Containing the Cold War's Hot Waste
A new method for the construction, verification, and maintenance of underground vaults isolates and contains radioactive burial sites without excavation or drilling in contaminated areas....
Dealing with DNAPLs
Trichloroethylene (TCE) in groundwater is one of the most prevalent contamination problems at hazardous waste sites; a problem that is substantially greater if the TCE is present as dense...
Building Between Buildings (Available in Structural Engineering Special Issue Only)
Construction of tall buildings in the centers of the world's large cities almost invariably involves working within severe site constraints. The constraints can involve all...
Deep Mixing Method: A Global Perspective
Various contemporary deep mixing method (DMM) techniques have been used in the United States since 1986. Such techniques owe their origins to Japanese and Scandinavian developments, which...
Alaska's Last Link
Alaska's Seward Highway has been upgraded this past year. The last section of the highway dates back to the state's early mining days in the Kenai Peninsula,...
Superfund Success, Superfast
After 15 years of indecision, unprecedented cooperation among regulatory agencies, community action groups, and Potentially Responsible Parties (PRPs) resulted in the completion of remedial...
Monumental Restorations
Modern nondestructive field surveys and state-of-the-art static dynamic monitoring systems provide important information for historical renovations while ensuring that the structure remains...
Saving a Sinking City
A construction team repairing a bridge or expanding a hospital usually must work around the daily activities of the affected group of people. But for a construction project in Co-op City,...
Mapping with a Differential
A southern New Jersey landfill is using Differential Global Positioning System topographic surveying to cut costs and turnaround time on annual mapping and volume certification. Modern...
Containing Contaminants (Available Only in Geoenvironmental Special Issue)
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are currently in favor of containing contaminants and either remediating on site or simply capping such materials within...
Fathoming the Strength of Structures
More and more, the owners of bridges and piers are budgeting rehabilitations based on inspections done underneath the waterline. Increasingly, they want the underwater inspectors to be...
Tracking Seismic Hazards
Union Station in downtown Portland, Ore. is a historic landmark but also a seismic risk. Engineers were charged with making a priority list of hazards so that the owners could prioritize...
Balancing Act (Available only in Geoenvironmental Special Issue)
On March 9, 1996, at the Rumpke sanitary landfill near Cincinnati, a precariously overbuilt waste slope collapsed and more than 20 acres of waste slammed into an adjacent excavation site....
For Whom the Bugs Toil
Bioventing is soil ventilation intended to enhance the biodegradation of petroleum hydrocarbon contaminants in soils by providing a supply of oxygen. Soil microbes are capable of consuming...
Grouting Pains (Available in Geoenvironmental Engineering Special Issue)
The article focuses on a new grouting technique for filling holes drilled during site investigation. The holes are grouted as the drill is withdrawn from the hole, instead of filled later....
Construction Safety Affected by Codes and Standards
These five papers present an insight into, and highlights of, some very recent design/construction standardization activities in the US, Canada, Great Britain, Japan and Israel. New performance-type...
All Fired Up
Plasma arc technology is being used to treat hazardous waste and contaminated soil and could be used to recycle landfills. The process uses plasma torches that operate at temperatures...
Manufactured Gas Plants: Yesterday's Pride, Today's Liability
Manufactured gas plants were the pride of the industrialized world until cleaner, natural gas pipelines were built beginning in the 1930s. Most gas plants had closed by the 1960s, leaving...
Saving the Bluffs: Engineering at the Edge
Erosion and landslides along the bluffs bordering the Mississippi River in Natchez, Miss. became an emergency situation when the only road to residents below the bluff was cut off from...
Wonderwall
A Superfund site near Seattle was surrounded by a 2,200-ft-long soil-bentonite wall to keep contaminants from entering nearby water sources. An earlier remediation effort had failed to...
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