s tops tend to be dressier than a polo, and most women’s cut polos don’t come across as sharp as a polo does on a guy.

“There also aren’t many options for women’s pants that are along the lines of chinos. So I either feel over- or underdressed when told ‘business casual’ and hardly ever right on the money.

“In college we had a company come talk to us, and they require borderline business professional because the founder says something along the lines of ‘dress professional, act professional.’ The company I work for is the opposite. Our dress code is essentially, ‘If you’d wear it to the lake, don’t wear it to work,’ which basically means no shorts for anyone and no sandals or sleeveless shirts for guys.

“The reasoning I was given was that ‘comfortable engineers are happy engineers, and happy engineers do good work.’ The caveat with our dress code is that if you are meeting with clients, you should match their expectations. With some clients I wear jeans and a top with a cardigan. With some clients I wear a nice dress and flats. I would love to wear a dress or skirt most days since they are comfortable and more easily look like the female equivalent of dressy to what the guys wear, but it just isn’t practical – I get cold easily in the office, and I can’t go to site visits dressed that way.

“I usually dress on a daily basis in a way that on short notice I can visit a construction site of a project without having to change anything but my shoes. I once had to literally run to my apartment to change into jeans because a contractor had an emergency, and I was in a skirt. My construction-site-visit clothes had been taken home for a wash and not been brought back.”

Gail Hayes, Ph.D., EIT, A.M.ASCE

Rockingham, Virginia

“I felt Heidi’s sentence of ‘I’ve yet to find a good alternative to the khakis and polo look’ in my soul!

“When I started my new position in December, I was told that the office dress code was ‘jeans and a polo’ and, like she said, polos on women typically send a different message than polos on men. Long story short, I found that cable-knit sweaters are an acceptable alternative for cold months and short-sleeve shirts with cardigans work well for warmer months. This is for my particular office, though, which is fairly casual.

“… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trendy clothes per se, but when I’m regularly at construction sites, I need practicality above all else. There are some clothing companies that are paying attention to the needs of women in positions like this (e.g., Duluth for some items), but we need more. I don’t consider myself a fashion-conscious individual and I dress modestly by today’s standards, but choosing my clothing for work can be surprisingly exhausting.”

Timothy Lang, EI, A.M.ASCE

Elkhart, Indiana

“At my office, our business casual is a nice pair of chinos and polos, unless you are doing out-of-office travel/inspections; then you can wear jeans in place of the chinos. Also, on Fridays we have a dress-down day, so jeans and polos or plain T-shirts.”

Join the conversation on ASCE Collaborate.

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In its 150-plus pages, the book packs in plenty of rich detail about surveying history, practices for the different types and purposes of surveying, and the tools of the trade. But what also makes the book stand out dramatically are its 100-plus images, many of which are full-color, historically accurate, extensively captioned photos depicting surveying activities from the time period, taken by award-winning photographer and co-author Dan Patterson with the assistance of a reenactors group known as the Department of the Geographer. This organization of reenactors is obsessively dedicated to historical accuracy with the mission of portraying a working interpretation of the Continental army’s Department of the Geographer during the period from 1777 to 1783. (The second co-author, Clinton Terry, is an associate professor of history at Mercer University.)

The authors dedicate a short opening essay to arguing the value of such images — carefully researched and produced in this way — to increase the understanding and relatability of eras from which visual primary sources simply do not exist, enhancing “the interpretative narrative, (and) adding clarity and color, literally.” Though our modern eyes see the images and instantly know that they are re-creations, the knowledge that this happened with meticulous attention to period knowledge and detail makes them compelling.

Though by no means dominating the book, the attention to this time period demands substantial coverage of George Washington. However, “using Washington as a central figure in this story is not an exercise of historical determinism or revering of a great man as a means of oversimplifying the complex,” the authors note. “Washington was at the forefront of the profession of surveying.” They note that his skill in the discipline may have both informed and presaged his acumen as a military leader while also highlighting that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln also worked as professional surveyors during their lives and that Teddy Roosevelt — the only other face on Mount Rushmore, as it turns out — likely knew how to survey as well.

Reminding us that the surveying profession was not just a tool during a period when the nation was first built but an instrument that actually shaped the way in which it was mapped and built (and that remained in many ways unchanged until the latter part of the 20th century), Surveying in Early America is a uniquely fascinating addition to the histories of the country and an aspect of the engineering profession.

(Note: Civil Engineering readers who are keenly aware that the United States is set to officially retire the U.S. survey foot in 2022 because it differs ever so slightly from the international-friendly version adopted in 1959 should note that the time period of this book stops well short of 1893, when the U.S. survey foot was introduced. Therefore, when discussed in this book, “a foot” refers its original pre-1893 length, defined as one third of a yard.)

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The Structure of Skyscrapers in America 1871-1900 is a sprawling, truly comprehensive look at every such building during that crucial three-decade period, as competing construction methods and technologies battled it out. Author Donald Friedman, who has done yeoman’s work researching and piecing together the historical and engineering record to make this reference possible, is a New York-based structural engineer with decades of experience specializing in historic preservation, adaptive reuse, and other aspects of existing buildings.

The book cites three linked goals: creating a “uniform set of descriptions of the structure of early tall buildings” (including those since demolished), describing how the various types of building structures came to be, and detailing how the continued presence of these forms affects conservation work in the present.

Like any good researcher, Friedman begins by defining terms and making clear his scope. Noting that 1871 was the beginning of the shift away from wood and masonry structures after two high-profile fires forced reconsideration of building technologies, he also identified 1900 as his endpoint because by that time the steel skeleton framing that would drive the truly iconic structures soon to come had become commonplace. Opting to examine only those buildings 10 stories and higher allowed Friedman to limit his study to “only” about 500 structures.

After spending some time defining building frame types and development, the factors driving those changes, and methods for altering and preserving older buildings and a wrap-up on building evolution, the book’s primary chapters end. And yet the book has only just begun because still to come is the simply named “Appendix — Individual Buildings.”

For the next 220 pages, the reader is treated to a capsule description and, with rare exceptions, a photograph of every building in Friedman’s study. Listed chronologically, and secondarily by the city, each entry provides the building’s completion date, building and framing type, primary use, height, width, depth, and “slenderness” ratio. Many also include the architect, builder, and total cost.

Amazingly detailed, cogently and effectively written and reasoned, The Structure of Skyscrapers offers an almost overwhelming amount of information, and as a historical compendium and reference it is a monumental work that simply has no equal.

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Cale Ash, P.E., S.E., is a principal of Degenkolb Engineers, an employee-owned structural engineering practice with six offices on the West Coast. Ash is the group director of the firm’s Seattle office. He joined Degenkolb in 2003 after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He chatted with Civil Engineering about Degenkolb’s efforts to maintain the company culture during the pandemic’s enforced period of remote work as well as how the positive solutions developed during the pandemic will inform the company’s post-pandemic operations.

1. How would you define Degenkolb’s company culture? 
We are always trying to understand what our clients’ goals are for their projects and then understand what our role is in achieving those goals. We try to take a fresh look at each project because we are always looking for ways to improve our processes or the work that we’re delivering to our clients. 

2. What did the company do to foster this culture pre-pandemic?
We’re organized into practice areas, and each group focuses on a different market sector such as health care, education, and so on. We have a variety of ways that we share knowledge across the company at the staff engineer level. We have six offices now, and before the pandemic we had an annual Degenkolb conference, where everyone gets together, typically in the Bay Area. It is a technical engineering conference like ASCE’s Structures Congress, for instance, and we would share information on projects, committee work, or new skills as a way to get that information out to all the engineers in the company. 

We try to take a fresh look at each project because we are always looking for ways to improve our processes or the work that we’re delivering to our clients. 

The annual conference was one way that we learned from each other and from our past projects to improve our performance on future ones. Usually, each office had its own engineer forums too, oftentimes as a lunch meeting. These were a way to share information with each other on a smaller scale about projects, committee work, or even a useful seminar that someone attended.  

When it came to activities outside the workday, each office would often have a social chair who organized happy hours or, in the larger offices, soccer and softball teams. Each office also traditionally had a summer picnic for the staff and their families. And then typically in January each office had a holiday party for employees and their partners to celebrate the past year. So, those are some of the ways that we tried to build a network across the individual offices pre-pandemic.

The fact that we are employee-owned with pretty broad ownership means that there are a lot of owners in the company, so we like to think that these events promote “ownership thinking” of how to meet our clients’ needs while building a successful business.

3. What practical changes has your office implemented in response to COVID-19 to make sure that your staff members remain safe as they work remotely? 
We transitioned to fully remote work in late March of last year. In the fall of 2019, we had, fortuitously it turns out, transitioned to using Microsoft Teams for a lot of our communication and videoconferencing. So, we had a nice technology tool already set up that helped us work remotely — within my office and among all the Degenkolb offices.

4. What practical changes did you make to ensure staff safety for those who still need to conduct site visits? 
The first thing that we did was to determine employees’ comfort levels when it came to visiting a site. If there is a need for a site visit, we ask the site manager about the COVID protocols in place. Early on there were more questions. I’d say probably in the last six months or so we’ve reached a point where just about everyone knows what the protocols are. But we want to make sure that the site managers are taking COVID safety seriously, just like they take safety seriously on an active construction site. 

5. Taking it beyond just safety: What have you implemented to maintain your company culture during the pandemic and widespread remote work? 
This is one that we’ve really thought a lot about. Right away, after we transitioned to remote, we thought about how we could make sure that we were connecting with all our employees on a regular basis. In the Seattle office, we make sure that we check in with our staff regularly, particularly our younger staff. 

As a company, we try to do one-on-one check-ins every three to four weeks. In the Seattle office, we are also doing weekly group check-ins. Every Monday morning at 9, we have a Teams video staff meeting. We usually start with conversations about what people did over the weekend, current events, or what have you. 

We are continuing to hold every week or so our market sector meetings, which are usually focused on project pursuits. And we also have committees that continue to meet regularly, though remotely. 

Right away, after we transitioned to remote, we thought about how we could make sure that we were connecting with all our employees on a regular basis.

On the social side, when we realized last summer that we weren’t going to be able to do our normal summer picnic, we encouraged engineers to organize little get-togethers for smaller groups of people in parks that might be near their houses. Just for a chance to — in a safe way — see each other for that personal connection that they’re missing when they’re stuck looking at their computer screens all the time. We didn’t do any catering and we didn’t want to do anything potluck style, so we told people that they could expense it if they wanted to buy some snacks and drinks for the gathering.

6. Have there been any “misses” that you needed to subsequently tweak?
Well, yes, in regard to the same topic: the summer picnic. As it turns out, there ended up being only a few people who were interested in helping organize the gatherings. But I think that’s probably a natural dynamic in an office. Some people are more interested in building social networks, and some people are more proactive and willing to volunteer for a responsibility like that. We had hoped that there would be more interest in these little get-togethers.

On the work side of it, typically our model is to hire engineers coming out of college and then train and mentor them through project work. That is one thing that has been more challenging: checking in with people to see if they are getting the support they need. If they were in the office, it would be easier for them to just turn to the person sitting near them to ask some questions. Or they might even overhear a conversation and learn from it or add to it. So, it was hard to figure out a good way to do that type of mentoring. 

To solve that mentoring issue, my colleague, who is the engineering manager in our office, organized what he calls coffee breaks. He has a 15-minute check-in once a week with a random grouping of people from the office as a way to somewhat replicate that in-office experience; it’s like a virtual watercooler conversation. 

As I think of my role as a project manager, it has been challenging during remote work to stay on top of project progress. Whereas before the pandemic, I could walk around and quickly chat with a couple of people on a project team to check where they were, now I’m either trying to schedule a meeting or talking to people one-on-one. I think it ends up taking a little bit more communication to make sure that people are exchanging the information they need to within the project teams. 

To solve that mentoring issue, my colleague, who is the engineering manager in our office, organized what he calls coffee breaks.

To help with this, one thing I have found successful is to hold a short standing meeting at the beginning of a workday, like they do on a job site to talk about what each trade is going to do. So instead of having just one larger meeting every week, we might have several 30-minute check-ins to see the progress people have made so far, where the pain points might be, and what needs some attention in order to just keep the project moving forward.

7. Have there been any changes that have been so successful you’d like to see them continued after the pandemic? 
A few come to mind. With the pandemic, there have been opportunities to trim out some unnecessary travel as people are getting more comfortable using videoconference calling platforms, either for meetings within or between offices or with clients.

Another success relates to flexibility. Some employees — myself included — have taken the opportunity that telecommuting has made possible to get out of town and spend more time with family or even do a longer vacation somewhere with good internet access. You can stay engaged and productive on your projects while keeping some flexibility for personal or family reasons. And I think that’s something that we’re still trying to finalize: how to take advantage of the technology tools that we’ve come to rely on in the last year to improve our flexibility as a workplace.

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Maintaining the Company Culture When Working Remotely: Now and Post-Pandemic.”

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Danielle Goudreau, P.E., M.ASCE, went from designing waterfront structures to managing projects by taking a higher-level position at a new company. She credits her willingness to ask questions and her experience as an outgoing networker for her success.

How did you get this new position? 
I enjoyed the work I was doing designing waterfront structures, and I was looking for more responsibility. I’ve done a lot of networking, so I know a lot of people at different companies and was able to ask them questions to figure out what kind of company would help me meet my career goals. I knew Collins Engineers was a leader in the industry and would be a great fit, so I sought them out and they had an opportunity open. When I applied for the job, the people at Collins recognized me because I was involved in several industry committees and had presented at conferences.

What are the new responsibilities that come with this new job?
In my previous role I had done all the individual tasks and coordination, but now I am the one responsible for actually meeting the deadlines, distributing work, and monitoring the budget for the project as well. I still do design work as part of my job, which is great, but I also manage and mentor other team members.

I didn’t hesitate to ask questions because you’re not always going to know the answer or the next step, but there’s plenty of engineers who can help you get there.

How did you learn those management skills?
I was lucky to have a mentor who would not just give me assignments task by task but would say, ‘I need you to do the preliminary design of this project,’ and then give me the opportunity to work through that on my own first. When I became confident in the work I was doing, I would then ask for more challenging tasks. I didn’t hesitate to ask questions because you’re not always going to know the answer or the next step, but there’s plenty of engineers who can help you get there. I also learned how to work on a team because you still have to coordinate with other engineers on projects and be able to work with them effectively. 

What role have mentors played in your success?
They’ve provided me with the opportunity to grow as an engineer and to think both critically and practically about problems. They’ve asked me to picture myself being in their position and make decisions from their point of view. A rebuttal I often get from one of my mentors, Ryan McCoy, when I ask him a question is, “What would you do?” or “Come to me with solutions, not problems.” This gives me the opportunity to walk through the problem rather than just getting an answer.

What technical skills have helped you most in your career so far?
Completing hand calculations when I’m presented with a new type of problem has really helped me develop my technical skill set. A lot of software programs are black boxes where you input the parameters and the computer spits out an answer, but being able to recognize when the answers seem wonky is very important. There’s a very big difference between 5 ksi and 50 ksi! 

Get out and get to know people in the industry – everyone has something to share and you can learn a lot through mentors and colleagues.

What personal traits or characteristics do you believe helped you win this new position?
I consider myself a people person. I rarely turn down an opportunity to attend a networking event and I’m very involved in the engineering community both locally and nationally. Attending events and having conversations with engineers of different backgrounds and skill levels has also helped build my interpersonal skills and confidence.

What tips would you have for an engineer who is perhaps not as outgoing but still wants to network at events?
No. 1 is just go. You will meet people regardless. And make sure you bring business cards! Then, if you aren’t as good at one-on-one conversations, maybe see if there is a technical paper you can present. You can also take courses at a conference and talk with the presenter afterward. People love to talk about their work, and asking questions shows that you are interested.

What advice would you give to other young engineers who would seek positions similar to yours?
First and foremost, make sure you take pride in your work and you’re effectively completing your tasks. You don’t need to know absolutely everything, but make sure you have done your very best. Take any comments as feedback rather than criticism.

Your manager might not recognize when you are ready to take on more responsibility. Ask for more when you are ready. You are in charge of your career.

And get out and get to know people in the industry – everyone has something to share and you can learn a lot through mentors and colleagues.

Your manager might not recognize when you are ready to take on more responsibility. Ask for more when you are ready. You are in charge of your career.

What do you hope to accomplish in this new position?
My No. 1 goal is to be a successful project manager — making sure my clients are happy and my projects are on time and on budget. Aside from that, I am looking forward to gaining more experience working on projects of different sizes and in different regions of the country. I worked mostly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island previously, and the biggest project I am working on right now is in Milwaukee, replacing 1,000 linear feet of lake wall. I feel really lucky to work at a company like Collins because I have the opportunity to work on a range of projects from small residential docks to large federal projects. I can see myself being in a business development role in the future, and I’m excited to develop those skills. 

Where do you see the profession of civil engineering heading in the next few years?
I think we’ve done a good job at addressing the impacts of climate change within the civil engineering field, though there is always room for improvement. In terms of waterfront structures, resiliency is something we incorporate into every design. In the next 5 to 10 years, I think we will see more projects addressing the causes of climate change rather than just the impacts. I’m a resident of Rhode Island, which was the first state to build an offshore wind farm (Go, Rhody!). And I think we’ll also see more low-impact designs along the waterfront that incorporate living shorelines as well as hard structures. 

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Maximize Opportunities by Asking and Networking.”

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I wish I’d known when the COVID-19 pandemic began that it would last this long and impact us as much as it has. The California State University Maritime Academy does not offer a civil engineering program per se, but many of the classes in our school of engineering are similar.

We differ in that our students are members of a uniformed Corps of Cadets and take certain classes onboard the Training Ship Golden Bear, with programs licensed by the U.S. Coast Guard. Since nearly all our license assessments and tests must be conducted in-person, only about 30% of our lectures run virtually.

Generally, our students must reside on campus, though COVID forced us to adapt for safety reasons. To help our cadets maintain social distancing, we assigned just one student per dorm room rather than our usual double occupancy. Due to the rooms’ availability, some students had to reside off campus — which threatened the protective “bubble” that would have existed if everyone had remained on-site.

I wish I’d known when the COVID-19 pandemic began that it would last this long and impact us as much as it has.

Classes on the ship and in some labs are run in tight spaces, and it was nearly impossible to socially distance. We relied on masks, hand sanitizers, and other efforts to keep everybody safe. We had to offer more class times, with several running later into the evening to reduce the number of students per section. All our classrooms and labs now have directional arrows on the floor to indicate which doors to enter and leave through. That alone required an immense logistics setup.

Other changes were also required. For example, the normal setup for welding classes placed students working side by side, sometimes even sharing gear. That had to change, of course. We spread them out and purchased new welding helmets, gloves, and other items so every student was assigned their own. Then we purchased new cubbies for them to store their personal equipment in separately. 

Though we’ve been forced to sail through some fairly choppy seas, we’re still afloat and managing to stay on course.

For an electronics class and senior projects, we purchased 3D printers for each student so they could work from their dorm or apartment — an investment that will remain useful even after we return to all in-person education.

Though we’ve been forced to sail through some fairly choppy seas, we’re still afloat and managing to stay on course.  

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Wish I’d Known.”

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FMI Corp.’s 2021 Engineering and Construction Industry Overview: First Quarter Outlook projects that, once tallied, final figures will show that total engineering and construction spending was down just 1% in 2020 compared with 2019. Yet that number is misleading. Spending in some nonresidential sectors plummeted as much as 17% in 2020 compared with 2019, FMI reports, while residential construction bolstered overall spending with gains of 8% for single-family units and 10% for home improvements. Public safety and water supply infrastructure also buoyed the market with spending increases of 13% and 11%, respectively. “While some geographies and industry sectors remained unscathed, or even thrived, most of the industry struggled with the pandemic’s impacts on people, projects, and profits,” says FMI CEO Chris Daum in the company’s report. “These challenges continue to define the E&C industry’s operating environment as we move into 2021.”

As COVID-19 vaccines proliferate nationwide and a new administration presides in Washington, economists are projecting a slow and uneven recovery with continued turbulence in 2021 before what is expected to be a more positive outlook in 2022. “A lot of the same issues that we faced in 2020 are still present at least through the first half of 2021,” says Richard Branch, chief economist for Dodge Data & Analytics.

“We don’t expect the overall economy to start posting stronger growth until the second half of the year. That growth will be in lockstep with the further rollout of the vaccines. As more Americans are vaccinated, that will allow some of these activities — like eating out, traveling, and seeing our friends — to resume, which will eventually feed demand for further construction. But it’s going to be a long road back,” notes Branch.

As COVID-19 vaccines proliferate nationwide and a new administration presides in Washington, economists are projecting a slow and uneven recovery with continued turbulence in 2021 before what is expected to be a more positive outlook in 2022.

One indicator of the marathon ahead is the 2021 Dodge Construction Outlook. It suggests that construction starts, which plunged 14% to $738 billion in 2020, will gain a little more than 4% to $771 billion in 2021, remaining well below pre-pandemic levels. 

Another indicator, the American Institute of Architects Consensus Construction Forecast, which compiles data from the nation’s leading AEC market forecasters, anticipates a 6% decline in overall engineering and construction spending in 2021 before growth returns in 2022. “The financial scars across most building markets are pretty deep, and it’s going to take time for those scars to heal to the point where construction can resume stronger growth,” Branch warns.

“Looking at the big picture, 2021 is going to be a bridge year. Once we’re beyond 2021, there will be much stronger growth in the economy and in construction,” he continued.

On the upside
While some AEC sectors must wait for the pandemic’s end to rebound, other areas have flourished not in spite of but because of the pandemic. Last year, as the U.S. economy spiraled into recession, analysts contemplated what the AEC market’s eventual recovery would look like. Would it be V-shaped, with a sharp decline and rapid ascent? Or maybe L-shaped, with a sharp drop and slow return to pre-pandemic levels?

As it turns out, the market is experiencing a K-shaped recovery, as residential demand soars while nonresidential interest wanes, says Brian Strawberry, a senior economist with FMI. “This can largely be attributed to the government’s response to the pandemic,” he says, noting that low interest rates, multiple economic stimulus packages, eviction moratoriums, and mortgage forbearance policies have bolstered the residential market while safety measures that forced some business closures reduced nonresidential appeal.

Widespread pandemic-induced behavioral changes, some of which are expected to endure for years to come, are also fueling bifurcation in the market. For instance, as social distancing became the norm for slowing the transmission of COVID-19, people across the country turned to online retailers for everything from flour for baking bread to puzzles for entertainment. This surge in online shopping, which, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce pushed total e-commerce sales up 32.4% to about $792 billion in 2020, is driving the need for additional warehouse and distribution space nationwide. 

The market is experiencing a K-shaped recovery, as residential demand soars while nonresidential interest wanes, says Brian Strawberry, a senior economist with FMI.

FMI reports that warehouse construction grew from approximately one-quarter of put-in-place commercial construction in 2015 to nearly half in 2020, representing approximately 18% growth year over year. “As an increasing number of us do more of our shopping through Amazon and other online retailers, one of the sectors on the upside of that K-shaped recovery is warehousing,” Branch explains. “These companies need more warehouse and fulfillment facilities to meet the next- and same-day delivery expectations that have become the industry standard.”

Pandemic-induced behavioral changes are also spurring another sector on the upside of the K: residential construction. As companies nationwide shuttered their offices and adopted teleworking arrangements that comply with social distancing recommendations, employees realized that they no longer needed to live in proximity to office buildings. This, coupled with low interest rates, has sparked an exodus from high-cost, densely populated urban centers, like San Francisco, New York, and Washington. “People, mostly millennials — who have been living in multifamily structures in densely populated cities — are searching for space and affordability out in the suburbs and rural areas,” Branch says.

“Part of that is natural aging and maturation of the millennial age group. They’re now in their early to mid-30s, and they’re starting to have families, which is generally when people start to look for more space and better schools in the suburbs. But the pandemic and the change in how people work has accelerated this exodus,” explains Branch.

The PSMJ Resources Inc. Quarterly Market Forecast analyzes engineering and construction proposal activity using its Net Plus/Minus Index to express the difference between the percentage of firms reporting increases and those reporting decreases in proposal activity. The forecast shows that in the fourth quarter of 2020, housing matched or exceeded pre-COVID-19 levels. 

According to the forecast, housing ended 2020 with an index of 43%, up from 38% the prior quarter, marking the highest-ever recorded NPMI for the housing sector since the firm began tracking it in 2006. Of the 58 submarkets that PSMJ follows, single-family individual housing (59%), multifamily housing (58%), and single-family developments (51%) were among the top performing in the fourth quarter of 2020. 

Remote working, tight real estate inventories, low-interest refinance activity, and other related factors have also driven home improvement spending, which has included new home offices, kitchens, bathrooms, landscaping, pools, and other upgrades, according to FMI’s first-quarter outlook. 

“These improvements have in many cases been put off from prior years but are also a means to upgrade living spaces and accommodate more time spent at home,” the FMI report states. “Improvement spending through the outlook period will remain well aligned with single-family construction. Anticipate continued strong growth through the first half of 2021. However, prepare for a future correction when supply and prices begin to balance, investment sentiment becomes challenged, government programs expire, and/or there is some return to normal working conditions.”

As for public safety, the FMI report says that the social unrest that occurred throughout the nation as people protested everything from police violence to stay-at-home orders spurred the 13% growth in that sector.

Two other sectors that have thrived during the past year are water supply and public safety construction. FMI’s report shows that a $1.4 trillion omnibus package under the 2020 Water Resources Development Act drove water supply spending up 11% in 2020 over 2019. That spending is expected to level off in 2021. 

As for public safety, the FMI report says that the social unrest that occurred throughout the nation as people protested everything from police violence to stay-at-home orders spurred the 13% growth in that sector. “The spike in public safety spending was a bit of a surprise to us,” Strawberry admits. “We’re talking about prisons, police stations, and fire stations. It’s unclear exactly where that investment was spent. I wouldn’t expect that growth to continue.” 

On the downside
On the downslope of the K-shaped recovery are most of the other markets across private and public construction, Branch says. The same behavioral changes that have boosted residential construction are also responsible for much of the decline in these markets. As people have stayed home and away from gatherings, nonresidential construction has contracted. 

AIA’s forecast shows that in 2020, construction of commercial facilities declined 7%, industrial building construction retracted 4.5%, and institutional construction decreased 4%. FMI breaks it down like this: lodging sunk 17% to $28 billion, office buildings fell 6% to $80 billion, religious spaces decreased 16% to $3 billion, educational institutions slid 4% to $101 billion, amusement and recreation centers receded 9% to $26 billion, transportation infrastructure dipped 1% to $57 billion, and manufacturing facilities dropped 8% to $73 billion. 

FMI reports that health care center and communication infrastructure spending remained stable over the period.

Of the 12 major markets that PSMJ studies, energy/utilities led with an NPMI of 47%, up from 28% in the third quarter of 2020 and even higher than its pre-pandemic rating of 43% in the fourth quarter of 2019.

“The pandemic induced a steep recession, and we’re seeing that play out differently in different sectors,” says Kermit F. Baker, AIA’s chief economist. “The hardest-hit sectors were the commercial facilities — retail and lodging, in particular. With institutional, it’s more of a mixed bag (because) health care actually grew a little bit, while education was down somewhat. And then there are the amusement and recreational facilities, things like sports facilities and stadiums, and they obviously saw steep declines because of the precautions in place to limit big concentrations of people. I think that’s going to be the trend that we see moving forward. Based on government figures, we’re expecting almost a 6% decline overall in 2021 — a little steeper on the commercial side and a little less steep on the industrial and institutional side — before recovering in 2022.”

Construction corrections
The Associated Builders and Contractors’ Backlog Indicator reflects the past year’s market declines. It shows that in January 2021, contractors had 7.5 months of project backlog on their books, down from 8.4 months in January 2020 but up slightly from 7.3 in December 2020.

“We’ve generally seen a curtailing in backlog, which means that contractors are working through their under-contract projects faster than they’re generating new opportunities,” says ABC’s chief economist Anirban Basu. “There are a lot of competing forces shaping this data. On the one hand, there is the weaker commercial real estate environment; that’s hotels, office buildings, (and) shopping centers. And on the other hand, the pandemic has created this tug-and-pull with projects being postponed and then coming back online. 

“Indeed, I think one of the reasons that we’ve seen the backlog edge a bit higher recently is not because of underlying economic factors, but in fact because some of the projects that were delayed in 2020 are now coming back to life.”

PSMJ’s forecast shows that much of the market’s movement throughout the past year has in fact coincided with the pandemic. The firm reports that when COVID-19 cases began spiking during the second quarter of 2020, the NPMI tanked to a “near-record-worst” of -22% before rebounding to 10% as COVID-19 cases leveled in the third quarter. The index then slipped again to 5% as cases resurged in the fourth quarter. 

Of the 12 major markets that PSMJ studies, energy/utilities led with an NPMI of 47%, up from 28% in the third quarter of 2020 and even higher than its pre-pandemic rating of 43% in the fourth quarter of 2019. “Its surge is attributable to a huge bounce in the renewable energy submarket, which reported an NPMI of 75% in the fourth quarter,” the report says. “Utility distribution (59%) and telecom/cables (39%) were also strong.”

Under President Joe Biden, renewable energy and infrastructure spending could continue to expand. Biden has indicated that behind the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that he signed into law in March, one of his top priorities is an infrastructure revitalization plan, with special consideration given to renewable energy. During his presidential campaign, Biden proposed a $2 trillion plan for clean energy, public transit, and road and bridge repairs aimed at tackling the nation’s crumbling infrastructure while creating unionized jobs. 

Under President Joe Biden, renewable energy and infrastructure spending could continue to expand.

Such investment is long overdue. ASCE’s 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure gave the nation’s infrastructure a C-, noting that across the country a water main break occurs every two minutes, 43% of public roadways are in poor or mediocre condition, and 10,000 miles of levees remain unaccounted for and unchecked. (Read “ASCE’s 2021 Report Card marks the nation’s infrastructure progress,” Civil Engineering, March/April 2021.)

“The Biden administration has spoken a lot about infrastructure already and seems committed to accelerating expenditures on infrastructure,” Basu explains. “Part of the motivation for that, of course, is to accelerate recovery from the COVID-19 economic downturn. But it will be interesting to see if the Biden administration can pass a meaningful infrastructure package. And by meaningful, I don’t mean just dollars leaving federal coffers to finance projects that are local or national in scope, but rather for the federal government to actually find new funding sources for infrastructure. Federal infrastructure spending relies heavily upon fuel taxes, the rates of which have not been raised since 1993. And now we have the specter of electric vehicles that will further hammer away at those fuel tax receipts. You put it all together, and this nation has some real problems.”

An infrastructure package from the Biden administration could include more than just energy and transportation projects. It could also include building construction. “The Biden administration seems to be in concert with this expanded definition of infrastructure that has been building momentum over the past decade, which includes some institutional facilities as well,” Branch explains. “It’s this concept of social infrastructure, like community centers and other buildings that could support a more vibrant community. That could potentially generate some work for the AEC industry.”

Location, location, location
As industry members consider opportunities this year and beyond, the pandemic’s impact will remain an important factor. For instance, the pandemic-induced shift to teleworking has allowed some people to live where they want regardless of their employers. Many people are settling in the nation’s midsection, which analysts predict will outpace other areas of the country in construction spending this year. 

The FMI report states that the top four performing census divisions will be: Mountain, East South Central, and the two divisions that make up the Midwest Census Region — West North Central and East North Central. “The tagline that I use is, ‘The South and West are the best,’” says Branch, who notes that the Midwest and Texas are certain to draw people searching for affordable single-family living. 

With remote working expected to endure long after the pandemic ends, analysts predict that new office construction will continue to decline through the next couple of years, and the nation will see a surplus of existing office space, driving steep declines in rents.

With remote working expected to endure long after the pandemic ends, analysts predict that new office construction will continue to decline through the next couple of years, and the nation will see a surplus of existing office space, driving steep declines in rents. “One of the things that we’ve learned through the pandemic is that many people can be as productive or more productive working from home than in the office, and that will truncate the demand for office space,” Basu asserts. “In order to retain tenants and to secure new ones, many landlords will strategically reduce rents. The rents that will fall furthest and fastest are among Class A and Class A+ office buildings because they have the most room to drop their rates.”

While demand for office space will fall, AEC firms could find opportunities in retrofitting remaining office space to meet new expectations brought on by the pandemic, Baker says. “More and more companies over the last several decades have gone from completely enclosed offices to cubicles to open space; I think that trend of fewer square feet per employee is going to reverse pretty dramatically for health reasons,” he says. “We’re going to go back to the Mad Men-era private offices, or at least something with less density and more social distancing. You’ll also see upgrading of (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) systems and other things for enhanced airflow and air filtration since we’ve learned that these viruses spread more easily in enclosed spaces.”

In addition to excess office space, many major metropolitan markets will have an oversupply of restaurant and retail space due to closures prompted and/or accelerated by the pandemic, the FMI report states. “One of the things we suffered last year was a vast array of major retail bankruptcies. Pier 1 Imports, True Religion, Neiman Marcus, J. Crew, J.C. Penney, GNC, Lord & Taylor, Francesca’s — each of them went bankrupt,” Basu says. “And then there are some companies that did not go bankrupt but who are closing stores by the dozens nonetheless, including the likes of Macy’s. So, we will come out of this pandemic with an abundance of vacant retail space, and that will diminish the demand for new retail construction.” 

All that empty office and retail space could generate opportunities for AEC firms, however, as demand for adaptive reuse rises. “That space needs to be reused in some way,” Basu says. “It might be for outpatient medical centers, or it might be for affordable housing, or it might be for fulfillment and data centers. Whatever the case, that requires design work, or at least redesign work, as these structures are adaptively reused. I expect to see a lot of modifications of existing structures. There will also be a fair amount of tear-down activity and then rebuilding on various sites in order to meet unmet demand for data centers, fulfillment centers, and other needs.”

In light of these changes, economists say that AEC firms must remain nimble in the pandemic’s wake. “This is not going to be a copy-and-paste recovery compared to the aftermath of the Great Recession in 2008-2009,” Branch warns. “The pandemic and the fallout from an economic perspective mean that opportunities for growth in 2021 in the construction sector are going to be harder to find. They are there, but firms that play in that sector are going to need to be creative in searching out those opportunities, and more importantly, they’re going to need to be aggressive when they find them — because other firms are going to be doing the same thing.” 

With the nation poised to emerge from the pandemic in late 2021, the overall economy is expected to begin rebounding, which will in turn drive growth in the AEC market. 

Strawberry agrees. “Great opportunities are still going to be out there,” he says. “AEC firms should be flexible and willing to change course to take advantage.”

To succeed, Baker suggests that firms expand their scopes to consider different projects than they might have pursued in the past. “Generally, when we go through cycles like this, new construction projects tend to be smaller and more targeted,” he says.

“It’s going to be several years before we see a resurgence in the megaprojects that we saw in the 2017, ’18, ’19 period. And a lot of folks in the industry are going to have to really start looking for new clients and recognizing that some areas that have been traditional strengths for them are not going to be strong moving forward. They need to expand their search a little bit in terms of finding areas that are going to see growth moving forward, and that may be a different list than the ones that have provided their business over the last few years,” Basu states.

With the nation poised to emerge from the pandemic in late 2021, the overall economy is expected to begin rebounding, which will in turn drive growth in the AEC market. 

Still, economists agree that it will likely take years for the market to return to pre-pandemic levels. “The forecasts suggest that construction activity is going to pick up in 2022 with 3% growth for that year,” Baker says. “Assuming that’s accurate and that the 6% decline that’s projected for this year is also accurate on top of the 2% decline last year, that would suggest that we won’t reach pre-pandemic levels until we get into 2023, probably midyear or so. We still have a lot of uncertainty ahead.”

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “A Bridge Year.”

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Their goal is to build a solid foundation in sustainability and infrastructure that will carry students through the rest of their education as well as equip them with the knowledge and skills to fully understand the environmental, economic, and social implications of the work they will be doing as practicing engineers.

Briefly describe CE 250 — Introduction to Sustainable Infrastructure. What are the learning objectives for this course? 
Introduction to Sustainable Infrastructure is a core, 200-level course required for all the university’s civil, construction, and environmental engineering students. In this course, we introduce students to the principles of sustainability and sustainable design from the global to the local scales. 

The course consists of five modules: introductory material, which includes approaches to engineering problem-solving; environmental sustainability; engineering economics; social sustainability; and a module of in-depth case studies to tie these topics together. 

For environmental sustainability, we consider a broad suite of the environmental impacts of infrastructure analyzed through the lens of life-cycle assessment. We also focus on the interplay between climate change and infrastructure, namely, how infrastructure contributes to climate change and what infrastructure-related mitigation and adaptation measures are available. For engineering economics, the students learn discounted cash-flow analysis, benefit-cost analysis, and consideration of externalities. In social sustainability, we tackle concepts such as environmental justice and architectural exclusion.

Why is this course an important element of the civil engineering curriculum?
Taking this course early in the curriculum is intended to build a foundation of knowledge on sustainability and infrastructure that will be revisited in upper-level technical courses. Civil, construction, and environmental engineers are designing infrastructure that will last for decades. It is imperative that our future engineers consider and fully understand the environmental, economic, and social implications of their work.

How is content delivered? What have been some of the challenges with this type of delivery?
In the most recent offerings of this course, I co-taught in an online format with Angela (fall 2020) and Joseph (spring 2021), and we opted for a partially flipped model with weekly recitations. Each week consists of two prerecorded (asynchronous) lectures, two live practice sessions, and one small group recitation for discussion. 

So, basically, we meet as a class online three times a week. On Mondays and Wednesdays, which we term the practice sessions, our time begins with a low-stakes quiz on the prerecorded lecture. This offers us and the students alike instantaneous feedback on what content is already mastered and where they are struggling. The remainder of the practice session is then devoted to example problems related to the content that is not yet mastered. On Fridays, we hold discussion sessions, in which the students are divided into five groups, each led by an instructor. 

Within those sessions, they work in groups of four to discuss relevant topics and complete the associated analyses. These discussion sessions allow for more direct engagement with peers and faculty, which we feel makes the space more inviting for everyone.

I believe that shifting away from a fully in-person model with three lectures per week has improved learning outcomes. The students are offered much more time to practice problems, and the small discussion groups offer them an opportunity to more deeply explore topics and engage with us and their peers. 

What makes this course unique? 
This course covers content that is not always included in standard engineering curricula. Through it, we build a knowledge base and skills in assessing all three pillars of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social. Through the use of real-world infrastructure case studies, we challenge the students to assess competing priorities using incomplete or uncertain data that yield, at times, ambiguous answers. In essence, we walk them through the process of considering messy real-world problems. 

Why do you make use of case studies?
The case studies bring forth examples that future engineers may face, while integrating analyses related to environmental impacts, economics, and society. The case studies that we have developed span a wide range of topics, including an assessment of the options to deal with coal ash ponds in North Carolina and the implications of a highway expansion. Students are expected to deconstruct complex problems and deploy a variety of approaches to offer novel insights into these real-world challenges. 

I am always looking for new case studies that offer a challenging analysis of infrastructure’s environmental, economic, and social impacts. It is important to keep the content fresh and to have a wide variety of case studies that meet the diverse interests of our students.

What is a fun or interesting assignment students enjoy?
Assessing the options for dealing with coal ash ponds in North Carolina. It’s a massive problem, and they quickly see how long it would take to move the material to properly lined landfills. In addition, they are introduced to alternative remediation options, including biocementation, a topic taught by Brina Montoya, Ph.D., an associate professor in our department. 

Are you ready to return to in-person learning? 
Definitely! But I do think that we will retain some elements of our new teaching model. Namely, I think that the students benefit from the immediate feedback that the quizzes and other activities provide as well as the more personalized engagement of the small group discussion sessions. 

Is there anything you would like to say to instructors who may be struggling with the challenges of online content delivery?
Zoom fatigue is real! So go easy on yourself and your students. We are all learning how to do this as we go. The online/asynchronous approach has required me to prepare and finalize content far in advance of its delivery, which carries with it advantages and disadvantages, and our teaching team has worked hard to make the live sessions engaging and fun.

For our live practice sessions, I find that it is helpful to have a variety of examples ready to go. This allows me to select examples and better focus our time on the areas where the students need the most help. 

What do you want your teaching legacy to be?
I hope that I effectively challenge my students to ask and answer big, difficult questions and that they are better equipped to consider the societal impacts of their work. 

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Teaching Sustainability from All Angles.”

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This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “At a Glance.”

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Since becoming ASCE president, I’ve been hosting an “Ask the President” town hall event on the first business day of each month. Recently, I’ve focused on two major developments within the Society: student voting and ASCE’s 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.

Timed with ASCE’s elections, the May town hall focused on student voting. This year, eligible members will have the opportunity to vote on several important issues. One is whether to allow student members to vote — an idea proposed to the Board of Direction last year. In October 2020, the board voted to allow students to vote, passing the measure with a landslide endorsement of 17-1. Since it requires modifying the ASCE Constitution, membership has the last say on the proposal. I urge you to vote “yes” on this issue for the following reasons:

1. If at 18 we can vote for the U.S. president, we should be able to vote for the ASCE president.

2. We keep saying “students are the future of our profession.” Now is the time to show them we respect them by giving them the right to vote.

3. About 100 years ago in our country, women could not vote. Today, the idea of women not voting is unthinkable. I hope we will feel the same way about students voting.

4. Some say students do not pay dues. While not directly to ASCE, they pay dues to their chapters, anywhere from $10 to $100 per year. Also, you and I are paid to be civil engineers, while students pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and fees every year to become civil engineers. So, to me, students have a major stake in civil engineering and in ASCE.

5. Some say students don’t know about ASCE. I can assure you that when I became a member in 1979, I didn’t know much about ASCE. But I studied the proposals and used my own judgment to decide. Civil engineering students are bright and can make well-educated decisions. 

6. Some say they will skew the elections. First, it’s unlikely that all students will vote. Currently, only about 7% of all eligible ASCE members vote during election time. So, student voting may motivate many members who should be voting but aren’t.

We keep saying “students are the future of our profession.” Now is the time to show them we respect them by giving them the right to vote.

At the April town hall event, I highlighted the 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure following its release in March, and the 2021 ASCE Legislative Fly-In, during which some 250 members met with their representatives in Congress to advocate for major infrastructure funding. 

Released every four years, the report card is created through a very rigorous and time-consuming process. It includes hundreds of volunteers and staff studying data in 17 infrastructure categories, leading to grades voted on by the Committee on America’s Infrastructure. I wish to thank Kristina Swallow, P.E., Pres.18.ASCE, chair of that committee, and all committee members for a job well done. 

The 2017 report card gave America’s infrastructure a D+. The 2021 grade is a C-. While this shows progress, we still have a long way to go to get an A. 

America’s infrastructure is ranked 13th in the world by the World Economic Forum! Based on extended trends of needs and investment, ASCE estimates that each American household will lose an average of $3,300 a year in disposable income due to declining infrastructure. The average number of households projected from 2020-2039 is 140.6 million. Multiplying the average lost annual disposable income by the average number of households over the next 20 years — 140.6 million — ASCE estimates households will lose $468 billion every year over the next 20 years, when factoring in inflation. 

Meanwhile, ASCE estimates it will take roughly an additional $259 billion a year for the next 10 years to bring our infrastructure back to a state of good repair. 

The time is right for a massive infrastructure bill to pass as infrastructure has bipartisan support and would revive our economy after the COVID-19 pandemic. Infrastructure is not just concrete and steel. It’s also schools, hospitals, parks, health care, and a good quality of life for everyone. Please take any opportunity you may have to convey that message to your congressional representatives.

If you have questions or comments to help solve some perceived problems, please email me at [email protected]. 

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering.

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It’s easy to guess which markets bottomed out: hotels and restaurants, offices, retail centers, schools, religious buildings, amusement parks, and stadiums — anyplace people usually gather but no longer could, at least not safely. Construction of public transportation systems as well as of streets and highways declined too, though some projects already underway were completed early.

This year may bring a slow and bumpy road to recovery — one with many questions remaining.

What kinds of projects represent the upper arm of the K? Warehouses to handle all those goods we ordered online when we could no longer shop in stores, home renovations driven by work-from-home and learn-from-home edicts, and single-family home construction, spurred by families who needed more workspace or wanted to take advantage of their sudden ability to work from anywhere. Construction of public safety and water supply infrastructure also rose dramatically. And spending on health care facilities, sewer systems, communications, and environmental conservation grew modestly as well.

This year may bring a slow and bumpy road to recovery — one with many questions remaining. Will the Biden administration be the one to finally succeed on a robust federal infrastructure bill, after decades of unfulfilled promises by presidents past? Will the bill prioritize communications technologies to bridge the digital divide between those with access to adequate fiber optic and cellular service and those without? Will “clean” transportation and environmental sustainability be central to the recovery, as President Joe Biden has promised? Time will tell.

In the meantime, though, there are other K’s worth mentioning in this nascent economic revival. One has to do with gender and the other with ethnicity.

At the beginning of the pandemic, day care centers and schools closed, and children were sent home to play and learn just as many white-collar employees were sent home to work. Schools and teachers were no more prepared for online education than parents were, and the learning curves were steep. It quickly became clear that the younger the child, the more help that child would need from an adult. And overwhelmingly, that adult was mom. 

And the longer people are out of work, the more likely it is that their skills will atrophy, making it tougher to be rehired in fields in which technologies and processes change quickly. 

Working mothers reduced their hours or left the workforce entirely in droves, and as the economy reawakens, they may find it more difficult to return to full employment than during past recoveries. Sure, schools will reopen, but some day care centers may not, leaving moms of younger children facing one more hurdle. And the longer people are out of work, the more likely it is that their skills will atrophy, making it tougher to be rehired in fields in which technologies and processes change quickly. 

This is bad news not just for working mothers but for their families, their communities, and their employers. Not only does it decrease women’s representation in the workforce — just as many employers were finally beginning to recognize the value of diversity in their ranks — it also decreases family income and therefore family spending. This, of course, slows the economic recovery. It’s a vicious cycle.

And the news may be worse for some people of color, who according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics experienced distinctly higher rates of unemployment than others during the pandemic — and still are. The BLS reports that even as late in the pandemic’s arc as February 2021, the unemployment rate was 5.6% for white workers and 5.1% for Asian American workers but nearly double that for Black workers (9.9%) and 8.5% for those who identify as Hispanic/Latino.

The engineering and construction professions often report worker shortages. As the AEC market continues along its K-shaped recovery, it will be important to remember — and reach out to — the unemployed workers on the downslopes of the other K’s. 

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “An Uneven Recovery.”

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Why? Not only are jurors inherently unpredictable, but anything can go wrong in a jury trial. A shocking display of this is highlighted in this issue’s case, Lake Hills Investments LLC v. Rushforth Construction Co. Inc. Here the Washington Court of Appeals recently overturned a $9.6 million verdict awarded to the contractor because a single instruction given to the jury was found to be incorrect.

Even in contracts that allow for litigation, sophisticated contracts universally require waivers of jury trials. Why? Not only are jurors inherently unpredictable, but anything can go wrong in a jury trial. 

The Case
The disputes in this case arose from the construction of a mixed-use project in Bellevue, Washington, that combined retail, residential, and commercial development. Lake Hills Investments LLC contracted with AP Rushforth Construction Co. to build the project in four phases over two years. AP began work in 2013, and the construction was beset with numerous delays. 

In November 2014, Lake Hills notified AP that it was in breach of the contract schedule and blamed AP’s management practices and insufficient job site staffing. Lake Hills also began identifying work it considered defective, such as excessive cracking in the concrete garage floor slab. 

AP blamed the delays on Lake Hills reducing its pay applications, making it difficult for AP to hire and retain subcontractors. AP blamed construction defects on Lake Hills having provided “a sketch” or “a concept” rather than buildable designs. 

The relationship between the two companies deteriorated, and in late October 2015, Lake Hills sued AP for breach of contract, asserting defective work. AP stopped work a few weeks later and filed its own breach claim, asserting underpayment.

In 2018, 24 witnesses testified during a two-month jury trial of the case. With respect to the allegation of defective work, the owner’s concrete expert testified that excessive cracking in the garage slab was caused by late and deficient saw cuts to the concrete as well as inappropriate placement of certain crack-control joints. The expert opined that the cracks were not the result of poor design. AP’s concrete expert testified that neither the saw cutting nor the crack-control joint placement caused the cracks, but rather that the plans and specifications themselves caused the cracking by requiring rebar as reinforcement through the slab. 

Ultimately, the jury returned a mixed verdict. Lake Hills was found responsible for the vast majority of the delays and for breaching the contract by underpaying. On the question of defects, the jury found that AP performed defective work on six of the eight areas and awarded the owner damages. However, the jury found that in two areas, although AP was liable, the plans and specifications were defective and caused the defective condition. Ultimately, the court awarded AP a net judgment of more than $9.6 million, including nearly $6 million in attorneys’ fees and costs.

The Appeal
Lake Hills appealed, claiming the trial court issued erroneous jury instructions in three respects. The first concerned the instruction associated with AP’s affirmative defense that alleged defective plans and specifications served to absolve AP of responsibility for Lake Hills’ defective work claims. The court had instructed the jury as follows:

For its affirmative defense, AP has the burden to prove that Lake Hills provided the plans and specifications for an area of work at issue, that AP followed those plans and specifications, and that the [construction] defect resulted from defects in the plans or specifications.

If you find from your consideration that this affirmative defense has been proved for a particular area, then your verdict should be for AP as to that area.

Lake Hills argued on appeal that the instruction had a glaring omission — that the word “solely” was missing from the instruction. Lake Hills’ position was that this instruction did not properly state that AP’s legal burden was to prove that the alleged construction defect resulted solely from defective or insufficient plans or specifications.  

The Court of Appeals agreed, stating: “Proof of any defect in the plans and specifications for that area contributing to a construction defect would let AP avoid all liability for that area even if Lake Hills proved AP’s deficient performance caused some of the damage. This instruction incorrectly understated AP’s burden of proof.” 

The appeals court went on to state that for the two defective work areas for which the jury awarded no damages, there was evidence of both deficient performance by AP and defective plans and specifications by Lake Hills.  

The court reasoned that the instruction allowed the jury to absolve AP of all liability for an area even if only part of the defective work resulted from poor plans and specifications. The instruction was found to have misstated the law and to be a reversible error. Inclusion of the word “solely” would have adequately stated the law and avoided a remand.

The Court of Appeals also addressed Lake Hills’ other two claims of erroneous jury instructions. Lake Hills challenged an instruction given to the jury regarding its assessment of liquidated damages against AP and whether the jury was properly advised on the concept of apportionment. The appellate court reasoned that the jury instruction did not reflect the contract because it excused AP from delay days due to its own delays. However, it did not misstate the law, the court found. Moreover, there was no prejudice toward Lake Hills. Accordingly, the appeals court ruled that the jury instruction was not a reversible error. 

Lake Hills also argued that the instruction given to the jury regarding AP’s cessation of work was incorrect as it related to Lake Hills’ alleged nonpayment. However, like the liquidated damage instruction, the appeals court found that the erroneous instruction was harmless.  

Because of that one word missing from that single instruction, the parties will perhaps spend millions more dollars to correct the error. 

The Analysis
When a jury is charged to begin its deliberations, dozens upon dozens of jury instructions are read to the jurors by the presiding judge. The process can take hours. The precise language of jury instructions is usually a hotly contested element of any trial, as it serves as potential grounds for appeal for either side. Because the appeals court found a reversible error here, the case was sent back for a new trial to take place.  

This means that not only will the parties have to go through another lengthy trial, but they will also undergo another discovery phase. The parties already exchanged 1 million documents in preparation for the first trial and conducted close to 60 depositions. They will now be required to participate in all the pretrial activities leading up to a second jury trial of that same significant length. The costs are bound to be absolutely astronomical.  

What is most shocking is that for the most part, this case involved a fairly straightforward Spearin doctrine-type defense. The owner alleged defects, and the contractor argued in response that it built to the plans and specifications. The Spearin doctrine says that a contractor who follows the design given to it will not be responsible for damage that results from defective or insufficient plans. 

In Washington state, however, the law is that the contractor must prove that the damage resulted solely from the bad design. Because of that one word missing from that single instruction, the parties will perhaps spend millions more dollars to correct the error. 

This is why construction litigants typically stay far, far away from jury trials. 

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “It Takes Only One Word: Why the Construction Industry Avoids Jury Trials.”

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Under the terms of the arrangement, the firm’s compensation would be reduced by a certain amount for each day that completion of a project milestone falls short of the expected deadline and increased for each day that milestones are achieved ahead of schedule.

While the engineer’s firm is eager to secure this otherwise enticing piece of business, the engineer has never encountered a contract with payments contingent upon the timing of his services. He has contacted ASCE to seek confirmation that it would not be unethical for him to accept an agreement on such terms.

QUESTION Would the member’s acceptance of a contract with payment amounts contingent upon the dates of completion for project milestones violate the ASCE Code of Ethics?

With this in mind, an analysis of how the engineer’s concern fares under the prior Code of Ethics begins by examining what types of contingency fees are most likely to impede an engineer’s commitment to safety, truthfulness, and integrity.

DISCUSSION At the time this question was posed to ASCE’s ethics hotline, Guideline c under Fundamental Canon 5 under the prior Code of Ethics read: “Engineers may request, propose, or accept professional commissions on a contingent basis only under circumstances in which their professional judgments would not be compromised.”

While the placement of this guideline under the canon on unfair competition might seem to suggest concern about the impact of such arrangements on the engineering marketplace, this guideline’s emphasis on engineering judgment makes clear that its true focus is the effect of contingency fees on an engineer’s adherence to other ethical principles — including the commitment to preserve public safety, render objective and truthful service, and act with integrity (as expressed in the old code’s Fundamental Canons 1, 3, and 6).

With this in mind, an analysis of how the engineer’s concern fares under the prior Code of Ethics begins by examining what types of contingency fees are most likely to impede an engineer’s commitment to safety, truthfulness, and integrity. One clear example of a compromising fee structure would be a payment based on reaching a predetermined engineering conclusion, such as delivery of a favorable feasibility study or quality-control report.

Similarly, a contingency fee might be ethically questionable if it rewards or penalizes an engineer based on the outcome of the engineer’s professional judgment, for example, an engineer reviewing storm damage claims who receives a cut of the insurer’s savings from denied or reduced claims.

Lastly, a contingency fee might raise concerns if it ties the amount of compensation too closely to the client’s financial interests, as might be the case for an expert witness whose payment is set as a percentage of the plaintiff’s recovery.

In contrast to these examples, the contingency fee described by the ASCE member does not represent any clear threat to the engineer’s objectivity. While the scheme of incentives and disincentives might certainly affect decisions such as the allocation of time and resources to the project, the contingency fee is neutral as to the engineering aspects of the performance; there is nothing in the arrangement that is inherently designed to influence the member’s truthful application of his engineering knowledge, judgment, or analysis.

Based on this analysis, the advice from ASCE’s hotline was that this transaction was not the type of contingency fee contemplated in Guideline c of Canon 5, meaning the code would not preclude him from accepting a contract of this nature.

Perhaps the most visible change in the new Code of Ethics, approved by ASCE’s Board of Direction in October 2020, is its dramatic reduction in size. At roughly 700 words, the new code is less than one-third the length of its prior iteration. Designed to serve as a leaner, more readable guide for engineering professionals, the new code forgoes the prior code’s model of listing specific instructions for specific conditions in favor of high-level, more broadly applicable principles. 

With nothing in the new code that directly addresses contingency fees, it is fair to question whether the advice given to the member in this case would change when viewed under the current code.

One casualty of this streamlined new code is the prior code’s language on contingency fees. In fact, the new Code of Ethics makes no reference to engineering fees of any sort. In its place is the simple guidance from Section 4a that engineers “act as faithful agents of their clients and employers with integrity and professionalism.”

The phrase “with integrity and professionalism” was inserted by the code’s drafters to set a boundary on the ethical duty to serve as “faithful agents;” it signifies that engineers cannot practice blind loyalty to clients or employers but must instead balance that duty against higher obligations to society and the profession.

With nothing in the new code that directly addresses contingency fees, it is fair to question whether the advice given to the member in this case would change when viewed under the current code. One possible school of thought is that nothing has changed; despite the lack of express language, contingency fees still create the same concerns about their effect on an engineer’s ability to render service to clients and employers with integrity and professionalism.

A more probable reading, however, is that the new code reflects a change in emphasis from the ethical rightness of any particular fee structure to the behavior of the engineer operating under those terms. It goes without saying that an engineer’s judgment can be compromised under any contractual arrangement and, conversely, that an engineer can act ethically even under threat of significant financial loss.

Under the current code, therefore, an engineer who is tempted to cut corners on safety must be mindful of Section 1a’s obligation to “first and foremost, protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public.” A professional asked to prepare a misleading or untruthful report should be guided by Section 1c’s directive to “express professional opinions truthfully and only when founded on adequate knowledge and honest conviction.”

And a member pressured to take part in fraudulent or unlawful behavior must heed Section 3a’s instruction to “uphold the honor, integrity, and dignity of the profession.” Whether the pressures in such a case arose from a contingency fee or some other incentive is largely immaterial to the engineer’s duty to adhere to the ethical principles of safety, objectivity, and integrity.

Accordingly, if a similar question were brought to ASCE’s ethics hotline today, the advice given would note that contingency payments are not precluded by the current Code of Ethics. Instead, the member would be encouraged to examine his own level of comfort with the payment terms. If the engineer was confident that the fee structure would not impact his ability to perform services with integrity and professionalism, then it would be ethically clear for him to proceed.

If instead he believed the arrangement might place an unmanageable level of pressure on his performance, then the wiser course of action would be to decline this arrangement. 

This article first appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Civil Engineering.

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ASCE’s Future World Vision calls for creative and motivated students to be attracted to the civil engineering profession so that they can bring novel solutions to challenging world problems. Civil engineering institutions of higher education have already successfully turned to problem- or project-based active learning pedagogies to prepare and retain these students.

In some courses we have co-taught, we have adopted a learning approach commonly found in creative disciplines. In these courses, students engage with physical materials and tools in creative and iterative ways, continually reevaluating their goals, exploring new paths, and imagining new possibilities. They make things, and they make them better. This creative process is variously codified as design thinking, haptic learning, and making things.

The benefit of making things for younger children in STEM education has been widely supported. But what about the civil engineering students in college-level courses? They seem to be having fun, but what are they learning as engineers?

Creativity is key

One way of invigorating engineering education is to combine engineering with liberal arts, grounding students more firmly in creative and innovative design, social responsibility, and critical thinking. These three outcomes are key to forming our future civil engineers.

Creativity is key to unleashing new and innovative ways of thinking and solving problems. Human safety, environmental protection, and social justice are at the core of the civil engineer’s design sense and social responsibilities. Critical thinking allows engineers to see the bigger picture, and haptic learning – sensory, experiential learning – helps them understand the consequences of the decisions they make by requiring that they experience them firsthand.

Our belief in haptic learning is based on our observations and students’ reactions during a co-taught undergraduate course that integrates structural engineering and woodworking at Princeton University. This course, “CEE418/VIS418 Extraordinary Processes,” has been taught on an annual basis during the fall semester since 2015. The course attracts mostly senior students and is capped at 15 enrollees because of space and material limitations. The 12-week course has highly structured learning components through lectures and reading materials, along with less-structured learning components through lab sessions that are self-paced.

Knowledge and skill take place in the lab sessions and through individual and group assignments. The course prerequisites include “CEE205 Mechanics of Solids” and any other 300-level civil engineering course, and/or one 200- and one 300-level visual arts studio course. Practically, this means that the civil engineering students entering this course do not necessarily have any woodworking skills.

The course objectives are to: (1) comprehend mechanical properties of wood, specifically their relationship to moisture and temperature; (2) prepare, carry out, and process physical wood lab experiments that focus on strength and flexibility for different wood grain orientations and moisture content; (3) apply wood working skills and structural wood design principles to open-ended assignments; (4) organize, plan, make decisions, (re)construct, and create solutions to these structural sculpture assignments (haptic learning); and (5) evaluate the merit of structural sculpture based on esthetic and engineering criteria.

Making and thinking like an engineer

For each assignment in the course, students are given a rather vague and open-ended description. For example, open-ended problems have included the synthesis of acquired knowledge and skills in creating common objects like a prosthetic, a cushion, or a small-span bridge. When tackling these assignments, the students start using their minds in at least six different ways that practicing civil engineers do, such as finding a specific problem, system-thinking, visualizing, improving, solving problems, and adapting their work.

First, the students are finding a specific problem by clarifying which issue to address (such as deciding between a mobility or a dexterity prosthetic) and looking up the functional requirements and pros and cons of existing solutions. They also investigate the boundary conditions of the assignment. These limitations include the amount and format of wood (e.g., length of wood veneer strips and volume/area of wood boards), tools and connectors (e.g., Japanese handsaw, lightweight rotary and carving tools, wood glue, dowels, rivets) and time and workspace available.

Based on these constraints, they imagine a system and how they can not only make the system’s parts but also connect them as a functioning whole. This is system thinking, a habit of a civil engineer’s mind. As they sketch many practical solutions with pencil and paper, they critically reflect on conversations with us, the instructors, and with their peers. Using materials and tools, they move their idea from the abstract to the concrete and visualizetheir projects in three dimensions.

They continuously improve their projects by prototyping in cardboard and wood, more sketching, and relentlessly trying to make things better. For example, one student increased the bending stiffness of a beam element by laminating additional wood strip layers to it.

When they meet obstacles, we look at techniques from other disciplines and solve the problem creatively. For example, to establish the right flexibility for a veneer strip network cushion, the student looked at a variation of textile and basketry weaving patterns that resulted in different stiffnesses.

Throughout the assignment, the students adapt their work by testing, analysis, skepticism, rethinking, and changing. Adaptation, creative problem-solving, improvement, visualization, system thinking, and finding a specific problem are habits of an engineering mind. They capture what engineers do when they are in the full flow of engineering.

Our civil engineering students are not only having fun; they are developing engineering habits of mind.

’Making’ a better civil engineer

We are interested in developing and enhancing our students’ competence with practical skills that a civil engineer might use.

For example, students gain experience with hard physical tasks. In our course, they manipulate a bandsaw, make identical components on a table saw, assemble parts using clamps and cordless drills, and consider screws and adhesives to construct, modify, and repair parts in their systems. In the lab studio, students learn these skills at their own pace and progress to new skills according to their own comfort and confidence levels.

Every week, as we make our rounds through the space, we have conversations with them about what is working (and what is not). In doing so, we track each student’s progress, identify any gaps in skill or understanding, and give them one-on-one attention.

We see that the students become persistent in pursuing intrinsic goals. They are willing to attempt difficult tasks and understand the levels of effort required to achieve success. This personal judgment of “how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations,” as defined by Albert Bandura in his 1977 book “Social Learning Theory,” is self-efficacy. By successfully solving problems, students learn to determine the level of effort needed to achieve success. High self-efficacy has been shown to lead to persistence and a sense of belonging in engineering communities.

Our civil engineering students are not only having fun; they are developing engineering habits of mind.

Too often, civil engineering students are externally motivated. They want to obtain good grades, compete with one other, or earn awards. In this course, we notice that the students are internally motivated. They want to be challenged and master content, and they want to solve a problem and make it their own because this gives them internal satisfaction.

Research suggests that intrinsically motivated students prioritize and achieve more profound levels of knowledge whereas externally motivated students use more superficial processing strategies, such as memorization or guessing.

The role of visual arts

We would be remiss not to mention the role of visual art in this learning environment. As the title of the course makes clear, the enrollments for “CEE418/VIS418 Extraordinary Processes” have been an even mix of civil engineering and visual art students. Because of this mix, each group is not only exposed to the other’s habits of mind and working methods but also compelled to incorporate them into their own.

Thus, concepts normally attributed to visual art – beauty, psyche, idiosyncrasy, uselessness – come to bear on civil engineering students as well. In a word, the presence of art makes failure an option. When failure is a viable – even beautiful! – outcome, civil engineering students have the freedom to question and rediscover the “purpose” of their work, be it functional or beautiful or both.

The authors wish to acknowledge the insights of Sami Kahn, executive director of the Council on Science and Technology at Princeton University and member of the ASCE Committee on Aesthetics in Design, on these topics.

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Noting that significantly scaling back our impact on the planet would be prudent but also unlikely, Kolbert’s premise in her new book is how to manage “not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature.” She has created a series of page-turning examinations of various forms of geoengineering that together constitute “a book about people trying to solve problems caused by people trying to solve problems.”

Whether that strikes you more like the whimsy of a Mobius strip or the doom of a circular firing squad may depend on what attitude you bring to the book, but in either case it may be difficult not to question some of your own preconceived notions by the time you put it down.

A significant part of what makes Under a White Sky so effective — in addition to Kolbert’s effortlessly incisive and vivid prose — is the author’s willingness to eschew bombarding us with dozens of short examples and anecdotes in favor of fewer carefully researched and reported stories. The book opens, for example, with a 20-page examination of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ strategies to combat invasive fish such as Asian carp, the introduction of which were a previous generation’s deliberate attempt to keep water clean and aquatic weeds in check in U.S. waterways.

This deep-dive approach allows the reader to see the complex interplay of decisions, successes, and setbacks that led to a given predicament and therefore gain a greater appreciation for the desperate but audacious attempts to correct them. Other efforts explored in wondrous detail include sequestering carbon emissions by turning them into stone, seeding the stratosphere with reflective particles to reduce the heat from the sun, engineering coral that can survive warmer ocean temperatures, and even lessons learned from attempts to save perhaps the rarest fish in the world, which only lives in one pool in the Mojave Desert.

Equal parts fascinating and terrifyingly clear about the depth of our long-term crisis, Under a White Sky does offer occasional glimmers of hope that science may yet save us. But they are just glimmers.

“Without exception,” Kolbert writes, the scientists and engineers with whom she spoke are trying to solve our big problems and “were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt.” After all, she notes, quoting a project director working on solar radiation management, “We live in a world where deliberately dimming the … sun might be less risky than not doing it.”

The post Can engineering save nature? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

In today’s Member Voices article, they look at the unique opportunity afforded by the upcoming infrastructure bill in Congress, presenting it as a chance to finally address the country’s need for climate-resilient infrastructure.

Finally, it looks like Infrastructure Week is going to happen. Decades of disinvestment gave the country an infrastructure system that recently earned a “C-” on ASCE’s Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. And this is before climate change accelerates.

Extreme weather is becoming more frequent and more intense, and the world is barreling toward a more volatile climate with infrastructure designed for the past. With infrastructure widely expected to be prioritized in Congress soon, we need to recognize that every infrastructure bill is also a climate bill. It is critical that we make our infrastructure climate safe.  

The Texas deep-freeze is fresh in our minds, but before long summer will be here, and our power systems will have to cope with extreme heat instead of extreme cold. During heatwaves, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plants lose efficiency because of higher temperatures of the air and river water, and some plants have to shut down when it gets too hot. Droughts, low streamflow, and the earlier melting of winter snowpack affect how much power hydroelectric dams can produce. Even the efficiency of wind, solar power, and batteries are reduced in extreme heat. To make matters worse, power lines and equipment also become less efficient during a heat wave, limiting the amount of electricity they can carry. All this adds up to an electricity system that produces less power during extreme heatwaves, just when vulnerable populations need air-conditioning the most. 

But it’s not just the energy infrastructure that isn’t ready for climate change, it’s everything. Roads, water systems, dams, airports, and other infrastructure were mostly built decades ago for the temperatures and extreme storms of the past. Last year, there were 22 weather and climate disasters in the United States that each caused losses of more than a billion dollars. But instead of the government carrying insurance against these disasters, the public is the insurance – governments generally self-insure or under-insure their infrastructure against disaster costs. When a road is washed out during an extreme storm, we all pay to rebuild it, again and again. That’s a hidden carbon tax that we already pay, and these taxes are going up. Since the federal government often pays for some of the upfront costs of infrastructure for states and cities, it is time to start requiring that this infrastructure be built climate safe. 

Infrastructure lasts a long time, and most of the infrastructure that will be in use in 2050 and beyond is already here. That storm drain in the street? It may have been there for 50 years or more, and in many cases can’t carry the additional rain that falls now, and climate change will make this worse. Ninety-seven percent of the U.S. interstate highway system was built before NOAA started updating rainfall estimates in 2004, and 25% of the system was built before 1961. 

What is needed is a fundamental reimagining of our infrastructure for a warming and increasingly complex world. Our investments in infrastructure not only have to enable the rapid decarbonization of power, transportation, and buildings, but also must enable systems that are safe under the threats from climate change and which function across a mosaic of increasing volatility.

Strengthening our infrastructure is necessary, but so is thinking in new ways about what our infrastructure can do. For example, Kuala Lumpur’s SMART tunnel typically carries traffic but during flash flood events can help in the removal of stormwater. Green infrastructure, which funnels stormwater into the ground instead of into the street, should be a standard feature in most of our communities, but it’s not. These and other nature-based solutions integrated into traditional infrastructure can help alleviate extreme conditions. Because of increasing challenges from climate, as well as other threats such as cyber and physical attacks, it makes sense to plan for flexible infrastructure that can adapt under stress. And given the legacy of racism intertwined with infrastructure, the next systems that are built have to be climate safe for everybody, with equity and justice at the center of what it means to be resilient.

In the aftermath of the Texas energy infrastructure disaster, and the next disaster, political leaders may retreat to the trope of “nobody could have foreseen this.” But climate change and extreme event impacts are at least somewhat foreseeable – and they have been foreseen. What has been done about infrastructure and climate change – basically nothing – is also a policy choice, and it’s one with devastating consequences. It’s now time to build something for the future instead of the past.

Read more about a recent climate change bill in the House.

The post Now is (finally) the time to future-proof our infrastructure appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

Civil Engineering: Could I get a quick elevator pitch of the book and its findings?

ML: The book is an attempt to give an international picture on the development of road pavement since the beginning of time to the current day, and then predict the future a bit. We took an international view because we’ve worked in most of the countries of the world and we found that most of what other people had written on the topic was fairly localized. We thought that pavements give an interesting view of society as a whole, so the book emphasizes not just the technology but why it happened and who did it and the politics of it. Even back in the past you can see that over time, the patterns in the history of how pavements were developed are not dissimilar.

What did the earliest manufactured roads look like when it came to form, function, and materials?

The first manufactured road to exist was part of the manufacture of one of the pyramids in Egypt. They had to bring in limestone blocks of about a meter to 2 meters in size from about a hundred kilometers away from the pyramid. And they did it by making a road from the quarry to the Nile and floating the blocks down. And they built another road from the wharf to the pyramids. And that road still exists as the oldest road we have in existence, from about 2,500 B.C. The limestone blocks required a lot of work to move; they probably rolled them on logs.

After that, there were roads built in Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, places like Babylon and Baghdad. And those roads were mainly built for processional reasons, to serve the temples and make the emperor more impressive, rather than for day-to-day use as a pavement. And some of those still exist. A few of them were destroyed in the recent crises in that area, but several of them still exist. And Nebuchadnezzar, whose name is often quoted in the Bible, he is quoted as saying his father built one of the roads that would exist forever.

We have seen that over a long historical period, from 1100 B.C., where they mortared together these big blocks of limestone or bricks made from sand and straw or clay. And in that area there was, and still is, petroleum. So there is also bitumen, the heavy byproduct of petroleum. The bitumen seeped from underground, and they heated the bitumen to use as a mortar to create a coherent surface.

What’s the biggest difference, would you say, between those early roads and our modern roads?

Modern roads also have a coherent surface. Everything is together in a single surface, whereas between the early Mesopotamian roads and now, most of the roads were cobblestones or loose stones, which were very easily disturbed. But for the last hundred years or so we’ve been producing coherent surfaces on the roads.

Why do you think there was that huge period of time where there weren’t coherent roads?

It was very expensive to make block roads. The Romans made coherent roads similar to horizontal walls, but they had lots of masons and slaves who could do it. Otherwise, it was too expensive. A road had to be fairly cheap and use local materials, such as boulders and pebbles from the riverbeds.

What does the evolution process to modern roads look like? And what were the most important elements that got us as a globe and as an industry from there to here?

When the Industrial Revolution began, all of the sudden in Europe in particular and to a lesser extent in America, roads were needed to transport goods and materials. So that’s when people started being serious about road making. And people — a Frenchman called Pierre-Marie-Jérôme Trésaguet and two Scotsmen called John Loudon McAdam and Thomas Telford — developed relatively modern road making methods involving drainage and the use of stone masons.

It wasn’t until steam engines were invented  that we began to be able to crush stone into broken stone that is compacted together to form a pavement. But even then, there was big controversy because the tradition was to use river pebbles, but McAdam said in about 1810 that broken stones make better roads. It took about 100 years before everyone believed that what McAdam said was true. And his name was used to describe the type of road — a macadam road. And when they put the pebbles together with tar it was called tar macadam, which became ‘tarmac,’ a term still used in some places.

And then in the middle of the 20th century, oil refining started, and a byproduct of oil — a waste product really — is bitumen, also known as asphaltic cement. When that became readily available, it became possible to make roads economically. Of course, you can also make roads out of concrete. Concrete roads and asphalt roads are competitive, but by and large asphalt roads are cheaper than concrete roads.

What was the American contribution to the development of modern road making?

America industrialized road making in a way that no one had done before. One of the big American contributions was to produce the machinery that allowed stones to be crushed and asphalt to be mixed and placed.

This industrialization of road making happened in America after the steam engine was developed, which led to the German development of internal combustion engines. After that, in America, Henry Ford got into the act. People started making trucks powered by internal combustion, and initially those trucks were not used too frequently. But in the First World War, the trucks started to be a major facility and part of the war, and America supplied the trucks to the Allies even before America entered the First World War. And those trucks had to be taken from the factories to the seaboard ports. The result was that all the prewar roads from factory to port were quickly destroyed and had to be rebuilt.

The other big American contribution was in the 1930s, when the California Division of Highways (a forerunner to the California Department of Transportation) developed a method called the California Bearing Ratio, CBR, to decide how thick pavements should be. A very simple method based on tests they’d done. And it was so effective that people still use it all around the world. And its use had a big boost in the Second World War, when it was used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to design airfields in the Pacific.

The CBR is determined with a stamping machine that you just press into the site where you are going to put a road to see how far into the exposed soil it goes. And that’s a measure of the bearing strength of the road, which determines how thick the pavement should be. And in a primitive way it works exceedingly well. You just need this machine.

It’s still used around the world for making simple roads. You wouldn’t use it for a freeway, but for an ordinary conventional country road or city street, you’d use it.

What countries saw the growth of roads the fastest? Was it really densely populated countries like you see in Europe? Or was it in the U.S., where you have lots of space?

First, it was density because you have to have a market to pay for the roads. In low-density areas it’s harder to get the funds for the roadways. As the tracks opened up in the west in America, they were very primitive by modern standards. It wasn’t until the 1930s and later that they were upgraded. In fact, a big problem in much of America at that time was the enormous problems with dust produced from those surface roads. If you looked in American magazines in the 1930s, you’d find dust prevention was one of the great issues at the time.  There were complaints from local communities, farmers, and small towns, and there were a number of proprietary products marketed to put the dust down — but they only lasted until the next rainstorm.

What was the biggest surprise or the most significant finding that you came across in your research and writing?

I think the biggest issue we found was how people didn’t think about how they had to maintain their roads after they were built. It was a message that was very slowly learnt. And then there is the economic issue — the engineering is simple compared to the economics of how you are going to fund the construction and maintenance of a road. And that’s a problem all around the world. Some communities are very good at it, and others are very bad at it.

What was the biggest takeaway you wanted to leave your readers with?

The biggest takeaway is that there is more to roads than just their surface. There is quite a complex technology underneath. And in a technical sense, the engineering is difficult because the materials are quite primitive and we must depend on local materials. And, unlike building a bridge, we can’t predict the elasticity or the slant very accurately, so there’s a lot more intuition rather than science in it.

And roads just don’t last very long at all. Roads need to be maintained almost annually and need to be remade almost every 10 years. They start wearing out from the first truck that goes over them.

What does the future of roads look like? The biggest challenges, the biggest opportunities?

The opportunities have to be in the tax and the economics of managing the road. We can now make the roads well, but some of the materials we use are energy intensive. We have to learn how to recycle the road better, although America is already very good at that. Someone said that American roads are America’s biggest quarry these days because once you dig up a road you can recycle it — break up the bits and reuse them. For the most part, we don’t need more length of road or width of road. It’s really managing the roads we’ve got, which is going to be very important through recycling.

In your opinion, where do we as a globe, as an industry, and as an engineering profession go from here?

I think for the future, the road technology is fairly OK. However, although recyling will help, we still lack an alternatives to bitumen, asphalt, and cementitious concrete for use in road construction. Bitumen relies on petroleum, so its availability depends on the reliance on fuel supplies for vehicles. Because bitumen is a byproduct of oil, refining it may become scarcer, more expensive, and less acceptable environmentally in the future.

The post How are ancient Egyptian and modern American road construction linked? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the very not-normal year of 2020 feels both like a very long time ago and just yesterday, depending on who you’re talking to or what you’re talking about.

Many people have lost loved ones to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many others have lost their jobs. Everyone has seen their lives changed.

Last spring, the ASCE Plot Points podcast featured 33 different civil engineers in 33 days, checking in on how the coronavirus was affecting their work and their communities.

Now, as we mark the anniversary of life in the United States turned upside-down (news broke that Tom Hanks had tested positive on March 11, 2020 – oddly enough becoming the cultural turning point), many of those same civil engineers from the podcast series checked in with Civil Engineering Source to reflect on how the last year has changed their lives.

Camilla M. Saviz

Ph.D., P.E., ENV SP, F.ASCE

Professor and chair of the Department of Civil Engineering, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California

When we talked to Saviz last April, she was moving her college courses into an online model.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

The past year has been hard for many people. The numerous challenges all around us compounded the effects of dealing with the coronavirus – people being separated from family and friends, students struggling, families lost jobs and loved ones, social inequity and racial injustice, wildfires, floods, and environmental challenges. Unfortunately, the list is long, but despite all that, our students’ empathy, resilience, and creativity give me hope for the future. I’m also hopeful because vaccines are being distributed quickly and the difficult lessons we’ve learned this past year have underscored the urgent need for positive change.       

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

We’ve been teaching in remote mode since March 2020. Having to teach in this mode has made me rethink my courses, what I expect students to be able to do, and how I organize courses and materials to make it easier for students to learn. Technology has been a lifesaver, but I miss informal hallway conversations with students and being able to bounce ideas off colleagues. I’m not sure if this is a plus or minus, but the cats’ guest appearances in class and meetings was also new this year.

When do you see things returning to normal?

Our university president is hopeful that we can return to in-person instruction in the late summer, but the virus numbers in our region have been fickle. We’ll hope for the best, but I expect our return conditions will likely be different from pre-COVID conditions. We have definitely learned how to be adaptable and innovative in our approach! 

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

Events of the past year have taught us a lot about the need for resilience, justice, and sustainability. Civil engineers are in a unique position to lead change, and advocate for – and implement – resilient, just, and sustainable infrastructure and systems. I hope we seize this opportunity!

Jacob B. Forrester

P.E., M.ASCE

Assistant manager, Starkville Utilities, Starkville, Mississippi

When we talked to Forrester last April, he was launching – virtually – the 2020 Report Card for Mississippi’s Infrastructure.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

Surprisingly, I’m the odd type of engineer that thrives off of interaction with people and experiences. The most challenging thing for me has been slowing that to an almost non-existent state. We’ve had to get a little creative and host some things outdoors, online, or over the phone, but it’s not the same. I truly believe that humans are social beings, and I can certainly say it applies to me. I know that many people thrive in quiet and reflective situations, but it’s not for me. 

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

I work in an essential industry – utilities. The biggest effect has been navigating the nuances of keeping people separated physically, masked, etc., but still performing work that requires interaction and teamwork. Also, there are many people who believe COVID is a farce, and encouraging/directing them to wear masks at all times when around other people has been a difficult undertaking as well. Ultimately, everyone has bought into the requirements, but I know most of my team is ready to resume a sense of normalcy again.

When do you see things returning to normal?

My expectation is that we’ll see things return to normal by the end of 2021. I’m very hopeful that it will come sooner. I’d really like to watch SEC football in person again very soon!  

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

Civil engineers have a role in stimulating the economy in the immediate. We’ll be directly responsible for preparing public infrastructure projects and getting them to market once an infrastructure bill hits. It’s my expectation that “shovel-ready” will play a large role again, and I would recommend that any engineer working with a client in the pre-planning or planning phase be cognizant of what and when the bill(s) are coming. I cannot see that Congress won’t push for an economic recovery bill the moment they feel that the workforce and health officials can bear the push. An infrastructure bill has been needed for a long time, and it will almost certainly be the catalyst that allows our economy to maintain its dominance in the world economic market. I could be wrong, and if so, I’ll be disappointed, but the discussion has been ongoing for a decade now, and I really believe the Biden Administration will push hard for a package by the end of 2022.

Jonathan Brower

P.E., M.ASCE

Associate, L.A. Fuess Partners, Dallas, Texas

When we talked to Brower last April, he was adjusting his K-12 outreach work in Dallas high schools to continue via online events.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

I think for me the most challenging aspect has been maintaining intentional relationships with coworkers and colleagues during all this time working from home. Since we are not in the office, we miss out on the “water cooler talk” and short, but important, offhand conversations that happen as you walk by someone’s office/desk or pass them in the hallway. If you’re not careful, you can sometimes go a whole day or two (or week) without talking to someone about something other than “work.” Over time, this can really wear on you and on your company culture. I’ve found that while working from home you have to be very intentional about reaching out to people and scheduling time to just have a candid chat with someone. At first, it feels really weird to “schedule” a conversation that would otherwise happen randomly and naturally in an office setting, but I’ve grown to appreciate and respect the time we have to set aside to maintain these relationships.

Despite these challenges, I’ve really tried to embrace the unique opportunities of this season of life. My wife and I got to celebrate the birth of our son in May of 2020, and if there ever was a time to be forced to work from home it would be when you have a newborn baby. I got to see my son way more during the first three months of his life than I would have in a “normal” situation. I was home to help my wife as much as possible during the day, in between meetings and work, while she was on maternity leave. Now that my wife is back at work and our son is at daycare, I have the ability to prep our dinners and do chores around the house during the time I would ordinarily be commuting to and from work. There certainly are perks to working from home for me personally right now, and I think there will be another massive adjustment to how I plan out my day when I have to start going back into the office!

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

I would say the biggest effect has been on the growth of my digital communication skills. We have a couple of new college graduates on my engineering team at work, and it is my job to mentor and teach them as much as possible about structural engineering design. However, I now have to do it all over the phone and through a computer screen. I’m a huge hands-on learner and teacher – I love to sketch details and plans on paper, flip through the physical pages of a concrete or steel design code, write out calculations as we are working on them, and point to the computer screen or book as I’m teaching someone a new program or section of the building code. Transitioning all of this to a virtual platform takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of patience. However, I’ve definitely gotten better at it, and I’ve figured out various ways to use the digital tools at our disposal to help continue my personal growth as an engineer and the growth of the young engineers on my team.

Also, going back to the previous question about challenges of the past year, teaching new engineers in a virtual setting requires very important attention to one’s daily schedule. I have to be intentional about reaching out to engineers on my team throughout the day and week to make sure they aren’t wandering too far off-course or spinning their wheels. These types of check-ins would be easier and more natural in an office environment, but we now have to make sure we aren’t losing someone behind the computer monitors.

When do you see things returning to normal?

Haha – I have given up trying to predict when things will go back to normal. When we all first got sent home from work, I thought that being home for one whole month would be really crazy. If you had told me back then I would be working from home for a year plus, I probably would have fallen out of my chair. I honestly don’t know if there will ever be a complete return to normal, and I also don’t think that there is just going to be this single, celebratory day when the switch is “flipped” and we all just resume life as it was. I have a feeling that there will just be an incremental growth in normalcy with small luxuries and openings coming back but in modified and adjusted ways. All that being said, if you’re wanting me to put metaphorical money down at the betting table, I’d say that 2022 is looking like a pretty normal year (ooof, I’m going to regret that, aren’t I?)

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

I think like in any situation in human history, it’s civil engineers’ responsibility to be leaders during the post-pandemic recovery. Whether it be adapting our building designs to “COVID architecture” or re-thinking the way an urban core functions when half its workforce now has the opportunity to work from home, we need to be flexible and innovative with our engineering work to meet the changing needs of civilization. We also need to be leaders in our communities as we apply the personal and societal lessons learned over the past year. A lot of things happened between March 2020 and March 2021, the pandemic only being one (albeit large) part of those things. We all had to learn patience. We all had to learn empathy and understanding. We all had to learn to be flexible. We all were pushed out of our comfort zones. We can look back and be bitter about the time, opportunity, and experiences that were lost in this year, or we can choose to look back and see the things that were exposed and laid bare – not only in our society but in our own personal lives and how we grew out of those experiences. I hope that we as civil engineers do not take this year for granted, but rather that we carry forward the lessons learned from the past year into our personal and professional lives for the betterment of our families, society, and the civil engineering profession.

Sophie Lipomanis

S.M.ASCE

Student, J.B. Speed School of Engineering, University of Louisville, Kentucky

When we talked to Lipomanis last April, she had just returned home to New Jersey, driving cross-country after COVID-19 began spreading in Seattle, where she was doing an internship.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

For me it has been really psychologically difficult as a college student from the remote standpoint. My once in-person internships are now operating remotely, which was really nice at first – not having to dress up nor deal with a commute or relocating. But now I feel like it made it so I did not get the full intern experience. From a college perspective, I have not been able to see anyone nor participate in events as we used to. No more in-person ASCE student chapter meetings nor student council. That makes it a rather lonely pursuit, not just personally, but from a recruitment perspective, it is hard to make someone inspired to join a group when you cannot meet in person, nor [at a] table.

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

I would say the biggest effect has been the remote transition.

When do you see things returning to normal?

Honestly, I see universities returning to normal sooner. After all, they provide a college experience and need to make sure they offer it, or else there would have to be tuition reductions. However, with work? I am not sure. I think long-term remote working has proved to be a legitimate option. It’s cheaper than prime office space, and without tedious commutes and office distraction in some cases, I think people are more effective subjectively. However, most importantly with COVID, society has proved it can function and still meet and mediate the challenges of distanced communication, so I think there will be more online events in the future and much more remote working.

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

Civil engineers connect communities. We need to make sure that we are improving what we can with our various departments of transportation. Never before have so many people been off the roads, and never before have emissions been lessened to this extent. I think now is an excellent time for civil engineers to imprint the importance of sustainable options, and it is also the best time to work toward solutions-oriented thinking.

Alfredo Ignacio Falcon

EI, A.M.ASCE

Project manager, LUSEO Group, Barcelona, Spain

When we talked to Falcon in April, he was making a conscious effort to bring a positive attitude to his structural engineering work in Miami.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

For different reasons, including the pandemic, the issuance of new H1-B visas (a non-immigrant work visa) was cancelled for the year 2020. After living in Miami for more than five years as a student and later as a civil engineer, I could no longer stay in the United States under my student visa. Due to the cancellation of the H1-B visas (my company’s main plan for keeping me in the country), it was time for me to leave. Luckily enough, my firm – LUSEO Group – offered me the option to move to their office in Barcelona, Spain. That is how during the summer of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I moved my entire life to another country I had never lived in before.

Moving is to me the most literal sense of “getting out of your comfort zone.” But getting out of your comfort zone is also rewarded with new opportunities and exciting challenges that lead to growth. The eight months I have been in Spain are not the exception to the rule. From touring the beautiful city of Barcelona, to eating the delicious Spanish food, to working closely with the company’s founders, I have been rewarded with an abundance of opportunities and experiences that have allowed me to see things from a new and more global perspective.

Which does not mean it has been easy! Moving in the middle of a pandemic makes everything way harder: the lack of travel and housing options, all entities and government agencies partially working and the higher level of care one must maintain, adds an extra layer of stress to moving. But what I have lived is beyond anything I would have ever dreamt. What seemed like a punishment at the beginning, has certainly become one of the best experiences of my life.

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

Besides all the obvious effects related to the moving, my work has shifted in scope. On one side, my firm in Miami has grown quicker than expected, requiring me to help in multiple areas. Originally hired as a project manager to coordinate internal work with the clients, I have had to do design and administrative work at different times. The catch is that although LUSEO Group is a building engineering firms that does MEP, civil, and structural work (what my background is in) all around the world, in the United States, we have a core business on MEP and fire protection engineering. So, I have had to go back to square one and learn the basics of mechanical, electrical, and even plumbing engineering design, so I can be of more help to my company.

On the other side, my responsibilities have changed in that I now work closely with our offices in Europe and Africa, in non-technical areas of the engineering business: administration, business development, marketing, strategic planning, etc.

When do you see things returning to normal?

Unfortunately, I think it will be a long and very unequal path to getting back to normal. I believe “first-world” countries will be operating normally by the end of 2021, with the effects of the pandemic being felt only by the people traveling, or involved in the areas of trade, hospitality, etc. For poorer or underdeveloped countries, it will depend on how fast vaccines are produced and distributed to them. And even then, many countries will still be in an economic crisis – a product of the pandemic. In short, I think that we will be living a normal situation within the next 6-18 months, but the effects of the pandemic will most likely be felt for years to come.

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

I believe that not only civil engineers, but the entire AEC industry plays a key role in the post-pandemic recovery. As vaccines are rolled out and countries switch to focusing on the economic situation, many governments might opt to invest in infrastructure as a measure to stimulate the economy and create jobs – putting us engineers in the spotlight. It is not only our job but our responsibility to make sure that we focus on solutions that benefit not only our own companies but the greater interests of the people.

Vivian Chong

A.M.ASCE

Civil analyst, Kimley-Horn & Associates, Los Angeles

When we talked to Chong in April, she was wrapping her head around the idea of spending her final semester of college in lockdown and preparing to start her career in the middle of a pandemic.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

I’m going to be honest — out of most people, I’ve faced very minimal challenges and changes in 2020. The biggest challenge of 2020 was that I realized I didn’t really know who I was without other people. Pre-pandemic, I was constantly surrounded by other people and kept myself busy with schoolwork or events. I loved the fast-paced, jam-packed social schedules I would have every week, but with social distancing and quarantine mandates, spending time with others was no longer possible. The excess amount of time I had for myself was overwhelming at first. I felt the need to continue to be productive with all the extra time and hated wasting my days doing absolutely nothing, because all I knew was to be constantly stimulated for the sake of feeling like everything I was doing could amount to something important. However, I realized that the days where I could just watch Netflix all day would be rare to come across in the future, so I gave in and allowed myself to enjoy doing completely nothing. I also started going to therapy, not because I felt like I was in an unhealthy mental state but to learn more about myself and why I am the way that I am. And it has been incredibly insightful to delve deeper into my own thoughts when previously they would be ignored or even go completely unnoticed. I’m grateful for 2020 because it gave me the time to figure out who I was when no one else was around.

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

Having less traffic during my commute in Los Angeles is absolutely a blessing. On a more serious note, I was very lucky to have joined a company that did not face severe negative impacts due to COVID-19. The company reassured me that I should not be worried about losing my job when the pandemic started, and I started my career in the fall as planned.

I absolutely love where I work! My team is incredibly supportive, and I feel empowered by the number of women and people of color who work at my office. The biggest change is going to work at a mostly empty office and wearing masks, but I feel safe going out to work at an office with people who are taking the safety precautions as seriously, if not more seriously, as I am. Soon, as restrictions in Los Angeles County are lifted, more people will be coming back to the office. I’m excited to see more faces!

When do you see things returning to normal?

Hopefully by summer with vaccines finally rolling out. It will definitely be strange not wearing a mask in public or eating at a restaurant for the first time when things return to normal and will definitely take some time to get used to again.

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

2020 was an eye-opening year for everyone. I took time to educate myself about the struggles and challenges many communities of color have faced on a daily basis even before the pandemic, and recognized how it ties in with civil engineering and infrastructure as a whole. The systems and laws put in place heavily shape the way our industry functions. Post-pandemic, I hope that many current and future civil engineers will take a second to educate themselves so we can (literally) build an equitable future.

Jarred R. Jones

P.E., M.ASCE

Executive director, North Charleston Sewer District and North Charleston District, South Carolina

When we talked to Jones last April, he was working to ensure his community noticed as little change as possible.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

At the beginning of the pandemic, information was changing so rapidly. It was difficult to give accurate information to employees. Personally, it was challenging managing family. My wife started working from home and we had to take care of a 1- and 2-year-old at the same time. Along the same lines, there were several employees who had childcare issues, and we worked with them as much as we could. 

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

Although all our staff returned to normal hours in June (we did three months of shift work where everyone worked about 20 hours a week in case there was a major outbreak), we discovered a few positions can effectively work remotely if needed. The core functions – such as service calls, accounting, IT, and purchasing – were easy, and we will periodically practice performing some tasks remotely in case the situation arises again. Only about 10% of our workforce has the ability to work remotely, so balancing that desire with the rest of the company who cannot is our next challenge. We are creating guidelines for a limited work-from-home plan for those few employees.

One more important change is our communication directly to the employees. Before the pandemic, we had already given all employees email and put up message boards for general announcements. Over the past year, we have installed additional message boards, and I have sent out five video messages since Christmas. I think this is a good way to get messages out with some personal touch. We will be increasing these in the future with other executive staff sending out messages relating to their work or issues. 

When do you see things returning to normal?

My operations are essentially normal besides the distancing and mask-wearing. I think the United States will be close to normal by the end of summer, as I am looking forward to getting rid of the mask requirements.

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

I think the design of buildings and technology will forever be changed. You need to prepare for this scenario and have many options ready to go instead of the scramble that took place last spring. We are in the process of creating additional meeting spaces to promote distancing. We are also doing an A/V upgrade to our Commission Chambers to allow remote meetings and trainings.

Peyton Gibson

EIT, A.M.ASCE

Associate program officer, Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, Washington, D.C. 

When we talked to Gibson last April, she had just moved across the country to start a new job based in Washington, D.C.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

I moved to D.C. in February of 2020. I didn’t really know anyone here before moving, so my in-person human contact has been pretty abysmal for the last year. I still feel very lucky to have kept up with my support network, albeit virtually. My boss and work have been fantastic throughout the pandemic in respecting boundaries and being flexible. I’ve also been able to learn a lot about my community through work with Mutual Aid and local government committees and projects, which I wouldn’t have otherwise.

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

I began my job with the National Academies remotely and had already been working from home a few days a week when the pandemic started, so none of that was “new.” However, a lot of my work involves workshops or multi-day consensus meetings that are a lot more conducive to doing in person. We have adapted and I’ve connected with so many new people during this time, but I’m looking forward to working with these people in the same room again.

When do you see things returning to normal?

I’m not really sure what “normal” will mean going forward. I hope people keep wearing masks in public when they’re sick for … forever. I’m also considering moving to Philadelphia after I’m vaccinated and commuting via train to D.C. for the “big” meetings I’m needed for (don’t tell my boss yet). Philly’s cost of living is way lower (and I’m in love with the city). I don’t think this would have flown in the “before times” but I think I could get my boss to sign off on it now.

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

The pandemic exacerbated inequities and disparities that have existed in this country for centuries. I think for many Americans, the past year was a rude awakening or at the very least an ugly reminder. Within the past 12 months, we’ve not only seen the Navajo Nation and other communities of color get ravaged by the virus but witnessed massive protests for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd. 

The built environment has played an enormous role in segregating America racially and economically. Although it is encouraging that the new administration’s USDOT is looking into policies to “reverse decades of discriminatory [infrastructure] planning,” the engineering industry must do more. The main reason I left the engineering industry was because of the discrimination and “old-school” mentality I saw (and received). These attitudes permeate the design and construction of infrastructure. We need to have a larger conversation about the “most important” canon in the code of ethics; “first and foremost, protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public.” My hope is for engineers to advocate for and create projects that strengthen communities instead of opting for exciting, profitable, and oftentimes damaging ones.

Anthony Cioffi

P.E., F.ASCE

Professor emeritus and adjunct professor, Department of Construction Management and Civil Engineering Technology, New York City College of Technology, Brooklyn

When we talked to Cioffi last April, he was in the middle of one of the country’s first coronavirus epicenters, continuing to work as assistant resident engineer for the Kew Gardens Interchange Phase 4 project.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

Staying healthy and safe in a COVID-19 world while trying to maintain a somewhat normal and professional life. It has been an ongoing challenge to keep our staff healthy and safe while trying to move a large transportation project forward. On such a large project, we had to continually monitor the contractor and subs for symptoms and test results. We were responsible for monitoring approximately 150-200 workers each day to ensure that everyone was following the mandated COVID-19 protocols. It can get very stressful at certain times, especially when a colleague or a worker tested positive for COVID-19. You’re always concerned about your family and friends. Will you bring this virus home today? Is this the start of something bad? If you or a colleague tests positive this could begin a snowball effect resulting in the virus being transmitted to your family and friends. I lost a very close college friend to COVID-19 this past year. A lack of one-to-one or personal contact this past year creates within you a feeling of neglect and uncertainty. You tend to reevaluate your life and what is important. Each day brings with it new challenges. Plans are constantly in flux and changing. Uncertainty is part of the new normal. Staying safe is always on your mind.

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

Personal contact with our staff. Face-to-face meetings were prohibited. Social distancing was the new norm. Business had to be conducted virtually. The downside is also a positive, as you can engage more people. It opens up new opportunities for communication. Colleagues from different time zones could now meet and share information using a virtual environment. Virtual meetings before COVID-19 were not the norm. Most of us are used to face-to-face meetings. Socialization also became different. Interacting with others via a computer screen was new and not without its challenges. Adjustments were required as with anything new. As a former ASCE Region 1 director, the Region 1 board had to make adjustments and compromises. In-person meetings were not prudent. The Region 1 board was a very closely knit group. We prided ourselves on our ability to create interest and excitement in ASCE and Region 1. The region had to think outside the box for new ways to interact. How do we hold a Virtual Assembly? How do we engage our students? How do we make it interesting and provide value to our members? Personal contact is always better.

When do you see things returning to normal?

I am not sure back to normal will ever occur – at least in the foreseeable future. There is a new normal that will need to be embraced. We will need to change the way we have done things in the past. Things will never be as they once were. COVID-19 has changed our profession and personal lives forever. Maybe some of it is actually for the better. We can hope that the vaccines will work and that an effective treatment protocol, including new medicines, can be developed to stop the suffering and dying. We have conquered many illnesses and diseases in our lifetime. We must remain hopeful that this too shall pass. Sometimes new is better. Normal is a relative term.   

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

The future is bright for the profession. The world is now paying closer attention to deficient infrastructure. Projects have emerged over the past year. The COVID-19 recovery will be driven by an investment into our aging infrastructure. We need to put people back to work. History has shown us this. The 2021 ASCE Report Card for America’s Infrastructure brings to light that investment is needed. America’s infrastructure was given a C-, which is an improvement over the last grade of D+.  But $2.59 trillion is required over the next 10 years. Civil engineers will be front and center in this effort. We will have a large role in the recovery as design and construction services will be needed. New construction methods will be developed. New materials and new technology will be developed and used to create a sustainable and resilient infrastructure.

Maryam Takla

EIT, A.M.ASCE

Project engineer, Turner Construction, Long Beach, California

When we talked to Takla last April, she was returning to the work site for construction on the new Los Angeles Rams football stadium.

What’s been the most personally challenging aspect of the last year for you?

The most personal challenging aspect of the last year would have to be the inability to participate in activities I love and that would alleviate my stress. Whether it was from work or classes I’m taking in my master’s program or anything really, that release and reminder that I’m more than my day-to-day responsibilities was a key factor to my confidence and mental health.

What’s been the biggest change in your work/career?

I see the construction branch to be one of the more interactive branches in civil engineering. We have so many social interactions with our teammates, subcontractors, inspectors, architects, and clients. These social interactions/team-building meetings are so crucial to build that sense of camaraderie and, ultimately, the project. I’ve felt that it can be difficult to maintain or even establish (depending on the phase of the project), connections due to switching meetings to a web platform or waving to greet someone instead of giving them a handshake. Nowadays, it’s become a little easier, but I remember the awkwardness and confusion when these customs were still being implemented in the beginning.

When do you see things returning to normal?

To be honest, it’s so hard to tell. I don’t think we will ever be able to have everything go back to the way they were before the pandemic. I’ve seen companies that have advanced from the pandemic by learning to make working-from-home the new normal and don’t intend to bring back pre-COVID work life. I’m sure once everyone, or at least the majority of the population, has been vaccinated, we will all be able to return to the things we need and love. But in the big picture, we also have to consider the recovery after the pandemic has been resolved. People have taken hits financially, have lost family and friends, and other things. I don’t know when we will be able to consider the pandemic a thing of the past.

What do you think is civil engineering’s role in a post-pandemic recovery?

We should focus on the areas that made COVID difficult to avoid due to a faulty infrastructure. An example of this is public transportation. For highly dense areas, it can be difficult to maintain the recommended six feet when your means of moving is public transportation. The caveat with this situation is with the varying populations and city landscapes, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. For some countries, another example would be availability of clean water. At first, when I thought about this question, I didn’t really think there would be much relation between civil engineering and the pandemic. I had always seen the pandemic in some sort of political, medical, or financial way. However, it is more evident now than ever that this is a team effort, and if there is anyone who has the means to improve the quality of life, it’s going to be us.

The post A year later – considering the effects of COVID-19 on civil engineering appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

150,000 members in 177 countries, 9 institutes, 10 regions, 93 sections, 160 branches, 397 student chapters, hundreds of committees, over 4,000 journal articles published every year, dozens of conferences, 235 staff members, a $56-million-per-year budget, and one big building near Washington, D.C., all dedicated to civil engineers and the civil engineering profession. This is ASCE; how does this all work? 

My answer would be remarkably well, considering the complexity. The dedication, the energy, and the passion for our profession are so obvious when I talk to any one of our members or staff. It is truly heartwarming. Don’t get me wrong, we have a healthy level of disagreement among us on several issues. But the overall effort to move our professional family forward confirms my conviction that ASCE will soar to new heights in the future. 

How does it really work? Well first, we have groups within the organization that focus on specific goals. Our volunteer members in the 9 institutes generate and dispense much of our technical content with the help of our institutes’ staff. These institutes represent 9 important subdisciplines of civil engineering. About 115,000 of our members are affiliated with our institutes, led by 90 governors on institute boards. These leaders oversee the operations of the institutes with the help of more than 30 staff members at ASCE headquarters near Washington, D.C.

The dedication, the energy, and the passion for our profession are so obvious when I talk to any one of our members or staff.

Our volunteers in the 10 regions play an equally important role by providing the ASCE presence at the local level. These 10 regions cover the entire planet, with Region 10 being our international region. The regions are home to many sections, themselves home to many branches. Each region has a separate board of 8 to 10 governors. All 150,000 ASCE members belong to a region. There is a natural and wonderful complementary role played between the regions and the institutes.

The 18-member ASCE Board of Direction meets 4 times per year and is made up of 10 region directors, 3 institute directors, 2 at-large directors, and 3 presidential officers. The Executive Committee, a subset of the board, meets monthly and addresses the more routine issues to free some board time.

Then come the committees, which address the technical and professional issues in civil engineering. I enjoy participating on both types of committees and am a proponent that, in most cases, we should not limit the number of members on most committees, provided each member is contributing. The number of volunteers working on ASCE committees is difficult to estimate, but I would venture that we have at least 10,000 members spending an average of 1 hour per week on ASCE matters. Imagine for a minute that we had to pay our volunteers a loaded rate of $150 per hour. That would represent $78 million per year donated by our volunteers. Thank you so much for your generous gift of time.

That brings us to the Society’s annual budget of $56 million. The largest components of the income are member dues ($14.5 million), publications ($19.4 million), and continuing education ($3.9 million). The largest components of the expenses are staff salaries ($25 million), publications ($12.4 million), and continuing education ($3.7 million). We have 62,000 dues-paying members, 23,000 Life Members, and 50,000 student members, among the largest membership groups. Balancing the budget is a challenge every year, and cuts have been made recently. Our reserves are at $28 million, and we use the investment return on the reserves to help balance the budget.

The 235 staff members in our headquarters building, led by Tom Smith, CAE, ENV SP, F.ASCE, our executive director, do a remarkable job of keeping ASCE well organized. Our publications are very prominently recognized worldwide and continue to be rated at or near the top of all rankings. We are working on identifying and increasing the practical content in our publications. Our webinar series is strong. Please let us know what topics you would like to see added. Conferences have shifted to the virtual environment, which, while falling short of personal interaction, decreases the cost to our members dramatically because they do not have to travel. 

This is ASCE in a nutshell. If you have questions or comments to help solve some perceived problems, please email me at [email protected]. The more of us who contribute to win-win solutions, the better we will be. 

This article first appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Civil Engineering.

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But the improvement in the overall grade doesn’t tell the whole story. ASCE’s Committee on America’s Infrastructure — the body of experts who work diligently to analyze the nation’s infrastructure category by category to determine the grades — gave only five categories better grades in 2021 than in 2017. Those are aviation, drinking water, energy, inland waterways, and ports. 

On the plus side, only one category — bridges — received a lower grade. But the rest of the grades remained unchanged from the previous report card, with one — stormwater — given its own grade for the first time this year. It earned a D.

Clearly, increases in the quality of the nation’s infrastructure have been incremental.

Many of the members of the CAI pointed out that increases in funding are what made the difference in those categories that saw improvements. Gregory DiLoreto, P.E., P.L.S., D.WRE, Pres.13.ASCE, the chair emeritus of the CAI, put it most succinctly: “Where investments have been made, the grades have risen. It’s a very simple correlation.”

As this issue goes to press, the civil engineering profession eagerly awaits the signing of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVD-19 stimulus package, which includes $350 billion in aid to cash-strapped state and local governments. Even more promising is a targeted $2 trillion infrastructure spending bill that the president has promised.

Increases in the quality of the nation’s infrastructure have been incremental.

But civil engineers are not waiting for federal funding to drive innovation. They have gotten used to being creative with whatever funding they can get.

Witness the increasing application of the deceptively simple traffic solution known as the modern roundabout, a safer and more efficient cousin of the dreaded traffic circle. As senior editor/features manager Robert L. Reid writes in “All about the Roundabout,” today’s roundabouts increase safety, boost throughput, keep vehicles from spewing pollution as they idle at traffic lights, and offer municipalities the extra benefit of not requiring electrified signals. Even if a storm knocks out the power, roundabouts keep working; there is no need for police to direct traffic. That represents a perfect example of systems thinking. 

Then, there is the effort to add hydro­power to the Red Rock Dam on Iowa’s Des Moines River. Engineers from Stantec point out that the project presented a thorny challenge because the dam had never been designed with hydropower in mind and had to keep operating as the powerhouse and penstocks were added. The new system generates enough clean, renewable energy to power 18,000 homes in the nearby community. That’s a win for the community and a win for the environment — not to mention the client.

And the preservation of nature played a significant role in a relatively modest but locally significant project south of Austin, Texas.. Rodriguez Transportation Group and McCarthy Building Companies were called on to solve multiple problems. Commuters needed direct access to the highway that would take them to their jobs in the city. Community residents needed to get those commuters off their local roads, which were never designed for the traffic they were seeing. And the land through which the new link was to be built needed to be preserved because beneath it lay an aquifer providing drinking water to millions of people and irrigation for agriculture. The solution? Engineers used fill to raise the alignment of the new connector highway. Digging wouldn’t touch the aquifer. Problem solved.

But civil engineers are not waiting for federal funding to drive innovation. They have gotten used to being creative with whatever funding they can get.

And solving complex problems like these is becoming infinitely easier with the use of cloud computing, according to authors with Arup and Rönesans Holding. The engineers describe a process called “optioneering,” by which they were able to run a previously unthinkable number of simulations to arrive at the optimal design for a hospital in a highly seismic zone.

Funding for infrastructure upgrades is critical, to be sure. But as these examples — and those in the Infrastructure Solutions series published in Civil Engineering over the past several years — demonstrate, civil engineers will continue to innovate with whatever resources they have at their disposal. CE

This article first appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Innovation Knows No Price Tag.”

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The Case
In August 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a request for proposals from contractors to repair and improve a military airstrip at the Selah Airfield at the Yakima Training Center in Washington state. Six weeks after the release of the RFP, the Corps issued CGC a $7.2-million, fixed-price task order for the work. The task order was awarded under a multiple award task order contract between the parties. The task order required the task to be completed in 240 calendar days, by May 27, 2017.

Once work began, the project experienced numerous delays. The parties disagreed about who was responsible for the delays as well as whether some of the work the Corps directed CGC to perform was required by the task order contract or was additional work that should have been the subject of change orders. While the parties were at odds about the extent to which various delays affected the critical path of performance, the Corps did issue a change order that extended the contract completion date by 49 days, to July 15, 2017.

By mid-May 2017, the Corps concluded that CGC would not be able to complete the runway on deadline and therefore in time for an event called the Mobility Guardian exercise, which was a high-profile, combat-readiness exercise scheduled for summer 2017. The Corps’ contracting officer issued a “show cause” notice to CGC on June 8, 2017. After considering CGC’s response, the contracting officer terminated the contract for default. 

The court found that CGC failed to identify any affirmative representation in the contract documents regarding the condition of the soils at the airstrip.

CGC argued that the default termination was improper and filed a claim seeking payment for work performed along with damages, amounting to more than $4 million. CGC alleged that, among other things, the project delays were excusable because they resulted from design changes imposed by the Corps, differing site conditions, and other circumstances not within CGC’s control. CGC ultimately filed a lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims asking that the court convert the termination for default to a termination for convenience and that CGC be awarded damages for its claims. 

The Corps counterclaimed for almost $7.5 million, which included more than $3.4 million attributable to hiring a replacement contractor, more than $3.2 million for repairs to the project site allegedly necessitated by CGC’s over-excavation and placement of improper fill material in certain areas, and more than $600,000 in liquidated damages based on 435 days of delay in the completion of the contract. 

The Decision
The court’s decision was based on several motions for summary judgment filed by the Corps to dismiss CGC’s claims. One motion related to CGC’s differing site condition claim, in which CGC alleged that the presence of wet soils at the site constituted either a Type I or Type II DSC. The Corps moved to dismiss this claim because CGC failed to provide any evidence that could establish the elements of either type of DSC. 

With regard to the Type I DSC, the court noted that CGC had to establish, at a minimum, that a reasonable contractor reading the contract documents as a whole would interpret them as making a representation as to the site conditions. In addition, the court cited longstanding precedent that the contractual representation had to affirmatively represent a condition (for example, that only hard material would be encountered). The court found that CGC failed to identify any affirmative representation in the contract documents regarding the condition of the soils at the airstrip. To the contrary, the court found that the contract explicitly “placed the onus on CGC to determine the condition of the site itself, by conducting its own geotechnical investigation and preparing its own report.” 

As for the Type II DSC, the court noted that CGC was required to demonstrate that there existed unknown physical conditions at the site of an unusual nature, which “differ materially from those ordinarily encountered and generally recognized as inhering in work of the character provided for in the contract.” The court found that CGC failed to meet such requirements. CGC presented no evidence that it could not have reasonably anticipated that there would be a significant quantity of wet soils at the site shortly after the winter season or that the conditions of the soil differed materially from what would ordinarily be encountered and generally recognized when undertaking similar work in the region.

The court found that CGC’s DSC claim appeared to be based entirely on a sentence in the contracting officer’s “show cause” notice stating that “the Government recognizes [the drainage system, material quantity overruns, and saturated soils] as either changes to the Contract or differing site conditions.” The court found CGC’s reliance on this “conclusory observation” to be unavailing:

“Even where a contracting officer’s legal opinion is fully explained (unlike here), it is not binding on the government in judicial proceedings (which are de novo) and it cannot override the language of the contract itself.”

As a result of the above, the court granted the Corps’ motion for summary judgment of CGC’s DSC claim. This meant, among other things, that CGC could not use the alleged DSC as a basis for claiming a time extension, which would have helped it defeat the default termination. 

The Corps raised other arguments on summary judgment, including that at the time of termination it was not reasonably likely that CGC could have completed its work on the contract within the time remaining and that CGC committed “material breaches of the contract specifications justifying the default termination.” These breaches included over-excavating and backfilling with noncompliant material, the Corps argued. The court declined to decide these issues on summary judgment, finding that there were facts in dispute and that all these issues were intertwined with issues that were associated with determining whether CGC’s delays were excusable.

The fact that the court was willing to dismiss the differing site condition claim could have a major impact on CGC’s ability to overturn the default.

The Analysis
It is obvious that the disputes in this case involve much more than a DSC claim. However, the fact that the court was willing to dismiss the DSC claim could have a major impact on CGC’s ability to overturn the default. The decision did not explain how many days of delay were tied to the soils issues, but given the court’s decision, CGC is certainly in a more precarious position than it would have been had the issue remained alive for the full trial. We found it surprising that this was resolved on summary judgment, as one would have thought it important to understand why the Corps’ contracting officer thought this was recoverable under the contract.

One other observation: The damages sought by the Corps are almost double the amount of CGC’s original contract price, with the excess reprocurement costs being almost as much as that original price. While the validity of the default termination and resulting costs will be the subject of a trial and later opinion, it is a stark reminder to contractors of the potential liability from not finishing a contract. To defend itself against these damages, CGC will have to prove its entitlement to a time extension by demonstrating that it gave appropriate contractual notice and offering project records to support its position. Stay tuned to future columns to learn the results of the trial. 

This article first appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Owner Acknowledgment of Site Conditions Doesn’t Help Contractor.”

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Hurwitz is the Eric H.I. and Janice Hoffman Faculty Scholar and the director of the Driving and Bicycling Simulator Laboratory in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering.

He has been an instructor at the undergraduate and graduate levels for 12 years, and he has received many regional and national teaching awards, including the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award 2019-20, bestowed by OSU’s College of Engineering. 

I believe that teaching is a performance art. To promote effective information transfer and deep understanding of class content, we have to deliver an engaging ‘performance’ in the classroom.

Briefly describe CE 595, Traffic Operations and Design. 
It is a graduate-level transportation engineering course offered in the fall quarter. CE 595 provides a robust introduction to concepts, theory, and tools widely used by transportation engineering professionals who work in the traffic operations domain. In addition to the weekly lectures, students participate in hands-on laboratories that include collecting a variety of traffic data, using calculations and software to analyze field data, and conducting a full traffic impact study, which is documented in a technical report and presented to the class at the end of the quarter. 

CE 595 is the first of three required courses in the transportation engineering curriculum at OSU. The other two are CE 594, Transportation Facilities Design and CE 591, Transportation Systems Analysis, Planning, and Policy. Together, these three classes provide a breadth of knowledge in the broad areas of operations, design, and planning, which are foundational in the transportation domain. 

You employ the ASCE ExCEEd model in your classes. What is it and how do you integrate it into this course?
The ExCEEd model proposes the teacher as a professional role model in the classroom. The model incorporates six tenants of good teaching, including: 

• Structured organization
• Engaging presentation
• Enthusiasm
• Positive rapport with students
• Frequent assessment of student learning
• Appropriate use of technology

I have implemented this teaching model in a variety of ways that maximize my strengths and minimize my weaknesses as an instructor. 

Elements of the model that work well for me include course- and module-level learning objectives, detailed documentation of my lesson plans in a framework referred to as board notes, and the development of preplanned, nontrivial questions. In addition, I use Microsoft PowerPoint to show only pictures or large tables/complex figures, a whiteboard during class to display the irreducible minimum amount of documentation students need to understand the material presented, and learning activities as often as is practically possible. 

What makes this course (or the way you teach it) innovative or unique? 
One aspect of the class that students regularly comment on is how well the theory from our lectures is aligned with the applied laboratory activities. Students have said that these hands-on labs provide an opportunity to improve the depth of their conceptual understanding.

Another common student observation is that they love that the data we collect and analyze during the first half of the class are used in the traffic impact study. They have commented that seeing how the process works from end to end gives them greater confidence in their abilities and understanding of the material. 

This past fall was the first time it was taught solely online. Tell us about your experience so far.
I have had immense support at all levels from OSU. That support included clear and timely policies and the acquisition of desperately needed hardware such as a Wacom tablet and Jabra microphone as well as software such as Canvas and Kaltura Capture. I also received training on these new technologies and was given templates and tips for implementing this technology in our learning management system. The university also supported me in my desire to attend professional trainings both at OSU and from professional societies.

I have been teaching college classes for 12 years, and I can say unequivocally that I have not worked this hard on constructing and delivering classes since my first few years as an untenured assistant professor. At that time, I was building class material from scratch one lecture at a time and never more than a day ahead of my students. 

My challenges during the pandemic revolved around a series of critical path choices: synchronous or asynchronous delivery, how much HTML formatting would I adopt, which capabilities of my learning management system should I pursue and to what degree, and whom should I go to for advice and guidance. These were among the many issues I grappled with. A year ago, I hadn’t spent more than five minutes considering any of these issues, and after the university announced we would be remote during the spring 2020 quarter, I had about 10 days to pivot to a new form of instruction. 

A governing principle of my teaching, again informed by my experiences with ExCEEd, is the continuous pursuit of positive, incremental improvement.

What have you had to change most about your teaching style moving to remote delivery? 
I believe that teaching is a performance art. To effectively promote effective information transfer and deep understanding of class content, we have to deliver an engaging ‘performance’ in the classroom. Exemplary teachers intentionally consider their movement around the classroom (for example, not staying in one place near the board) as well as their nonverbal communication, articulation, volume and pitch, and humor.

A big part of my classroom delivery includes interacting with my students through preplanned questions. My choice to deliver the class asynchronously required that I adopt other tools and techniques to benefit the student learning experience. 

Although I have had a number of challenges, I’ve experienced some success as well. First, delivery of dozens of short five- to 10-minute video clips with high-resolution audio for my narration and a large-screen tablet to produce the notes I would typically document on a whiteboard. Second, adoption of discussion boards for my weekly modules during which I respond to every primary post from every student every week, resulting in hundreds of posts from me throughout the quarter asking and answering student questions. Third, development of remote laboratories. This was possible only because student members of my research laboratory collected dozens of videos in the field last summer. They created transcription and calculation templates for the incoming students to take advantage of. 

You believe that students should be prepared to have their ideas challenged. Are students ever daunted by having their ideas challenged? If so, how you do handle that?
Transportation engineering problems are often complex and multifaceted. Regularly, these problems are of great concern to myriad stakeholders, whose desires are often in direct conflict. The transportation professionals of the future will need to be able to articulate their thinking in clear and concise terms to move their preferred solutions toward implementation. 

I work very hard to promote a welcoming classroom environment in which a variety of ideas and ways of being are welcomed and encouraged. I set expectations for professionalism and collegiality at the outset of the course, and I try to model those standards through my behaviors in and out of the classroom. I am also intentional about developing a rapport with every student. In these ways, I try to make all my students comfortable in order to actively participate in the class. I have very rarely had students express anything but enjoyment of our classroom dynamic.

I work very hard to promote a welcoming classroom environment in which a variety of ideas and ways of being are welcomed and encouraged.

Students are graded on their contributions to discussions. Explain how that works. 
Discussion posts are evaluated with a rubric that is presented at the beginning of the class. That rubric includes four dimensions: quality of the original post, quality of response posts, quantity of postings, and demonstrated understanding of the learning materials. Each dimension is scored as unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and exemplary. 

If students do not participate in the optional office hours offered through Zoom each week, I will have very little direct interaction with them. This structure provides an opportunity for me to ask and answer questions from every student in the class and for them to have similar experiences with each other.

Is there anything you would like to say to instructors who may be struggling with the challenges of asynchronous content delivery?
A governing principle of my teaching, again informed by my experiences with ExCEEd, is the continuous pursuit of positive, incremental improvement. Our courses, lectures, and individual assignments do not need to be perfect the first time we deliver them, but it is critical that we reflect on every element of our teaching, identify those elements that are working well and propagate those forward, while simultaneously working to improve elements that are not working as well.

So, pick one item from your delivery last quarter or semester that did not work as well as it could have, and be intentional about improving that during your next class offering. For example, if you looked at my spring 2020 class offerings and compared them to my winter ‘21 offerings, three iterations later, you would see some elements that worked very well initially are still there (discussion boards) and other elements that are not even recognizable (hyperlinked buttons and graphics on the home­page of the class).

Do you have an innovative program for reaching and teaching today’s technology-savvy civil engineering students? If so, email [email protected] using the subject line “Higher Learning.” 

This article first appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Civil Engineering.

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Maribel Castillo is the vice president and director of corporate communications for global multidisciplinary engineering services firm T.Y. Lin International. She has advice for how engineers can best prepare for — and succeed in — conversations with print and broadcast media.

1. What practical advice would you give engineers on how to respond to a phone or email request from the media for an interview? 
My practical advice is first and foremost to ensure that you are in compliance with your firm’s media relations policy. For example, T.Y. Lin International’s policy is that all media inquiries must be coordinated with corporate communications. This includes inquiries related to company business, projects, and any general engineering issues.

Second, I would advise engineers to inform their clients about all media inquiries. Often, project contracts include restrictions and guidelines about speaking to the media and publicly sharing information about projects. 

For subsequent correspondence, I advise engineers to respond to all emails in a timely manner. My motto is, ‘Always prioritize media requests.’ I know engineers are very busy, but you should respond as quickly as possible. I am fortunate that our engineers are responsive; they are proud of the work they do, so they are always eager to share what they are working on and the technical aspects of the projects and innovations that they’ve developed.

And, since you should always prepare for your responses before an interview, I see it as key to obtain the interview questions in advance whenever possible. 

2. When would you recommend saying yes to an interview request? 
I recommend saying yes to interview requests when the publication’s or media’s audience includes your existing clients or targeted clients. For professional service firms, the end goal with media interviews is to position your firm as a technical expert and a trusted resource for clients, which ultimately results in new or repeat work for your firm.

We are fortunate in civil engineering to have well-respected and long-­established publications with editors and writers who have deep knowledge of engineering and have expertise in technical writing. So, that makes the final result of articles or news segments typically very beneficial for the firm in presenting your work.

3. When would you recommend saying no? What’s the best way to say no to leave a door open for future requests?
First, I would recommend saying no if the client/owner has restrictions on speaking to the media. I also recommend saying no when it’s not likely that your clients will read the publication. If you have a communications or public relations leader at your firm, the best way to say no is to have them respond to the request and maintain ongoing communications with the editors to position your firm for future opportunities. 

The same sentiment holds true if your firm does not have a dedicated communications or public relations leader. Try and figure out how to continue the dialogue with the editor or with the writer. Connect with the person on LinkedIn to learn what they are interested in. This positions you so that in the future, if it is a publication that targets your clients, you can reach out to them with potential story ideas, such as an upcoming milestone on a project or a big win that your company has had. 

It’s really about establishing relationships with the media. I see my role — and that of our engineers — as being partners with the media. We’re all living in a world with short deadlines and external pressures for engagement and results, so any way that we can help journalists and writers do their jobs is a win-win on both sides.

4. What questions should engineers ask in advance to ensure they have the information they need to properly prepare for the interview?
As stated previously, asking for the interview questions in advance is key to preparing for the interview. 

Also, find out the ‘slant’ of the article. Will it have a technical focus or position the project as part of a larger industry trend? The engineer should also inquire what other team members — for example, the owner, architect, or contractor — are participating in the article or news segment.

5. What are your top three tips on preparing for a phone interview? 
First, prepare your responses in advance in writing and include as much detail as possible. Have project materials available for easy reference. If you are not 100 percent sure about a fact during an interview, it is OK to say you want to check it and get back to the interviewer by a certain date or time.

Media interviews are a great opportunity to showcase your clients as well as your firm’s design and technical expertise. Always strive to provide quality photography as well as high-resolution drawings and renderings. 

Second, ensure that you are familiar with the publication and the journalist. Spend time reading past articles in the publication and getting to know the journalist’s work.

And, third, schedule the interview at a time when you will not be interrupted. Allow extra time for extended dialogue and unplanned questions. Remember, this is an opportunity to make a connection with the journalist. 

6. What are your top three tips on preparing for a television or online interview, which bring with it the need for engineers to consider visual presentation as well?
First, as with phone interviews, ask for the questions in advance and make sure you understand the purpose of the segment or interview. Will it just be you on camera, or is it a panel interview? How long will the interview last? Sometimes it’s impromptu at a public outreach meeting. But if you do know about it in advance, ask if you are going to be interviewed live or being taped to be shown at a later time.

Second, since you will be doing a visible interview, ask if there are any support visuals they would like provided; make sure the ones you offer are approved for distribution by your clients. PowerPoint slides, renderings, design animations, project images, and even drone footage of a project site can add value and visual impact for the interview.

Third, prepare your responses, any accompanying visuals or designs, and rehearse your presentation. Work with your project team and your communications team — if you have one — on this.

It is essential to practice responding to supplied or potential questions several times and to do this out loud. Engineers know their projects and how to make client presentations, but doing a live interview with media is different. Preparation is key to ensure that you are comfortable with the materials that you are presenting. You should keep it as simple as possible.

Make sure all the technology is in place for online interviews. If, for example, it’s via Zoom or Microsoft Teams, check that your lighting is correct and your camera isn’t blurry. 

And don’t forget to dress for success, even if you are being interviewed from home. I think if you’re dressed professionally, you act professionally. Put on business clothes. Fix your hair. Do those things that give you the self-confidence you normally have when you give in-person presentations. 

7. Once the interview is over, is there any follow-up you’d recommend the engineers do? 
Before ending the interview, thank the journalist and reiterate that you are available for follow-up questions. 

For print articles, ask if it’s possible to review the draft prior to publication. If it is, that’s the time to catch inaccuracies or potentially add information to the article that will be of value to the audience, your clients, and your firm.

And after the interview, make sure you provide any follow-up materials and respond to additional inquiries by the journalist’s deadline or as quickly as possible if they don’t provide one.

This article first appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “How to Talk with the Media.”

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I wish I’d known earlier in my career the importance of mentorship and networking. When I worked at the California Department of Transportation, I would get sent to leadership training classes that I sometimes resisted because they didn’t seem worth it to me and they took up a lot of my time. Looking back, I wish I had seen them more as opportunities. Years later, in some work-related situation, I would express an idea that seemed pretty astute, and I’d wonder where that idea had come from. Eventually, I realized that I was repeating something I’d learned from those training classes I hadn’t wanted to attend.

It is important to remember that as planners and engineers, we are products of our environment. When that environment is good — when you have supportive supervisors who look out for you, help you extend yourself, expand what you think you’re capable of doing — then you can be more successful. Fortunately for me, I worked with a number of supervisors who were more than just my bosses; they were my mentors at the time and eventually became part of my professional network. These included Gordon Marts, a director of multiple Caltrans districts, and James van Loben Sels, who led Caltrans during much of the 1990s.

These executives supported me, chewed me out at times, and pushed me to apply for new positions and take on new responsibilities — even when I preferred to stay put in a job where I felt comfortable and secure. But because they had taught me well, they helped me stretch my abilities to meet new opportunities.

Some years ago, I was honored by the Sacramento Japanese American Citizens League with a work of Japanese calligraphy that reads: ‘You live in the shadow of others.’ I have tried to take that message to heart, framing the calligraphy and hanging it on a wall at my home to remind me that we all cast a shadow that can support and protect others. 

I am grateful to those who mentored me, and I try to stay in touch with them, especially around the holidays. And I am pleased that the Contra Costa Transportation Authority selected as my replacement someone I helped mentor — Timothy Haile, P.E., formerly CCTA’s deputy executive director for projects, who can now start extending his own ­shadow.

Randell H. Iwasaki, P.E., M.ASCE, recently retired as the executive director of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority in Walnut Creek, California. Previously, he served as the director of the California Department of Transportation. He is now working to help Amazon Web Services develop its transportation division.

This article first appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Wish I’d Known.”

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Daniel Bressler, EIT, A.M.ASCE, was laid off from his position as a project engineer several months ago due to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Bressler — who earned his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from New York University and is now pursuing his master’s degree in structural engineering through The City College of New York — was undaunted. He pursued employment by establishing clear steps he would take each day and week and completed those steps as if they were his job. By the end of just one month, he had a new position that he enjoys and feels confident in. To succeed in civil engineering, he recommends mentorships and curiosity — plus a generous helping of humor.

How did you land your current job during the pandemic?
I follow step-by-step guides for most things. So first I told my inner circle — my family and close friends — that I was looking for a job. Then I told my college friends, and after that I told my college professors. I had saved emails from my undergraduate school that listed jobs, so I went through those and reached out to the companies to ask if they still had anything available. Then I used LinkedIn, and finally I just searched websites of companies I thought I would be interested in and applied online. I used an Excel spreadsheet to track everything, and every two weeks I sent follow-up emails, up to two or three times.

It’s easier to take baby steps and take it piece by piece. And it helped that my family was there to support me. My dad said, ‘Don’t feel sorry for yourself. These things happen. Get back on your feet. Do the work.’

A friend of mine works with an architect who worked with the owner of York Tower Consulting Engineering, and that’s how my resume eventually made its way to them.

How does this new job compare to your last?
The biggest difference is that I have more responsibility. As I am earning trust from my employer, I am allowed to do more independent design. I now have more input into the final product that we deliver to the client.

For example, I designed the gravity and lateral system for an extension on an existing building. The caveat of the design was the client — an architect — did not account for columns in the layout and did not want to change the design. The solution that I got to design was a structure that started outside the existing building, so it wouldn’t disrupt the layout. For the extension of the existing building — the new upper two floors — the structure went over the existing building and continued from there, almost as if it were hugging the existing building. 

It was a really different experience that I would not have thought I would have had the chance to design. I am also lucky that my days always stay interesting with other small jobs like designing connections for balconies and such.

What are the chief skills and abilities that you developed in your previous positions that enabled you to move on to this new position?
I learned self-confidence in my designs and how to gather data. When I was in school, all the information was presented to me, but over the previous two jobs, I learned that the world is far from perfect. Sometimes you must do some research and guesstimate to come up with an adequate design for the situation at hand. 

What nontechnical skills have helped you so far in your career?
I always look for a challenge and ways to learn. I ask ‘why’ and dig deeper into how someone came up with an answer and how I can apply that in the future. I’m willing to take critiques and be a team player. 

I also did Toastmasters, which gave me confidence in public speaking. I recommend it to anyone.

And having a sense of humor helps in an industry that can be a little bit dry. It makes it more lively and easier to work with people.

What role have mentors played in your career?
I work very intimately with my current manager, who has an open-door policy and is a very warm person, very open to any questions I have. It’s just him and me on the renovation team. 

I am also part of ASCE’s Mentor Match. I’ve been with Dustin Cole, P.E., P.Eng, M.ASCE, for two years. He has taken the time and patience to help me through many of the challenges of a young engineer starting out in the industry. Every month we have a phone call. I have a checklist we go through, and then we talk about whatever else came up that month. And I take notes so I can refer back.

And my mother was a big role model for me. She went to college later — after she raised her kids — and went into nursing. That was amazing to see. It showed that if you have your mind set on something, you can do it, and it doesn’t matter when.

How did you get interested in engineering, and civil engineering specifically?
In undergraduate school, I was taking lots of courses; I was good at math, and I was interested in how things work. My brother suggested a physics course because we had a friend who is an engineer, and he suggested that. I took physics and loved it. Then I spoke to that friend, and he asked questions about what parts of the course I liked the most, and through those answers we narrowed it down to civil. And the more I took civil engineering courses, the more I fell in love with it. And now I’m pursuing my master’s degree, and the more in-depth I get, the more excited I get.

What do you hope to accomplish next in your career?
I want to get my master’s degree, which I am in the process of doing now. Within the next two years, I want to sit for my professional engineer license exam. 

And I want my managers and company to feel like I am a reliable asset, that they can send something my way and know it will come back done — and done well. I strive for personal excellence.

How have you worked on developing your leadership skills?
I was a transfer student, and when I transferred to NYU, I wanted to pursue extracurricular activities to get to know people. So I went to a meeting for the ASCE Concrete Canoe Competition. I had barely taken any engineering courses yet, but I signed up to get involved. Two days later they asked me to be the construction captain. We had one project manager and five subteams, and I led one of those. It was phenomenal. We won everything on the regional level, and at nationals, we were in the top 10 — and my category placed third. That experience taught me deadlines, responsibility, and how to manage and work with people. It was fun, and I learned a lot.

Where do you see your career heading next?
After getting my master’s degree and my P.E., I may look at getting a structural engineering license. And I do want to take on more management tasks while still doing design. But beyond that? Honestly, who knows what’s next? I’m ambitious. But I’m just as curious as you!

What personal traits or characteristics do you believe helped you in this new position?
My perseverance and focus. When I don’t succeed the first time, I use that as incentive to try even harder. I truly believe that anyone can do anything they set their mind to if they put in the work, as long as they take it step by step and learn something new every day. 

What advice would you give to other young engineers who would seek positions similar to yours?
I am only two years into the industry, so that’s hard to say. But I would say, ‘Try, no matter what.’ Even if you are not receiving any responses from your dream company, keep applying and do not get discouraged. I always pictured myself at a large firm, but now that I am happily employed at York Tower, which is a small firm, I realize that every organization has a unique culture and value. 

Where do you think the field of civil engineering is headed in the next five to 10 years?
I think civil engineering is going to be a lot more computer based, with people connecting virtually as part of the regular routine. Already we are seeing the increased use of 3D modeling software to create construction documents. That progression will continue.

What is one item that you can share from your personal or professional bucket list?
My bucket list used to include riding a roller coaster, but I got over that fear a year and a half ago. I rode the Incredible Hulk Coaster at Universal Orlando Resort. It uses a drive-tire launch system, which avoids the dreaded chain lift!

What would your current coworkers be surprised to learn about you?
I do not drink coffee, so if you ever see me with a thermos, it’s hot cocoa. And yes, there are probably marshmallows or whipped cream in there as well!

What quote or principle do you try to live by, in your work or your personal life?
‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste.’ (The United Negro College Fund launched an ad campaign with this slogan in 1972.) My teacher in ninth grade told me this, and it stuck with me ever since. If you want to do something, set a goal and take it in baby steps. 

Another similar idea came from a college professor, Ron Pennella, CCM, FCMAA: Use the word ‘challenge’ to describe goals because ‘challenge’ implies that it is something that can be overcome.

What is one routine you couldn’t do without?
Playing basketball. I need to play ball at least once a week, or I will go nuts from not moving. Before lockdown, I would play religiously twice a week, sometimes more. Right now, though, it is a little hard to play defense while staying 6 feet apart! 

Are you a younger member who has recently taken the next step in your career? We’d like to hear from you. Email [email protected] using the subject line “Next Step.”

This article first appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Break Down Your Goals and Follow the Steps.”

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Melissa Fischer, P.E., M.ASCE, is aiming to change that.

Fischer, who identifies as nonbinary, is a supervising engineer for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, but lately they’re probably better known as a novelist.

Fischer’s first novel, The Advocacy, published in 2019, mixes all the human drama, emotional stakes, plot twists, and character development that you’d expect from a great work of fiction with a realistic portrayal of a working civil engineer.

Fischer discussed the book on a recent episode of the ASCE Plot Points podcast. Read the highlights below or listen to the complete interview.

Civil Engineering Source: Can you give us the elevator pitch on what your novel’s about?

Melissa Fischer: The elevator pitch: “Who gets good water? Who decides?”

This novel focuses on the gold-mining region in Ghana, on a village whose drinking water supply is a river, which is ruined by the construction of a dam by the local gold mine. When I say local, it’s a multinational corporation – it’s a very large mine. [The village] appeals to a civil engineer who’s working in the area. [Louisa Lehmann] is a Peace Corps volunteer, and she’s actually managing an NGO, which is a charitable organization, that is financed by that same gold mine.

So, the village knows [Louisa] has contacts with the mine, and they’re asking her to help get the mine to rectify the situation. The more she presses on their behalf, the more she’s jeopardizing the goodwill of the mine, and they may pull their funding from her agency.

Source: What genre would you describe this as?

Fischer: I would describe it as literary fiction. I guess I’m not the one to say because I’m not the reader, but from the reactions of readers, I think that the fact that it’s about a civil engineer and that it’s written by a civil engineer, I think people are a little bit hesitant to imagine that it could be an enjoyable read. [laughs]

I would say you will not be disappointed. I spent 25 years writing this novel. Ever since I got out of the Peace Corps in ’94, I’ve been working on it. And a great part of that time was to learn how to write well. I think I have done my work and served up a really solid meal, a really enjoyable read, and that is the feedback that I’m getting. You can go on Amazon and see the feedback from readers, that people are enjoying the book.

Source: That’s got to be so satisfying to be working on something, to have something in your head for so long and not just the feeling of having it accomplished, but to have that outside validation now. That’s got to be pretty good, right?

Fischer: Yes, it is. I mean, 25 years is a long time. And I won’t say I was in isolation that whole time, but probably the first 10 years I pretty much wrote on my own until I felt I couldn’t make it any better. Then I started sending out copies to friends and family, maybe 20 or 30 or 40 copies every year to year and a half. I would get feedback, and I would revise it.

I did take a lot of the comments from people, and I think it made the book better. About 10 years ago I started going to a professional writing conference, and right off the bat I could see the difference in the kind of feedback I was getting. These are people who know writing, and they go right to the point, and I think my writing took a quantum leap. I have gone every year, I’ve circulated scenes, read them in critique sessions, and I think it’s really helped me to refine my sensibility as a writer.

People would walk up to me after a Read and Critique and say, “That’s the kind of writing I think all of us here want to do. It’s beautiful.” That kind of feedback I’ve been getting from years at the conference, but nobody had seen the whole book.

At some point, maybe three years ago, the big thing for me was getting Ghanaian readers to take a look at it. I’m really writing from my heart. I’m really writing out of love for what life has given me. My two years in the Peace Corps in Ghana were profound for me. And I want through the novel to somehow share with people who weren’t there the poignance and the beauty of the life that Ghanaians shared with me. So, the last thing I want to do is unintentionally offend the people I’m trying to honor, but it’s so easy to do even with the best of intentions.

So, I guess I’m responding to your question about getting this affirmation back. … Before the book gets published, you produce something that is called an advance review copy, or an ARC. That’s what you send out to reviewers so that you can actually have a review quote on your cover when you publish it. Sending those out and getting the responses from those people – who are people who know good writing and also know Ghana – was really very moving for me.

It felt like at the end of a 25-year journey there was somebody there waiting to say, “We welcome you.”

Source: You mentioned that you spent some time in Ghana with the Peace Corps. When did you decide that that experience was something you wanted to write about at least in some form?

Fischer: When I got home from the Peace Corps, I immediately started typing up my journals with the intent of having a novel.

Source: I’m interested that you always were looking at it in terms of a novel, not necessarily as just a straight memoir or something like that?

Fischer:  No, because as a child I always loved fiction. I was always reading, and I knew from a very early age that I was going to write a novel. For me, there’s something more alive, there’s something larger about the canvas of fiction. … I want to get beyond the empirical and just the recitation of actual facts.

Source:  Interesting. So, it was really during that experience that you were journaling and capturing impressions with an eye on a novel potentially someday?

Fischer: You know, I kept three sets of journals. I kept my professional journal for the work that we were doing; I kept a journal that was written to friends and family on the level of anything that I would be openly willing to share with anyone else; and, I kept a personal set of journals, which is kind of my uncensored, much more intimate journal that I’ve always kept, so I had that material when I came back.

Source: Have you met other civil engineers who are inclined to write like this? Do you think there are some similar skill sets there?

Fischer: I have no doubt they’re out there. I don’t want to forget anyone. I don’t think I have met another engineer who’s writing fiction, but I believe they’ve always existed and still exist. [laughs]

Source: Do you think the process of writing a novel has helped make you a better civil engineer or helped you approach your work differently?

Fischer: Absolutely. Wow, that’s a big question.

I think, for writing this book, I’m a better human being and that there’s something about the posture of writing fiction … When you’re writing a story, you don’t even know the what. You don’t know how the plot’s going to unfold. So it requires a posture of respect and a posture of listening because you’re waiting for the story to reveal itself.

There can be that tendency in the mind for when that story becomes visible to say, “Oh no, that’s not right, that’s not it,” and to ignore it and to keep waiting, imagining you’re listening, but you just missed it. And so, you learn to honor that very first impulse and not turn it away.

I would say, similarly, professionally, I’m a supervising engineer, so there are engineers who work under my guidance … learning to, seriously, from my heart, learning to really respect the people who work for me and really listen to them and what they’re bringing into the room and say yes to what they’re bringing in, that’s been huge for me.

Learn more about The Advocacy at melissaannfischer.com.

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Blockley chatted with Civil Engineering about his thoughts on each and how he believes the field of engineering should evolve for the future.

Civil Engineering: What prompted you to put together Building Bridges: Between Theory and Practice?   

DB: I wrote the book because I have come to realize that engineering is not well understood by society in general and our profession is taken for granted and quite seriously undervalued.

The book is summarized through 20 learning points that I have distilled from reflecting on my experiences. They include, for example, the idea that engineering as an industry needs to better integrate the capabilities of ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ to create more resilient engineering solutions.

Three things underpin these learning points. First, the nature of engineering is poorly understood both inside and outside of the profession. I, like many other engineers, get frustrated when I hear media reporting of major engineering events. How many news outlets have engineering correspondents?

Second, we have witnessed some very serious engineering failures with loss of life and resources — some on a massive scale. Our technical focus within the profession has led to a neglect of the human dimension in design, constructions, use, and disposal.

Third, confusion about the similarities and differences between engineering and other disciplines — particularly science and technology — is holding back engineers from achieving the recognition that they deserve. For example, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) has served a useful purpose in the past to help recruit young people in these fields — but I think that the ‘S’ has begun to dominate the ‘TEM’ in a way that is unhelpful to the engineering profession. We need to think more clearly about the relationships between engineering and other disciplines.

Why is there a gap between what engineers know and what they do, in your opinion?  

The gaps have arisen from increasing specialization in education, training, and professional work since the Renaissance. As science developed, it was quite natural for people to specialize. The problem is that the overview knowledge is now lacking. We tend to feel most comfortable entrenched into our professional silos, and there is too little interaction and transdisciplinary discussion.

Scientific rationalism dominates our universities as well, so there is little understanding of ‘practical wisdom.’ Increasingly, many academics have no industrial experience. Theoretical papers and publications are regularly remote from practice and understandable by only a few other academics. And on the flip side, practitioners routinely dismiss such papers as having little value.

There is no common language that helps us join theory and practice together.

Some academics accuse practitioners of being ad hoc and lacking rigor. But practical rigor is of a different kind to rational and logical rigor, as I explain in the book.

The reasons structures fail is largely due to human behavior, and until recently this was almost totally ignored by academics and practitioners alike. Probabilistic safety and reliability theory have come a long way in the last 40 years, but they almost entirely neglect the human reasons why events accumulate and incubate to trigger failures. We have almost no social science of engineering.

Considering this gap between what engineers know and do, why do things go wrong? 

My generation of engineers was not challenged through their education to think about safety, risk, and uncertainty as part of their design process.

During my career we have witnessed some terrible failures. Quality as a concept was, and still is, equated with functionality, and the latter does not necessarily address the question of safety and economy.

But thinking about risk and uncertainty has to consider the whole picture. The reasons why failures occur vary from the very simple (e.g., a calculation mistake at the Second Narrows Bridge in Canada in 1958) to the complex interaction of many unforeseen events (as at the West Gate Bridge in Australia in 1970).

Most failures don’t just happen suddenly — the pressures build or incubate. They derive from the unintended consequences of decisions, unknown unknowns (things we don’t know we don’t know), and many other factors such as organizational rigidities and the ill-structuring of problems as well as economic and political pressures. So, for example, the lateral torsional buckling of the Dee Bridge in England in 1847 was not recognized because it was not understood at the time. Flutter that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 was also not ‘on the radar’ then.

Nevertheless, there are patterns of events during these incubation periods — these accidents waiting to happen — that we, as engineers, can attempt to spot and ameliorate to avoid the final trigger event.

In your opinion, how should an understanding of failure in general — and perhaps structural failure in particular — inform the future of civil engineering as an industry? 

We need to spot the incubating accident waiting to happen before it happens. As the philosopher Karl Popper emphasized, we learn from our mistakes. In strict logical terms success teaches us little. But failure holds very clear lessons — undoubtedly something went wrong. Learning can be at many levels, from simple awareness to deep study.

In the Building Bridges preface, you wrote: ‘I fervently believe that it is imperative that everyone (technical and non-technical people alike) need to do things differently if we are to address successfully some of the big challenges we face in the 21st century.’ To your mind, what are the biggest challenges we are facing in this century? 

I see them as embodied in the well-stated 17 U.N. sustainable development millennium goals. I think that they need to be at the forefront of all of our thinking. They address issues from poverty to clean energy, from hunger to clean water, from sustainable cities to climate action.

Engineers have a crucial role in meeting all of these challenges. But to do so we need our voices to be heard, and to achieve that we need to relate what we do to other disciplines such as economics and politics much more understandably and comprehensively. We should not allow ourselves to be sidelined as narrowly technical with nothing to say about the ‘big picture.’ At the same time, it is our technical expertise that we ‘bring to the party’.

What approach do you think will be most successful at addressing these challenges for civil engineers? Why? 

In short, I see systems thinking as key. This is because it provides us with a language for collaboration. It is not just the latest management fad. It provides a vocabulary for forming an integrated view of the ‘big picture’ and the detail.

Systems thinking forces us to make connections and see interdependencies. It takes us as engineers away from being technically narrow and from being narrowly technical — though our technical knowledge and skills are crucial. Systems thinking enables us to see civil engineering in its relationship to engineering as a generic discipline because we can relate potential and flow in all processes, both natural and man-made.

Systems thinking allows us to identify our relationships with other disciplines such as economics, law, politics, and the social sciences. Here, potential is captured through answers to questions of ‘why.’ Flow is captured through answers to questions of ‘who, what, where, and when’ as they change. Methods and procedures are captured through answers to questions of ‘how.’

Engineers, perhaps more than any other group, understand the importance of getting the details right — but we have done that by focussing on ‘how’ to the detriment of ‘why.’

So, we still need specialists such as geotechnical engineers. But we need those specialists to think in a ‘T’ shape where the flange is breadth of understanding and the web is depth. If specialists can talk a common language of systems, then they can more easily collaborate with others outside of their immediate specialisms. For example, many engineers are baffled by political decision-making — but we have to work with and influence those key decision-makers much more effectively.

In summary, my learning journey has taught me the importance of promoting systems thinking in facing the challenges of meeting the U.N. sustainable development goals.

Engineers have a crucial role to work together across disciplines, across national boundaries, and across political ideologies so that we can reach those goals together.

The post Why should engineers join together theory and practice? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

“Although I did not connect it to civil engineering at the time, I loved playing with LEGOs as a little kid. I especially loved the Harry Potter sets since it connected to my love of reading while still letting me build random creations for my mini-figures,” said Danielle Schroeder, EIT, A.M.ASCE, associate bridge engineer, Pennoni, in a discussion about the toys that inspired civil engineering careers on ASCE Collaborate.

She was not alone.

Clearly, not every child who enjoyed playing with LEGOs grew to become a civil engineer. But is it fair to say that every civil engineer was once a child who enjoyed playing with LEGOs?

Here are some highlights from the ASCE Collaborate discussion (and be sure to log in and contribute your own memories):

Daniel Taylor, P.E., M.ASCE

Project engineer, Ambler, Pennsylvania

Funny little story – in an elementary school yearbook, I said that when I grew up I wanted to be a LEGO master. My wife jokes that I kind of did just that by becoming a structural engineer.

Mitch Winkler, P.E., M.ASCE

Retired engineer, Houston

I was really into Tonka trucks when I was young. I had a dedicated dirt patch where I could move earth. I also had a lot of broken trucks from pushing them to their limits. I also learned practical hydraulic engineering at an early age building waterways and retention basins.

Jose Castro, A.M.ASCE

Water resources assistant engineer, San Diego

I absolutely love LEGOs! For me LEGOs didn’t directly inspire me to be a civil engineer, but they directed my avenue for engineering, creativity, and imagination. In elementary school I joined a LEGO robotics club using the Mindstorms branch of LEGO. Although not civil-based, it was still taking engineering concepts and procedure to accomplish a common goal for our team.

Even now, I have several of the LEGO Skyline Architecture sets around my cubicle at work to remind me to be creative and to have fun.

Julian Valencia, EIT, A.M.ASCE

Project engineer, Houston

I didn’t have LEGOs back in Colombia where I grew up, but there was a toy that did inspire me to become a civil engineer. It took me a while to find the name since I wasn’t sure if it had one plus what would be the right translation to English? The toy name is Etch-a-Sketch!

I remember spending a lot of time drawing, which I later discovered was drafting – other toys and I even remembered trying to re-draw the continents. I can’t remember if I ever finished that amazing task!

Heidi Wallace, EI, P.E., M.ASCE

Professional engineer, Tulsa, Oklahoma

I loved playing with the LEGO set we had at my grandparents’ house, and I still enjoy building with LEGO. My favorite, though, were the colored wooden blocks we had at home.

My sister and I both loved telling stories and making them come to life. She was largely in charge of character creation and dialogue. I was the director of the construction of the environment. She found suitable outfits for the Barbies to go with her theme, and I used our blocks and other supplies from around the house to make the roads and buildings.

After a while I would get bored with whatever the Barbie crew was doing for the day and wanted to go outside. (Once the building part was over it wasn’t of much interest to me.) My sister insisted that all narratives come to a logical conclusion. If I wanted to do something else, I had to find a way to end the story sooner.

One of the most memorable was when her Barbie convertible was going over my bridge. I kicked out the supporting structure and said, “Oh no, structural failure. They all fell in the river and can’t go to the ball now with wet dresses. Let’s go play outside.” I was around 9 years old at the time.

I didn’t really seriously think about being an engineer until high school. I decided on civil engineering my junior year of high school. Looking back over the story above and many others, it’s no surprise this is where my career has taken me.

Join the conversation on ASCE Collaborate.

The post What toys inspired your civil engineering career? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

So when Emily Grubert, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, expresses concerns about how urgently her profession is approaching issues related to climate change, it’s only with an eye toward progress.

Grubert discussed climate change issues on a recent episode of the ASCE Plot Points podcast. Read the highlights below or listen to the complete interview.

Civil Engineering Source: Do you feel like civil and environmental engineering as professions are where they need to be in relation to climate change?

Grubert: I don’t. I think a lot of professions probably aren’t. I think as a society in general we’re not where we need to be in relation to climate change.

But I think particularly within the field of civil and environmental engineering, where we are interacting so much with the built environment and so much with the aspects of the built environment that really affect people’s day-to-day lives, we have not professionally integrated some of the implications of climate change enough yet in my view.

I think part of that is related to the fact that a lot of the regulatory structures that we work within are also not there. There’s been some really interesting research on stormwater design standards and such and how those are actually affected by potential climate change impacts. So there’s a bit of push and pull here. But I think that as a profession we are not dealing with it to the extent that we’re going to need to.

Source: So how do we get the profession to the place where it needs to be?

Grubert: I think one of the really important places where we can take a leadership role professionally – and I’m an academic, so I think this particularly falls on that side of it where we are training civil and environmental engineers – is just making it clear to people how much this actually will affect professional practice and design in particular. … Of course, having a regulatory basis to act on some of that knowledge is important, and I think will help a lot if we can get to that place. But even from this kind of internal perspective, I think really understanding how a lot of the assumptions we’ve made as a profession for a long period of time maybe don’t hold anymore is an important place to go.

One of the things that I think about a lot, personally, is that we do accept a lot of different forms of dynamism when we’re doing design. So things like the population changing, things like understanding the regulations about water contamination changes, things like this, we’re used to incorporating those into our design decisions.

I think framing some of the impacts we expect to see from climate change in the same way – sort of like you plan for population growth or population decline or whatever it is you’re facing locally – planning to actually know that you are going to see some impacts and some uncertainty around particularly water and temperature in the future is a really important direction for us to go.

Source: Why do you think it’s easier for folks to accept planning for changes in population than it is to accept mitigating for climate change?

Grubert: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think there are a couple of different potential explanations for it.

And I have not looked into the one true scientific answer to this, but intuitively to me, I think it really is because as a profession we have such a safety focus, in this particular case, we’re maybe losing a little bit of sight of what these big changes could mean versus what we are comfortable with and what we understand.

With population, we have a long history of understanding that that matters when making decisions. So being conservative and trying to be protective of the public means acknowledging this historical pattern that we know matters, and that we know really, really affects the way we do projects.

I think with climate … the tension really emerges where we have a profession where we want to be pretty sure about how our stuff is going to perform and combining that with something where there’s this message that maybe we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen, it feels safer to rely on what we know and rely on what we know has worked in the past. And that tendency to extrapolate from the past rather than anticipating the future is part of what I think is going on here. …

And it is a change in practice, even though a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the goals are fairly similar: protecting health, safety, and welfare.

Source: If I’m a civil engineer and I’m in the middle of my career, I’m 50 years old, doing pretty well, and I want to keep on doing pretty well for another 20 years, what’s in it for me? Why should I take a risk potentially and stop doing things I’ve been doing successfully for the last three decades?

Grubert: It’s a fair question. I think one of the ways to reframe that potentially is to think about whether it actually is a departure from we’ve been doing.

I think if you’ve been successful working for the past three decades, a lot of that probably has been a focus on the public and a focus on doing really good work that is enhancing the human condition. So, framing it that way, actually accounting for climate change and accounting for this changed condition that matters for the types of things that we care about as a profession and as individuals, I think is a fairly obvious next step.

In terms of what that means locally, though, indeed that probably does affect practice a bit. But I think the attitude of doing really good work that creates public good is not the thing that changes, but some of the specifications may. And so to that, I think really it does come down to an ethical issue. We’re designing long-lived infrastructure in many cases. We’re maintaining infrastructure that is intended to exist for a long time. We are developing systems that really influence people’s lives.

“As a profession we have such a safety focus, in this particular case, we’re maybe losing a little bit of sight of what these big changes could mean versus what we are comfortable with and what we understand.”

Emily Grubert

So adjusting practice to account for a new truth I think really is an ethical matter at the end of the day. I don’t think from a top-down perspective that does change people’s approach to their jobs very much, but it does change the implementation.

Source: Tell me about the socio-technical things you see changing at the same time that are probably part and parcel of climate change but are also a separate thing.

Grubert: We kind of see climate change as this big external change that’s happening to the fundamental physical system around us. … And I think that as we plan around climate change, not forgetting that there are other things that are changing at the same time that are a little bit more within human control, in the form of socio-technical systems, that is really important to ensuring that our designs around climate change actually reflect all the dynamism that we’re experiencing.

Specifically, I work on energy systems, particularly how energy systems interact with the environment. … The power system is changing dramatically. Going from … a primarily fossil-based energy system and a particularly fossil-based electricity system where power can be generated on demand … into a world where, largely for carbon reasons, we’re moving toward renewable resource use, that has a lot of interesting implications for the way that the grid is operated.

Even here, planning around both of those transitions at the same time where there is this external climate forcer but also this responsive socio-technical difference where we’re fundamentally operating the electricity system differently is important as we model.

I work a decent amount on building systems as well. One of the things that we’re seeing as we think about the transition of the energy system – again partially in response to climate change – is that some of the assumptions that we’ve historically made are actually wrong when you consider the way that people are responding to these impulses.

Historically there’s been a relatively big focus on energy efficiency in buildings. And that’s still really, really important, but because we’re responding to climate change and a variety of other issues in part by making the grid cleaner, a lot of the energy efficiency measures that we may have taken have now very different performance standards because you’re not saving electricity that’s as dirty as it used to be.

So in the past you might’ve been willing to do something that used a lot of embodied energy in order to create a more efficient building structure over time. Maybe that doesn’t make sense from an environmental perspective or a cost perspective anymore when the grid changes. So recognizing that there’s dynamism not just in the climate system but also in the response to the climate system and in the response to a lot of other things, frankly, as well I think is really important to remember as we do consider how our design process and our maintenance processes, our operational processes, need to change in response to this very significant issue.

Source: When you look at things and say, “Wow, what we thought was cutting-edge practice 15, 20 years ago already needs to change,” does that scare you? Or is that kind of just part of how this works?

Grubert: I mean it worries me a lot. I don’t know if it scares me, partially because I am in that privileged position where I probably will be dead before it’s really, truly 100 percent bad. I’m not trying to argue that we’re not already experiencing impacts of climate change and that it won’t get worse during my lifetime, but I think one of the things that does worry me quite a bit is that we may try to make decisions that are oriented around a better environmental outcome without fully challenging all of the assumptions that go into that decision and therefore will make bad decisions.

So there’s some historical examples of this, where we think we’re doing something that’s good for the environment but we didn’t fully understand the system that well. So recycling a lot of the time can be more resource-intensive than landfilling. And with all of this stuff, you’re making tradeoffs across a number of different decision criteria, and you make a choice that favors one thing over another, and somebody else might make the opposite choice. But I think when we think about climate impact in particular, there are a couple of types of assumptions that we may make really well-intentioned that don’t turn out to be true, and therefore cause us to spend a lot of effort and a lot of capital transitioning to something that isn’t as useful as we thought it might be. …

I think we could make bad decisions without realizing that we’re making bad decisions if we’re not very careful to challenge all of the assumptions that go into those choices.

Source: But that being said, not making any decision is worse than any of those options, right?

Grubert: Yeah, absolutely. I guess my mission then is to recognize the assumptions when they’re there, because I think it’s really easy to just assume something is true and that it is statically true and that there’s no way that’s going to change. So when I think about how I try to train my students really looking for those hidden assumptions and trying to use the best possible information that we have, that’s all we can really do.

Because like you said, we have to make decisions. I just hope we can make decisions recognizing when we’re actually choosing among different assumptions and actually making choices rather than kind of ignoring something that maybe we could have seen and not incorporating the best information we currently have.

The post Are civil engineers doing enough to account for climate change? appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

Two of the possible knee-jerk reactions to this book’s title are 1) “Yeah, the heck with all these so-called experts, I’m going with my gut!” and 2) “There are definitely a lot of people who (unlike me) need to learn to think for themselves!” In broad terms, author Vikram Mansharamani — a Harvard lecturer and holder of a Ph.D. and two master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology — might answer those statements more or less as follows: 1) “Well, we still need the legitimate experts, and they aren’t actually the main problem,” and 2) “Yes, you too.”

The main premise of Think for Yourself is that we have landed in a place where “You may not realize it, but you’ve lost your mind,” as the author writes in the introduction, by which he means that most of us, at least part of the time, “blindly outsource our thinking to technologies, experts, and rules.” And that we do this — in areas as diverse as retail shopping, health care, and relationships — is a reaction to a world where the amount of available information on practically any topic is simply overwhelming, so much so that “automating” it can seem like the only way to cope.

Mansharamani wrote this book largely to show people that there is another way to cope and wrest back control of your thought process and decision-making. And the first, most important step is to understand just how often you are, in fact, “coping.” Whether that means, for example, that you unwittingly are allowing algorithms to filter your reading, over-relying on an incompatible financial adviser, or “overspecializing” on the job to manage your workload.

Think for Yourself asserts that the complexity of the modern world in virtually every area (more data, more options, more “things to know”) has necessarily driven greater specialization of disciplines, jobs, and knowledge in general. But the pendulum has swung too far. The person who can most nimbly adopt other perspectives, understand the gaps in their own knowledge, and discern where they should listen most carefully to the experts is in the best position to succeed — whether personally or professionally.

By recognizing when you’ve mentally put your decision-making process on autopilot, you can take back manual control to ensure that your decisions are truly yours — or at least are driven by the experts you’ve consciously decided to trust. Because, as Mansharamani argues, rejection of expert knowledge is not the point; what’s important is assimilating that information and synthesizing it for yourself and your own needs.

Peppered with real-world examples and brimming with practical strategies, Think for Yourself is a tour de force that will make you think anew about how you think about the world and which information sources — be they advisers, rules of thumb, or invisible algorithms — you lean on to make your own choices.

The post Review: How to leave automated decision-making behind appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

Typically ranging from 5 to 15 ft in height, low-head dams are designed and constructed to span waterways. Also referred to as run-of-the-river dams, the structures result in continuous flows of water over the dam’s crest from bank to bank. In the western United States, low-head dams are commonly known as diversion dams because they are commonly used to divert water from streams to canals or ditches for irrigation.

Death by reverse roller

What makes low-head dams dangerous is their propensity to form “reverse rollers” that create a recirculating flow pattern, trapping victims at their base, says Ken Wright, P.E., D.WRE, Dist.M.ASCE, the founder, chief financial officer, and principal engineer for Wright Water Engineers Inc. A reverse roller occurs when hydraulic conditions are such that a high tailwater results in a submerged hydraulic jump. In such cases, “water flows over the dam, travels along the bottom of the stream, and rises up at a place called the boil zone,” Wright says. When a significant portion of the rising water flows upstream, it “creates the reverse roller that provides the drowning-machine phenomenon,” he says.

Individuals trapped in a reverse roller are forced back to the base of the dam, where water passing over the crest submerges them below the surface and returns them to the boil zone. Typically, this process of recirculation repeats itself, drowning the victim. Complicating matters, air entrainment in the boil zone reduces buoyancy, making it harder for someone in the reverse roller to remain afloat. The presence of a reverse roller also poses a threat to anyone approaching a dam from downstream, including first responders attempting to engage in water rescues.

About 50 fatalities typically occur each year at low-head dams nationally, and the number appears to be increasing as more people recreate on rivers, says Paul Schweiger, P.E., a vice president and manager of the dams and hydraulic section for Gannett Fleming and the chair of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials’ Public Safety Around Dams Committee. “Some dams have a notorious history, going back more than 100 years,” Schweiger says. “I know of at least one dam that has had more than 30 fatalities.”

Not all low-head dams are deadly. Determining whether a particular dam might become a drowning machine requires careful analysis. “You could look at (a low-head dam) and say it’s likely a hazard, but you can’t prove it without some hydraulic engineering calculations,” Wright says.

That said, visually inspecting a low-head dam under varying flow conditions can provide clues as to whether the structure generates reverse rollers, says Karl Kingery, P.E., M.ASCE, a project manager for WWE. A key indication is the presence of the boil zone, which is identifiable by the existence of water “boiling up vertically” in a line from bank to bank, he says. Having a white, frothy appearance because of the large amount of air it contains, the boil zone is “higher than the surrounding water upstream and downstream,” Kingery says. Another key sign of a reverse roller is the presence of logs or other debris bobbing up and down while trapped at the base of a dam, he says.

Because river conditions can change from one day to the next based on rainfall, so too can the risk posed by a low-head dam. “That is the insidious part of low-head dams,” says Ruth Wright, a former Colorado state legislator who champions efforts to address the dangers associated with the structures. (The Wrights are married).

A national inventory

Because no one knows how many low-head dams exist in the United States, it is impossible to say for sure where most such structures are located, says Rollin Hotchkiss, Ph.D., P.E., D.WRE, F.ASCE, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Brigham Young University. However, low-head dams appear to be “more prevalent in the arid West where irrigation occurs and in the Northeast from colonial times,” he notes. “There are, though, low-head dams in every state.”

For example, a recent inventory of low-head dams in Colorado found more than 1,100 such structures, says Bill McCormick, P.E., P.G., the chief of the Dam Safety Branch within the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and the current president of ASDSO. In 2019, the DNR conducted the inventory by using Google Earth to search for the locations of known water diversions in the state. In this way, the DNR identified 793 diversion dams, 248 grade-control structures, and 62 features used either for recreation or to provide fish habitat. In October 2020, the DNR made this information available on its website as part of a new initiative to increase public safety around low-head dams.

By inventorying and publicizing the locations of low-head dams within its borders, Colorado “really is a model state when it comes to addressing issues” at such dams, Schweiger says. With certain exceptions, most states do not know how many low-head dams they have, he says.

To overcome this dearth of information, a task force involving three professional organizations is developing a national inventory of low-head dams. Comprising members from ASCE’s Environmental and Water Resources Institute, ASDSO, and the United States Society on Dams, the task force is making “steady progress” since beginning about 18 months ago, says Hotchkiss, who chairs the group.

Creating the national inventory involves several tasks, including compiling existing low-head dam inventories done at the state level. Besides Colorado, the states of Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nevada, North Dakota, and Utah have completed inventories. Other efforts include developing a digital application to enable users to identify the locations of low-head dams encountered in the field.

The task force is seeking volunteers to use Google Earth Pro to help with the inventory. The volunteers will locate and identify low-head dams by noting the characteristic line of white water that is readily visible in aerial images. (Those interested in volunteering can contact Hotchkiss at [email protected].) However, the task force seeks to ultimately automate this time-consuming process through the use of artificial intelligence, specifically to “train software to examine photographs and find low-head dams automatically,” Hotchkiss says. “Progress will be accelerated as we can develop those algorithms,” he notes. Information developed as part of the national inventory will be made publicly available on a dedicated website that will be launched this spring.

Clear solutions, many complications

The simplest approach to mitigate the danger of a low-head dam involves using signage to warn of the dangers of a dam. “A sign helps bring awareness of a hazard,” Kingery notes. “But it doesn’t change any of the characteristics of the dam.”

Although removing a dam eliminates the threat, this solution often is not available for reasons of cost or impracticality. In some cases, low-head dams can be modified in various ways to prevent the hydraulic conditions that lead to reverse rollers. “One of the things that make low-head dams so dangerous is the uniformity of the reverse roller across the base of the dam,” Kingery says. To alleviate this problem, a dam may be modified by means of changes to its crest or the addition of rock fill or ramps at its base.

However, complications abound for anyone looking to push for measures to improve safety at low-head dams. For one thing, the dams often do not fall under the purview of state dam safety programs, which tend to focus on larger dams. “Our normal dam safety tools really don’t apply to low-head dams,” McCormick says.

Liability is another concern. Particularly for older dams, ownership may be unclear or unknown, and local governments or other entities often hesitate to act for fear of assuming future liability associated with a dam.

Civil engineers may be at risk of litigation if they engage in efforts to improve the safety characteristics of a dam, says Ed Krisor, an attorney who represents multiple Colorado government entities in the drainage and flood control area. “One of the risks is once you go into the area of suggesting solutions, you then run the risk that someone could go after you,” Krisor says. Current case law, he notes, is unclear on the subject, contributing to the uncertainty.

Raising public awareness

Looking to make future generations of civil engineers aware of the dangers of low-head dams, a group has developed a PowerPoint presentation that it is distributing to civil engineering professors to share with their students. Hotchkiss helped prepare the presentation along with WWE, Ken Wright, Ruth Wright, and Robert Houghtalen, an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the former head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Based on his experience sharing the presentation with his students, Houghtalen is confident that the gravitas of the subject will hold the interest of students elsewhere. “My students paid more attention to that presentation than to any other during the semester,” he says.

In Colorado, the DNR’s low-head dam initiative includes adding signs near certain dams, educating emergency responders, and working with various groups to raise awareness of the dangers. Because recreationists are a key target of the campaign, the department is working with the local chapter of American Whitewater to help make its members aware of the locations of low-head dams in Colorado. The DNR’s McCormick says that someone once asked him how he would know if his department’s initiative had succeeded. His answer? “A summer without any fatalities from low-head dams,” he says.

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We are always students. I am 71, and I am a student. Civil engineering advances rapidly and those who do not wish to continue learning at any age will be left behind. This President’s Message is for the students in universities around the world who aspire to be civil engineers. I’d like to share what ASCE is providing you and why you should transition to becoming an associate member as soon as you graduate.

How ASCE helps you:
1. Student Presidential Group. I created this group to allow students to have direct access to the Society’s president and to voice their opinions. I bring any student requests to the ASCE board for potential action. The 9 institute presidents and 10 region directors selected more than 20 students for this group. If you wish to participate, let me know.

2. Fellowships, scholarships, and other funding programs. ASCE has many fellowships and scholarships ranging from $500 to $15,000 for students. So you can apply for a chance to win a prestigious ASCE financial award. Also, the ASCE Foundation has created the StAR Fund to reimburse ASCE student activities. If you wish to attend an ASCE conference, if you need money for your student chapter activities, or if you have an ASCE dream that requires some financial help, apply to the StAR Fund.

3. Staff at ASCE headquarters. Leslie Payne and her Student Programs team are your best friends when it comes to helping you. If you’re not sure who to contact, email ASCE’s customer service at [email protected] or call 800-548-2723. 

4. Online student resources. Check out the Student Chapters page, Student Member Resources, COVID-19 Resources, CE Graduates Resources, ASCE Career by Design, and Career Connections. These include school and career advice, networking opportunities, and more. In addition, student members have free access to the digital edition of Civil Engineering magazine and AccessEngineering. Student members also receive The Ladder newsletter 10 times a year. 

5. Access to salary data. When trying to land a job, the ASCE Salary Report may be helpful to you. The survey highlights trends related to compensation and benefits in the U.S. civil engineering industry. According to the 2020 report, the median entry-level salary was $64,000. Additionally, the median annual salary for engineers with a Master of Arts or Master of Science degree was about $14,000 more than for those with only a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degree. Of course, many factors, including the local cost of living, influence these numbers.

Being a part of ASCE means being a part of the largest civil engineering network in the world. Your connections will grow as your career does.

Why transition to associate member grade on graduation:
1. As a student and as a professional, ASCE will make a big difference in your career. I personally benefited from my involvement and believe you can too. Being a part of ASCE means being a part of the largest civil engineering network in the world. Your connections will grow as your career does. Indeed, you can never have too many contacts and advocates. It will also make your career more fulfilling and fun through the social aspect of this professional interaction.

2. ASCE is your professional family. And who better than you can help ensure the family is successful and recognized for its contribution to the health, safety, and welfare of the public? Membership is your first step in helping the family. ASCE provides you with an opportunity to pay back through service to the organization, other members, and the public.

3. The transition is easier than ever. The ASCE Board of Direction has decided that as of the 2022 membership year, all student members will automatically become associate members upon graduation. This will be free of charge for the first year. Afterward, you will pay 50 percent of the full dues until you turn 28. Believe me, the money is trivial compared with the benefits. You are making an investment in your career.

I hope I’ve shown you the value of becoming an ASCE associate member. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at [email protected]. 

This article first appeared in the January/February 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “Students: This Is for You.”

The post Students, pay attention appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.

Most notable, perhaps, is that the magazine has done away with its Civil Engineering News section — in print, at least. Does this mean the magazine will no longer deliver the news of the profession — the projects, research, and trends that civil engineers need to know to perform their jobs, boost their careers, plan their businesses, and get the most out of their membership in ASCE? Au contraire.

Civil Engineering’s award-winning staff is now publishing the news in a much more timely fashion on Civil Engineering Source, ASCE’s comprehensive hub for news articles, videos, podcasts, and updates of every variety. The magazine’s news articles can be found sprinkled throughout the site as well as collected at source.asce.org/cemagazine. From the magazine site, you can access content that is updated daily as well as digital versions of past issues. 

In this issue, members will find a number of new departments and refreshed approaches to popular mainstays.

You can also sign up for the Source newsletter, which delivers news from around ASCE and the magazine to your inbox daily or weekly (the choice is yours). The newsletter is powered by an artificial intelligence system that learns which topics interest you most and personalizes your newsletter to your preferences. The more you click, the faster it learns.

In case you haven’t checked in with the Source lately, the print magazine will summarize the most-read and most important online news articles in a new department, From the Source.

Also new with this issue is a one-page infographic, At A Glance, that covers a different topic in brief in each issue, presented in an easy-to-digest format. In this issue, as ASCE prepares its 2021 Infrastructure Report Card, the department enumerates past report cards’ many accomplishments.

Looking for Policy Briefing? That popular department now appears online so that its content can be far more up to date than was possible when it was published in the print magazine. In its place are two new departments focused on career growth: 7 Questions and Wish I’d Known.

Longtime readers may remember 7 Questions from its previous iteration, last published in 2017. This freshly redesigned reboot will cover timely topics of interest to anyone who has a hand in managing the business aspects of a civil engineering practice or department. This issue’s installment focuses on the timely topic of helping teams avoid burnout.

Wish I’d Known is a new mini­profile that asks experienced engineers to ponder one thing that they wish they had known earlier in their careers. It’s a way to allow seasoned engineers to reflect on their careers and offer words of wisdom to the next generation, so it’s located just after Next Step, our advice column for younger engineers, by engineers. This installment of Wish I’d Known examines what one leader wishes he had known before COVID-19 about how effective teams can be when working from home.

Member News highlights recent awards, new fellows, and notable obituaries, which can also be found on the Society News pages of the Source.

And all the magazine’s print content will be available online in a much more user-friendly format than in years past, with an added bonus: You can now easily add your comments on any of our articles.

And of course, there is the biggest change of all: With this issue, Civil Engineering is now being published bimonthly, affording the staff the opportunity to produce both a graphically sophisticated magazine of record for the membership and an up-to-the-minute digital news platform that will reach members wherever they are. Together, the print magazine, digital website, and email newsletter will deliver more fully on Civil Engineering’s mission: to present significant news, events, trends, advice, and innovations of interest to civil engineers of all subdisciplines; showcase the extraordinary, creative, and socially important achievements of civil engineers worldwide; and foster enthusiasm and respect for both the profession and the Society.

This article first appeared in the January/February 2021 issue of Civil Engineering as “A Fresh Start.”

The post Civil Engineering magazine takes a fresh approach appeared first on Civil Engineering Source.