![\"nyctrip.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/magazine.nd.edu\/assets\/19885\/nyctrip.jpg\" "\\"nyctrip.jpg\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a thought that\u2019ll freak me out the next time I cross the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge linking Brooklyn and Staten Island: The span sits as much as 12 feet lower in summer than in winter because of the seasonal expansion and contraction of its steel suspension cables.<\/p>\n
Not 12 inches, a variation I could comfortably assimilate into my simpleton\u2019s comprehension of bridges. Twelve feet.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s another arresting fact that also comes courtesy of the bridge\u2019s owner, New York City\u2019s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA<\/span>). When placing the towers eight-tenths of a mile apart and dealing with the mind-numbing variables relating to structural weight, cable strength, anticipated vehicular loads and the geology of the Narrows\u2019 floor \u2014 to name but a few considerations \u2014 the engineers who designed and built the bridge had to account for the curvature of the earth.<\/p>\n It was the longest suspension bridge in the world for 17 years and is still long by any standard. Yet this massive structure, visible from the distant boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, can shimmy uncomfortably when runners pound across it during the New York City Marathon. It\u2019s a function of the flexibility designed into long-span bridges to accommodate motion and stress.<\/p>\n Now consider this tale of two bridges. New York\u2019s monumental oceanic gateway opened to traffic in 1964, the same year as the steel truss arch bridge that faithfully carried Interstate 35 West\u2019s traffic across the Mississippi River at Minneapolis until it collapsed under the evening rush on August 1, 2007. Thirteen people died, more than 100 others were injured.<\/p>\n MTA<\/span> is preparing to spend $300 million to replace the New York double-decker\u2019s concrete upper level with an orthotropic steel deck, an expensive retrofit that will make it thousands of tons lighter and extend the bridge\u2019s expected life 100 years.<\/p>\n Inspectors had twice declared the Minnesota bridge \u2014 like thousands of others across the country \u2014 \u201cstructurally deficient,\u201d a federal designation that doesn\u2019t foretell imminent doom so much as it urges serious repairs. The day after the collapse, Governor Tim Pawlenty said the bridge had been tentatively scheduled for replacement in 2020. Instead, Minnesotans spent nearly $300 million to replace it in one year, pay out an early completion bonus and compensate families for their incalculable loss. The result, the award-winning I-35W St. Anthony Falls Bridge, is also expected to last a century.<\/p>\n The Minnesota disaster happened a few weeks before some 40 young men and women thinking about a future as civil engineers arrived for their freshman year at Notre Dame. Now these students are juniors immersed in what one professor calls the \u201creal, hardcore concepts\u201d of civil engineering. The ominous boom above their heads one sunny Sunday morning this past autumn wasn\u2019t the nation\u2019s infrastructure problems crashing down upon them. It was an experiment-in-progress at Lehigh University, the last stop on their class field trip to New York City, testing the next upper deck of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to make sure it really will serve 100 years without cracking.<\/p>\n We all might want to think seriously about civil engineering and infrastructure because our report card is ugly. At a time when the nation is fighting two wars, has flunked capitalism for the first time in 70 years and is aggressively negotiating its grades in healthcare and education, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE<\/span>) says we\u2019re pulling a D in infrastructure. Their 2009 report card awarded one of the best marks in any category, a C, to our bridges.<\/p>\n The secretary of transportation has called the United States \u201cone big pothole.\u201d A study released last May by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials declared a third of our interstates, highways and major roads \u201cmediocre\u201d or worse.<\/p>\n Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. Today we can add that sensational auto repair bills are the price we pay when civilization crumbles. Bad roads cost car owners $400 yearly. Double that if you live in a metro area of more than a quarter million people, the transportation officials say.<\/p>\n What about the rest of our infrastructure? The civil engineers say we daily lose about 7 billion gallons of water to bad pipes and face an $11 billion backlog to replace obsolete water works and meet federal safe drinking water standards. \u2019Tis but a drop compared to what comes out the other end, an estimated $390 billion to overhaul our wastewater treatment systems and meet new demand over the next 20 years.<\/p>\n Suburban development has crept up on our dams and levees, which are getting old and dangerous much quicker than we\u2019re fixing them. Mass transit, the fastest growing transportation sector for 15 years, isn\u2019t keeping pace with demand. The bottom line, according to ASCE<\/span>, is $2.2 trillion to catch up with ourselves over the next five years.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t count the persistent threat of terrorism and everything else we know is coming: rapid population growth; natural disasters like the massive earthquake the Pacific Northwest anticipates within the next 200 years; the high-stakes coastal clash already pitting the oceans against those of us who insist on living next to them.<\/p>\n Cue every clich\u00e9 you\u2019ve heard about opportunity in adversity, but today\u2019s civil engineering students are going to spend much of their careers fixing or replacing this stuff. Demand for their services far exceeds supply. \u201cThis is a fantastic time to be an engineer,\u201d says Michael Sweeney, the vice president of engineering superfirm AECOM\u2019s Transit Rail East division and the emcee for the Notre Dame field-trip stop at the company\u2019s offices in downtown Manhattan.<\/p>\n A show of hands reveals this is a first visit to America\u2019s largest and most complex, confounding and fascinating city for more than half the students. Sweeney welcomes them with internship applications, enticing them to come back next summer.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t go into civil engineering if your goal in life is to make a lot of money, student Kimberly Duffy says.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say it never happens. Notre Dame sends just a few dozen graduates into the field each year, and for a small program it\u2019s well represented in the senior leadership of firms with national and global reach like AECOM<\/span>, Skanska, Granite and Kiewit. But civil engineers draw the lowest starting salaries among their peers. Money comes easier in petroleum and nuclear.<\/p>\n Instead, civil engineering is about service to society, says Professor Tracy Kijewski-Correa, a tall-buildings expert who teaches structural engineering. Students learn to provide basic public services. \u201cThere\u2019s no consumer for what we do,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s one thing that sometimes attracts students into civil engineering,\u201d agrees Professor Yahya Kurama. \u201cThe fact that you\u2019re going to make something that will last for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n Some years ago it wasn\u2019t clear the attraction was holding. So in 2003, the department tapped a travel fund created by Dennis Murphy \u201971 and worked with his firm, Kiewit, to create a field trip that would introduce ND civil engineering students to the challenges of large-scale projects. Kijewski-Correa led a group up the Pacific Coast to examine bridges. They wound up at the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington, where Kiewit had begun construction on a second span the year before.<\/p>\n \u201cIt isn\u2019t always possible to force yourself in the middle of the night to remember why you\u2019re studying differential equations or thermal dynamics,\u201d notes Murphy, who got hooked on construction as an undergrad and valued the trips he\u2019d taken with classmates to Chicago and Lake Michigan\u2019s dunes.<\/p>\n \u201cGet them dreaming,\u201d is how the current trip leader, Professor Joannes Westerink, distills the purpose. In 2006, Westerink and his colleagues took students to the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans to study the hell wrought by Hurricane Katrina. They couldn\u2019t have bought a better guide. Westerink, affable and courteous, builds weather models for the ocean that predict with incredible precision how fast water flows, how it carries sediments and pollutants, how it forces itself inland when propelled by severe storms.<\/p>\n The Advanced Circulation Model he has developed with his colleagues, many of them former students, is the vehicle for collective work on storm surge shared by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Navy and a host of other agencies, consultants and universities. It\u2019s the kind of knowledge engineers need to build better levees, create all-important digital flood insurance rate maps for threatened states and think critically about the future of coastal cities like New Orleans.<\/p>\n Now teams of ND faculty will apply their wide expertise to a pair of hurricane preparedness projects. One will model flood risk for Pacific islands. The other will create a comprehensive model for Hawaii, detailing the impact that rushing, piling water and high winds would have on roads, buildings, bridges and people. \u201cIt combines everything related to infrastructure,\u201d Westerink says.<\/p>\n On the New York field trip, the students learn that storm surge and rising seas are no less a concern for Manhattan than New Orleans. Subway entrances in some places are only a few feet above sea level; a devastating 1893 hurricane took out elevated tracks in Brooklyn and obliterated an island near what became JFK<\/span> Airport. Even under normal conditions, \u201cNew York is in need of retrofitting for a significant part of its infrastructure,\u201d Professor Alexandros Taflanidis says. The catalog of challenges in a metropolis of 19 million people is exhaustive.<\/p>\n This year, after 12 hours on a bus barreling east from South Bend on I-80, Westerink, Taflanidis and their students begin with an after-dinner walk across an old challenge gloriously met: one of the city\u2019s first world-class engineering achievements, the Brooklyn Bridge.<\/p>\n The following morning, after Michael Sweeney\u2019s introduction at AECOM<\/span>, the students learn about the company\u2019s work on the Second Avenue Subway (SAS<\/span>) line and the World Trade Center Transportation Hub.<\/p>\n The long overdue 8.5 mile SAS<\/span> and its 16 new stations will relieve the Lexington Avenue Line, the sole north-south subway option up Manhattan\u2019s East Side that carries 1.3 million riders daily. The project has been kicking around since 1929, only to hit the vagaries of finance and local politics. It stalled out in the 1940s and again in the \u201970s.<\/p>\n The project\u2019s final design is expected later this year, but the brutal-yet-delicate job of excavating station sites and tunneling through the undulating bedrock and sediments beneath Second Avenue\u2019s six lanes and 20-foot sidewalks has begun. Public relations are sensitive. Whole blocks have become worksites. \u201cThe big challenge in New York is finding space while minimizing impact on the public,\u201d explains senior tunnel engineer Jaidev Sankar. Things don\u2019t get easier underground. \u201cWe found utilities even the utility companies didn\u2019t know were there.\u201d<\/p>\n The WTC\u2019s Transportation Hub will glamorously reconnect the surface city with the PATH<\/span> commuter rail station that served lower Manhattan before 9\/11 \u2014 and has again since its 2003 reactivation. Riders will arrive and depart through an underground structure similar in size to Grand Central Station, designed by Spanish engineer and architect Santiago Calatrava. It will emerge above grade in a white monument of steel ribs and glass that Calatrava envisions as a child\u2019s hands releasing a dove.<\/p>\n Project managers say one goal is a more versatile facility linking riders with Manhattan\u2019s throng of transit options. Another is to restore what was once the highest grossing retail space in North America \u2014 engaging a \u201csmall city\u201d of commuters and shoppers each day \u2014 under the natural light filtering down through Calatrava\u2019s design.<\/p>\n The design challenges are both practical and spectacular. Sixty escalators, 40 elevators. Steel platforms cantilevered out 75 feet. \u201cOne of the joys of Mr. Calatrava\u2019s architecture is holding stuff up with no visible means of support,\u201d project architect Joe Hand notes with an exasperated mixture of professional appreciation and irony. \u201cWhat he does is challenge your mind to say, that thing shouldn\u2019t be hanging out there, but it is.\u201d<\/p>\n Some 200 designers worked five years to ensure redundancies in structural, mechanical and electrical systems, Hand says, \u201cso that this building doesn\u2019t suffer the same fate as its predecessor.\u201d Terrorism, a leading concern, will be a fact of professional life for engineers working on prominent projects. Meanwhile, transit through the hub must function continuously.<\/p>\n Later that afternoon, the focus shifts to sustainability when the students visit the headquarters of Skanska USA<\/span> on the 32nd floor of the Empire State Building, the first office in its class to receive \u201cplatinum\u201d certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design criteria set by the U.S. Green Building Council. About 80 percent of New York\u2019s carbon footprint today comes from the energy used to construct and maintain buildings, city data shows. It\u2019s a compelling statistic, given projections that the square footage of our built environment will more than double globally over the next 20 years.<\/p>\n Skanska officials lead students through an on-site review of the company\u2019s work in progress on the United Nations\u2019 Capital Master Plan, a sweeping modernization that will yank the epicenter of global diplomacy out of 1954 in everything from its electrical wiring to its audio translation systems while preserving the five-building complex\u2019s historically spacey look and feel.<\/p>\n By evening it\u2019s back to bridges at Columbia University\u2019s Carleton Laboratory, a major locus for bridge monitoring and research. One eye-catching experiment lives in a transparent chamber the length of a charter fishing boat. It contains a segment of 20-inch bridge cable undergoing a corrosion simulation while sensors measure humidity, pH levels, temperature shifts and other enemies of structural integrity.<\/p>\n Designing long-span bridges is part of the curriculum for Patrick Brewick \u201909, who is getting acquainted with it all as a Columbia grad student. Nearly three in 10 ND civil engineers pursue graduate study. Brewick traveled to New Orleans as a junior and caughtWesterink\u2019s passion. \u201cI saw that same enthusiasm in all the engineers there. They really had a love for what they were doing,\u201d he says. \u201cIt actually led me to start getting interested in graduate school.\u201d<\/p>\n Professor Stephen Silliman, who has spent a lot of time working on water quality in such countries as Benin and Haiti, says we have civil engineers as much as doctors to thank for the sharp decline in U.S. infant mortality rates since the mid-19th century.<\/p>\n Today, \u201cWe have no fear \u2014 or maybe just a tiny bit of fear \u2014 but we have no real fear of turning on a water faucet and drinking out of it,\u201d Silliman says. Should we get complacent or stingy about maintaining our high standards though, we\u2019re fools.<\/p>\n New Yorkers boast that they have the best drinking water in the world. Ten percent of their supply comes from the Hudson Valley\u2019s Croton watershed. Since the city started drawing there in 1842, the water has flowed unfiltered some 125 miles to customers\u2019 taps. Now development in the watershed threatens quality and the water no longer meets federal standards.<\/p>\n The $1.3 billion Croton Water Filtration Plant is the largest single construction contract in city history, and the largest project Skanska has ever undertaken. Today it\u2019s a nine-acre square cut 95 feet into the earth and run through with pipes large enough for people to stand in. Think of it as a giant packing box that could store about 1,500 single family homes underground.<\/p>\n When it\u2019s done, the filtration plant will lurk quietly beneath a golf course in the Bronx\u2019s Van Cortlandt Park. Gravity will pull the water in and pumps will force it through mixers, filters, chemical processes and UV treatments, nine minutes in and out, up to 13 million gallons per hour.<\/p>\n \u201cOn a construction site, you don\u2019t want to multitask,\u201d project safety director Michael Caterina warns. Walking through the plant\u2019s unfinished maze of pipes, rebar and concrete wall, student Megan Smith strains to talk above the staccato drumming of air compressors and jackhammers and the unnerving air horn blasts that remind workers of the murderous, crane-borne loads passing over their heads.<\/p>\n Smith says her generation\u2019s biggest challenge will be matching its ideals and desire to tackle big problems like global poverty to the long-term commitments required to really help poor communities. One hurdle is the absence in developing nations of the kind of regulatory environment that keeps workers at the Croton plant safe and healthy. So Smith has added classes in political science and economics to her heavy engineering courseload to prepare for the human and cultural dimensions she expects will shape her career. She may work a few years and pursue graduate study in international development.<\/p>\n \u201cYou need to have some expertise and know how to do this,\u201d she says, motioning at the activity around her, \u201cbefore you can think about how to change it, make it cheaper, make it efficient and then take it somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWithout water and the subways, New York City wouldn\u2019t exist,\u201d Granite Construction project manager Jim Steers posits later that afternoon. The students are standing on a temporary footbridge at the Avenue J subway station on Brooklyn\u2019s Brighton Line. Miles away, the Empire State Building looms above the trees and a bend in the tracks, a scenic view that draws attention from the gaps in the corroded steel posts big enough to put your arm through, or the concrete missing from the station\u2019s beams and platforms.<\/p>\n Steers\u2019 team is rehabilitating five stations. Thirty years ago, he tells the students, New Yorkers endured several minor derailments a day. It\u2019s down to two or three per year now, thanks to the city\u2019s persistent reinvestment.<\/p>\n For the most part, life and business go on around the work, slowing it down. Granite can\u2019t shut down three stations in a row and must keep Avenue J open to allow \u201cbackriding\u201d \u2014 riders travel past their stop, switch trains and return from the other direction. Complex scheduling, Steers says, accounts for much of the relatively high cost of these projects.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s ironic when the lead stories on local news broadcasts that night report some of the worst rider headaches in memory. MTA<\/span> said 18 of the city\u2019s 20 lines were affected and 400 buses were employed in order to expedite maintenance work around the city before winter.<\/p>\n Not to fear. The sun rises on New York the next day. The students forge once more into the quiet city for Mass at Saint Patrick\u2019s Cathedral before the long trip home.<\/p>\n If you have a child obsessed with Lincoln Logs, Legos or K\u2019nex, you may be raising part of tomorrow\u2019s infrastructure solutions. That child playing on your living room floor may one day, as Professor Westerink says, make the world stronger, greener, safer and more efficient.<\/p>\n Olga Beltsar was one such child about 12 years ago, she explains before a presentation about graduate programs at Pennsylvania\u2019s Lehigh University, the trip\u2019s final stop. Girls liked to build things, she confides with mock superiority. The boys she knew liked to break them. Fortunately, for work that marshals both creative and destructive impulses, ND\u2019s juniors are split about 50-50 down the gender line. But her classmate Brian O\u2019Connor says engineering began for him with the suspension bridge he fashioned out of drinking straws in the 5th grade. That structure didn\u2019t survive the trip home, but the foundations of his future were poured.<\/p>\n Brian Wysocki rode the train every day from Long Island to high school on Manhattan\u2019s 84th Street. \u201cHe tried to take a different route each time,\u201d his mother had said over pizza at Brooklyn\u2019s L&B Spumoni Gardens, explaining her son\u2019s fascination with transit. Beltsar\u2019s path was even more circuitous. In high school, the father of a young girl she tutored helped her find an office job in an engineering firm. She\u2019s since interned in both construction and design, and expects to pursue the latter in her career.<\/p>\n Engineering often matches youth with responsibility. Ken Burns\u2019 1981 documentary about the Brooklyn Bridge notes that the average age of the engineers was 34. Most of the engineers leading the Croton plant tour were a few years out of school. At lunch that afternoon, Eric Harvan, one of the ND students, had mentioned an internship documenting progress on the construction of a factory and helping with bids and contracts. One day two superintendents handed him drawings for a shipping office the client wanted inside the warehouse and said, \u201cGet it built.\u201d<\/p>\n Not to be grim, but all those young engineers will be dead by the time the Verrazano-Narrows needs another deck in the 22nd century, which brings us back to that apocalyptic thrum above our heads in Lehigh\u2019s Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems lab. The sound, explains senior research scientist Sougata Roy, is actuators simulating the passage of highway truck traffic, one tandem axle lumbering by every two seconds. \u201cThe idea,\u201d Roy says, \u201cis to ensure that even the heaviest truck will not cause any cracking to the structure.\u201d Keep things going for eight months without stopping, and you\u2019ve simulated 100 years of constant, reliable service.<\/p>\n Lehigh professors brief the students on several current experiments. Across the room, actuators apply earthquake forces to a four-story \u201cself-centering\u201d steel frame, testing a system that will essentially allow buildings to rock their way through overpowering winds or a seismic event and restore themselves, undamaged, to their original shape. The computers driving the actuators also simulate the behavior of the rest of the building \u2014 a hybrid test that extends the research beyond the physical space of the laboratory. Understanding how large structures fail is a lesson as valuable now to the funding entities as it will be to students throughout their careers.<\/p>\n Therein lies our hope, says Westerink \u2014 given adequate finances, planning, determination and the right people, of course. As our grasp of the physics of the world around us has shot forward over centuries, our computational capacity has grown exponentially in just a few years. It\u2019s possible now to imagine hurricanes in Hawaii and earthquakes in Southern California in all their random ferocity, or forces and stresses of any kind, really, across the thousands of sprawling, fragmented jurisdictions and markets that together support our national infrastructure.<\/p>\n As all knowledge does, this holds the power to make us stronger. Or at least a little less freaked out.<\/p>\n John Nagy is an associate editor of<\/em> Notre Dame Magazine.<\/p>\n Photos by Brian Bloom.<\/em><\/p>\n Here\u2019s a thought that\u2019ll freak me out the next time I cross the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge linking Brooklyn and Staten Island: The span sits as much as 12 feet lower in summer than in winter because of the seasonal expansion and contraction of its steel suspension cables. Not 12 inches, a variation I could comfortably assimilate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4250,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4250"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018One big pothole\u2019<\/h3>\n
![\"nyccorrosion.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/magazine.nd.edu\/assets\/19886\/nyccorrosion.jpg\" "\\"nyccorrosion.jpg\\"")
<\/p>\nBuilding to last<\/h3>\n
Faster, safer, greener, smarter<\/h3>\n
Fluid development<\/h3>\n
Pardon our progress<\/h3>\n
Take nothing for granted<\/h3>\n
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