The OCEA Awards of Merit
by Teresa Austin, Assistant Editor;Serial Information: Civil Engineering—ASCE, 1992, Vol. 62, Issue 7, Pg. 50-53
Document Type: Feature article
Abstract:
Submerged rock weirs help tame the Mississippi River, high head pump storage provides power to a community safely and inexpensively, and the world's largest cantilevered hangar houses a fleet of wide-body aircraft to win acclaim as this year's Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Awards of Merit. For thousands of years, the Mississippi River has twisted and turned within its floodplain, forging its own path along the way. This meandering has largely been checked in the bendways of the river through revetments and dikes, the most treacherous area of any river. In 1990, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers installed a series of 13 submerged bendway weirs on the Mississippi River along Dogtooth Bend, about 160 mi. south of St. Louis. The second award winner, the Duke Power Company of North Carolina, added 1,065 MW of capacity to serve its 1.6 million customers when the Bad Creek Pumped Storage Project began operating late last year. The $1 billion project consists of the 370-acre Bad Creek upper reservoir, a four-unit underground powerhouse and Lake Jocassee, which serves as the lower reservoir. The third award winner goes to the American Airlines wide-body hangar in Fort Worth, Tex. It has 360,000 sq ft of column-free space, created by cantilevered steel box trusses supported by six cast-in-place and post-tensioned concrete towers rising about 160 ft high.
Subject Headings: Rivers and streams | Awards and prizes | Energy storage | Channel bends | Weirs | Submerging | Steel columns
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