Surfside sticks in my mind so much because it happened in my first week on the job as an engineer. That was only two years ago, but it really feels like the pandora's box of deferred maintenance is just starting to swing open.
Too often, signs of trouble are ignored until a problem becomes a crisis. Here are some clear warning signs residents should watch for.
Four recent catastrophic building collapses and a near miss are raising concerns about the state of America’s aging buildings and questions about who, if anyone, is checking their safety.
Many cities have buildings showing signs of aging and in need of repair. In New York City, where a seven-story apartment building partially collapsed in December 2023, the median building age is about 90 years, and many neighborhoods were built before 1900. ...
Birdtray might be what you’re looking for. I’ve only used it on windows, but for me it gets thunderbird out of the way but able to be checked and used immediately.
I've only got a water resources/environmental practice exam that has been passed around a lot. There is a decent amount of rudimentary soil mechanics and foundations, that I actually think is getting removed for that specific exam in the new one. The new structure means it might be a choice of piecemealing old content based on the NCEES topics list, or buying brand new materials.
I'll probably be sitting the exam a little under one year from now, so I'm planning on doing the former until early next year, then hopefully my employer will buy some newer materials, or handle a bit of the cost, or maybe a review course at a local uni.
Just yesterday I got a dell inspiron for this reason. It’s the “we have a laptop at home” macbook air IMO and I only logged into the OEM windows for the 5 min of checking out what’s new windows 11 before installing my OS of choice.
oh yeah, I forgot I watched about half of that video last week. He is really thoroughly knowledgeable and I enjoy his videos a lot, but it felt like a bit of a litany of arguments which is why I quit watching. However, the seismic argument is huge to me. Saying 'Masonry houses can kill you here' is a pretty strong argument in my book, especially when dealing with the realities of economics and what's actually affordable/what's cheapest.
This does a really good job of explaining the benefits of "stick" construction, even if he does get a little wrapped up in his hamburger analogy. I'm particularly interested in sharing it because of how many people online denigrate wood houses in the US, and I think this will show some of the real advantages of it as a construction choice.
The Genius of 2x4 Framing
"America is built on light wood framing. It is the most common construction method for the most common building type in the US. This video explores how and why light wood framing came to become such an American standard. By comparing it to the rise of the hamburger, we trace the parallels of convenience and ubiquity that hamburgers and wood framing share. The video also explores an exhibition called 'American Framing' at Wrightwood 659 to see models and 2x4 constructions up close and personal."
That’s just way too vague to tell one way or another, and I don’t want to fall for marketing. Most concrete is made of mostly local materials, since the sand and gravel is quarried locally, sometimes on the same site as the mixing plant
One thing definitely lacking in the article and my brief look on their website is just… wtf even is the binder? Anything to truly replace portland cement will have to be non-proprietary and really well researched if they ever want it to take off.
C-Crete Technologies has unveiled a portland-cement-free mix that it hopes will change the concrete market.
Just find these types of scaled models amazing to see in real life.
And, of course, it's actually being built. https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/issues/magazine-issue/article/2023/07/zigzagging-weir-helped-solve-safety-issues-at-2-california-dams
And here are some videos on other physical models like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtUDGSmPd04
Finally, if you're interested in the mathematics behind how we can do this and make comparable prototypes:
A 1:45 scale model simulates the discharge of two dams in the Central Valley.
The opening was a bit hard to see where they were going, but overall a pretty good video that gives a good history of some difficult road engineering
And rightfully so. Who are you to cast such a judgement? Some lay person of business administration, no doubt. Take a seat and stick to your own lane, and let the MASTERS of business administration have the wheel.
I haven’t read it yet, but the journal article this blurb is about is currently open access. Sharing it because I absolutely love this type of thing. I knew someone in school who was doing similar research with accelerometers on vehicles to try and assess the stiffness of the whole span. I think I sounded weird when I told him this irl, but I literally like to go to sleep thinking about being able to make measurements so indirectly and passively.
The new high-speed imaging successfully evaluated the roughness of 98 bridge approach and departure slabs in Oklahoma, proving its ability to provide comprehensive nondestructive data.
Sure are. I’m amazed how weird the picture ended up looking at that point, but I took another gander since I ended up there on my lunch break again. There are a couple of pieces of lumber run horizontally on the steel beam’s flange and the top chord of the truss is on top of those boards. I think it looks so funky because there are short pieces between each chord right at the very end
Mixed steel and wood framed commercial building under construction
A commercial building under construction I saw the other day. It caught my eye because of the shoring still being up
So true. I'd think that's about the standard we're used to with passenger cars, safety systems mandatory to be installed, and usage enforced by policing. I hope that the majority of people causing these wrecks are drunk and disoriented, not malicious, and that just giving them a convenient option to get home would eliminate 90%+
Obviously of note is the plumbed services manifold the Homeowner designed. He must have had a stinking absurd lot of money to throw at the house to start with, because I would have started out just trying to eliminate the need for the services. All electric appliances, roof drains off the side into a skirt of pea gravel at the base of the house, and maybe a holding tank for either water or sewer so that one or the other could be detaching from a "static" house position when the house it turned. That would be nowhere as luxurious and easy as this was (presented to be). Hope someone up to the maintenance purchases it and is a good steward
Been using some free time at work to make an inventory of pipeline stream crossings and plan on making it a GIS feature class for regular maintenance. This was inspired by an encased sanitary sewer essentially becoming a low head dam (just eroded, not discharging sewage) in a homeowners back yard and we were unaware until someone called.
It’s mostly just been tracing the features so far, but I’m thinking about where to take it next. Thinking a good direction to go next will be to use the elevation model to try and find manholes in high slope areas and ditches so they can be identified for monitoring for erosion or I&I.
I was introduced to wrong way detection systems early in undergrad when some grad students were grabbing people to be test subjects in their simulator. Strikes me as such a hard problem because it’s trying to control the human factor, and it is pointed out that the majority of the crashes are caused by drunk drivers. Have to figure that this is another problem that increasing automation in cars will help solve along the way.
All over the country, states are looking for ways to reverse the trend, often relying on new technology to do so.
Felt like this compliments the Practical Engineering video from yesterday by showing that RO has its own difficulties beyond the cost and energy usage. I've heard about these brine disposal issues, especially for the huge coastal cities. Personally, I am of the mind that municipal water demand, ecology, and fisheries all have higher stakes in coastal water quality than the energy industry (green or not).
Second to that, I don't know much about Hydrogen energy, but I had the understanding that electrolysis of water was net negative energy. I'm not sure if that was already counting RO treatment (figure it is cleaner with DI water), but if it wasn't then that makes it even more of an energy loss. I'm often making the argument that transitional energy, from fossil fuels to renewable, is going to be a mishmash of half-working parts and deviation from the efficiency that we enjoy with a mature fossil fuels industry. I don't think that's an excuse to trip over ourselves and do a lot of the same things that oil companies did (destruction of entire ecosystems, getting in the way of the needs of residents, profiting from the results of public capital investment).
The Biden administration's climate agenda is facing an unexpected challenge in drought-prone Corpus Christi, Texas.
Brady does a good job breaking down why RO desalination is energetically and operationally much better than traditional distillation. Only thing I didn't like that much was his discussion of salinity concentrations, as I feel like he built it down by defining what ppt meant relative to percentages, while I think that it being shown to the relative amounts of other dissolved solids like iron and hardness would show that sea water is an order of magnitude more laden with the dissolved solids. To me that is why RO membranes are absolutely miraculous despite the high energy requirements, because they can produce high quality fresh water from differing source water without there being much difference in each treatment process in the end. Running seawater through RO for desalination, versus well water removing hardness and nitrates would mainly differ on the pretreatment to remove suspended solids and then the proportion of reject water to permeate.
I gotta say that the 3d printed building thing is starting to look noticeably more serious than the mortar blob huts that I remember seeing a decade ago. It will be interesting to see if they find their niche and become widely used and affordable. The main thing is, the sitework will still need to be done by laborers and heavy equipment, so now the building itself is going to include even larger specialized equipment for the printer. Will normal laborers learn how to set up and mind these, or will there be another set of specialist operators created?
My understanding is there is emphasis in moving building construction to having most of the work done in a shop environment, and then the pieces all sent to the site and put together like legos. We're suffering a bit for that right now, with simple precast concrete buildings having lead times of over one year. If this keeps up, it may become a case where the trade off between the higher quality (and aesthetic quality) of a precast building is an even trade-off with a less sturdy printed building. Cases when there is an emergency need, like replacing a controls building after a tornado.
With projects like the 100-house development in Austin, Texas, and NASA's Mars habitat, 3D-printed architecture is really taking off in the United States. Another major milestone comes from Printed Farms, which is nearing completion on what it calls the world's largest 3D-printed building, a…
Property rights defenders and developers hail the ruling as a victory, while others decry it as a giveaway to polluters that will harm the environment.
System to ‘annihilate’ PFAS chemicals deployed in Michigan
Some parts that stood out to me:
>When officials from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), first visited the Heritage Crystal Clean Grand Rapids facility, they displayed “a bit of skepticism on the front end, you know, not really understanding what we were doing,” recalled Brian Recatto, the president and CEO of Heritage Crystal Clean. “They wanted us to do a bit more modeling as we installed the equipment, which we did, to prove that we didn’t need an air permit.”
>Since then, both Recatto and Trueba say that feedback has been increasingly positive. “They [Michigan state officials] love the fact that we’re destroying the contaminants versus transferring the contaminants,” said Recatto.
>A spokesman for EGLE confirmed that the agency has visited the facility, but said the agency could not assess its performance.
>"This is new technology and EGLE hasn’t reviewed it (we haven’t seen any performance data yet) thoroughly enough to comment on it,” EGLE spokesman Scott Dean told Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.
>“So, in a nutshell, that’s what we do … we use temperature and pressure to create an environment that completely annihilates PFAS.”
>The chemicals break down into water, salt, and carbon dioxide, he said. After that, the water is then recycled back into the system it came from.
>Recatto said the facility’s daily capacity is expected to be 160,000 to 165,000 gallons of leachate. More PFAS Annihilator systems were being installed at the time he spoke with the Examiner.
>He estimated the wastewater treatment plant will be sending “a couple hundred gallons a day of concentrated material to be processed in the Annihilator.”
>Even when water treatment results in greater than 99% reduction, the remaining water still has PFOS and PFOA levels above the proposed federal ceiling, the group noted. PFOS and PFOA are two of the most widespread and best understood PFAS chemicals, the group said in a statement. Those “forever chemicals” have been linked to cancers, birth defects, thyroid disorders, and other chronic diseases in humans and other animal species, the organization’s statement said.
>Trueba said that “like any industrial water, this water is safe enough to put back into the water treatment facility in Wyoming, Michigan, for water purification and reclamation. No industrial waste water (post initial processing) is safe for human consumption until it goes through the local water treatment facility, in this case the city of Wyoming.”
The tale of I-95's rapid 12-day recovery – frame-by-frame
Thousands of Philadelphians flocked to watch PennDot's livestream. Revisit the highlights.
Civil Engineering - A community for discussion of Civil Engineering and any of its sub-disciplines
A community for discussion of Civil Engineering and any of its sub-disciplines, including but not limited to: -Structural Engineering -Geotechnical Engineering -Environmental Engineering -Transportation Engineering -Construction Management -Water Resources Engineering -Surveying The intent is to cre...
Lidar remains the secret sauce for truly autonomous cars
What are the two different visions for our autonomous car future?
Cincinnati triple steam river pumping station
Some photos from a tour of the historic facility that is still in use as one of the waterworks' intakes. It's really quite incredible how well preserved it is and the ongoing conservation efforts. The chamber is the same width as the main floor all the way to the bottom which is well below the bottom of the Ohio River, and was entirely dug by hand. The tour guides were excellent and very knowledgeable, and have a website with a lot of information:
Seeing other peoples' usernames briefly
This has happened to me twice now in just a few minutes. After the first time I clicked on the profile link and it sent me to my own. I cleared website data for lemmy.world and then saw what is in ss while not logged in at all.