Avoiding Defective Specifications
Despite everyone's best efforts, the design intent as portrayed in the contract documents is rarely crystal clear. As a result, the owner and the project team often find themselves...
Jointless Redecking
If you're redecking a bridge, why not eliminate a major cause of its corrosion at the same time? Why not remove the expansion joints? The Department of Public Works in Steuben...
Kuwait: The Incredible Shrinking Rehab
With rehabilitation estimates now just 20% of what they first were, the liberation of Kuwait has not been a cure-all for the construction industry. Firms participating in the emergency...
The Soil-Rock Boundary: What is it and Where is it?
A major issue in many areas of Civil Engineering practice is the boundary between earth materials that are defined as soil and those that are defined as rock. Designers, contractors, and...
Special Bedrock Conditions in Greater Boston
The Cambridge Argillite, a weakly metamorphosed shale, forms the major portion of the Boston Basin, a structural as well as topographic depression. In the greater Boston area, the argillite...
Foundation Studies in a Fault Zone and a Steep Valley Slope
This paper presents two case histories which illustrate unique problems in defining the character of rock for support of structures. The first case study concerns a conventional building...
Soil-Rock Transition Zone: Uncertainties for Design and Construction
This paper addresses the problem of establishing definitions of the soil-rock boundary with regard to different engineering applications in the Piedmont geologic provinces. Three engineering...
Rock in the Limestone Regions of the Southeastern United States
Problems often arise in the shaft drilling industry in the Southeast. The karst areas in this region have certain situations found in few other places. Erratic boulders and limestone pinnacles...
Determination and Presentation of Subsurface Conditions for Design and Construction
A major problem in the design and construction of many engineering projects is the lack of adequate geotechnical information both for design and for determining conditions to be encountered...
Construction under Fire
Construction is not carried out in a laboratory setting under controlled conditions�especially in areas of socio-political conflict, such as El Salvador in the 1980s. Instead, the construction...
Double-Decking the Freeways
Elevated highways cost more than at-grade construction. Nonetheless, the hidden costs of increased traffic congestion and the real cost of urban right-of-way make elevated highways feasible....
The Structural Curtain
Curtain walls are not standard off-the-shelf items. For major projects, they are almost always custom-designed. Typically, curtain walls are on the critical path of project and often account...
Avoiding and Resolving Disputes during Construction
Successful Practices and Guidelines
Computing in Civil Engineering and Symposium on Data Bases
This proceedings consists of the papers presented at the conference Computing in Civil Engineering and Symposium on Data Bases held in conjunction with A/E/C Systems '91 from May 6-8,...
Anatomy of Asphalt
Two main factors will combine over the next several years to alter the composition of asphalt pavements, which make up more than 90% of the paved roads in the U.S. First, a major research...
Every Penny's Worth
Value engineering has been used in the construction industry since the 1960s, but highway projects have sometimes been thought of as too simple for VE studies. Now, with the increasing...
Earthquake Evaluation of a Substation Network
The impact of the occurrence of a large, damaging earthquake on a regional electric power system is a function of the geographical distribution of strong shaking, the vulnerability of...
Two Decades of Communications Systems Seismic Protection Improvements
Telecommunications systems in North America have gone through significant technology changes in the past twenty years. The electro-mechanical switching equipment has been replaced by electronic...
Access Floor Response Spectra for Equipment Line-Ups in Telecommunications Central Offices
Modern telecommunications central offices very often utilize access floors to support equipment line-ups. An analytical study was carried out to study the seismic response of equipment...
Telecommunications Facilities Earthquake Readiness Since San Fernando
The vertical rack architecture of telecommunication offices showed some weaknesses during the San Fernando earthquake in 1970. Efforts have been made since then to improve performance...
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