Nailing A Landslide (Available only in the Geo/Environmental Special Issue)
When mud flows in California threatened to stop traffic on a freeway and erode a street from below, Caltrans worked around the clock to stabilize the slope using soil nailing and shotcrete....
Budgets
Marketing budgets vary greatly from company to company. They will be much larger, when you calculate labor as a percentage of total marketing costs, for smaller firms than larger ones....
Starting a Project
Project start-up marks the end of the planning activities and the beginning of the project. The PM must take the steps necessary to set up job numbers, job data sheets, assemble data needed...
Bridge to the Past
Constructed by Maya builders during the seventh century, the PreColumbian bridge at Yaxchilan was the longest in the world for over seven hundred years. Little remains today of this unique...
Rocky Mountain HOV
In 1988, Colorado DOT and the firm of Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall, Denver, the oversight consultant on the project, set out to bring the highway up-to-date and promote...
Down-to-Earth Terminal Design
From New England to the Pacific Northwest, airport terminals in the 1990s are being designed and built to meet foreseeable demand--with very little uncommitted space. The speculative nature...
Selecting Tower Cranes
Looming over the skyline like steel dinosaurs, tower cranes can look deceptively similar. But these beasts of burden are not a homogenous species, and selecting and positioning the right...
The Toll Road That Wouldn't Die
When government and business leaders scooped the first shovelfuls of earth from a field near Dulles International Airport on September 29, 1993, it marked the start of construction on...
Bart to the Future
Construction has reached the midway point on the $2.7 billion San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District Extensions Program. The first three extensions, due to open in 1995, will expand...
What Price Congestion Management?
Congestion pricing--the idea that, when more people want to use a road, they should pay (or pay more) for the privilege--was dismissed in the 1950s and rejected in the 1970s in the U.S....
Is Virtual Reality for Real?
Virtual reality, an advanced visualization technology, will change certain aspects of civil engineering. The method allows people to simulate conditions, render designs and test these...
Bridge Design: Reality Bites Back
Many bridge engineers tend to ignore the process nature of reality, the fact that everything in this universe changes from moment to moment. When they are given the responsibility for...
Beyond Water Witching
Ground-water exploration is usually an uncertain and expensive endeavor. Since late 1993, however, Golder Associates Inc., Redmond, Wash., has been working with time-domain electromagnetics...
The Bell Tolls for Toll Booths
Many older toll facilities have reached their traffic-handling capacity, blocking the efficient movement of cars onto toll facilities. The article examines problems associated with reconfiguring...
Wider Ride to the Rainbow
Engineers on the project to widen the entrance to the Rainbow Bridge between New York and Ontario let the aesthetics of the Niagara Falls setting dictate their design decisions. The challenge...
ASCE Salary Survey 1995
The 23rd biennial ASCE salary survey of the civil engineering profession conducted by the ASCE Committee on Employment Conditions during the first quarter of 1995 is presented. It consists...
Ready for Anything
The author describes the temporary bridge developed by Caltrans for use in emergency situations where stretches of highway bridge are damaged. The bridge is made of salvaged railroad flatcars...
Sounding Out Scour
As engineers are aware, detection of bridge scour is the best protection. A method for monitoring scour during low, normal or high water flows would also help alleviate some of the ambiguity...
Strong-Motion Data Processing
Processing of strong-motion earthquake accelerograms is now carried out routinely on a world-wide basis. Two international workshops have given participants the opportunity to assess their...
Depressing Traffic Top-Down
Top down construction will permit the City and County of Denver to maintain traffic at two congested intersections while a tunnel is driven below them. The project, which will carry Speer...
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