Do Federal Grants Distort a City's Capital Investment Priorities�
The availability of federal grants in some areas and no grants in others sometimes leads to absurd distortions in a city's true capital investment needs. Under construction...
How Top Officials Would Save Aging American Cities
The November 1978 issue of CIVIL ENGINEERING�ASCE took an in-depth look at what was ailing America's older cities�� and what some possible remedies were. This current article...
World's First Iron Bridge
In 1779, using a new man-made material, skilled English workmen built a single-span bridge of cast iron over a steep river gorge about 140 miles northwest of London. The result was a 424-ton...
Symposium on Reaeration Research
Proceedings of the Hydraulics Division Specialty Conference, held in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, October 28-30, 1975. Sponsored by the Hydraulics Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers....
New River Gorge Bridge: World's Longest Steel Arch
For 45 years, the Bayonne Bridge had reigned as the world's longest steel arch bridge. No longer. The New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia has a steel arch spanning 1700...
Rx for Drought: Pumping Plant to the Rescue
Designed and built by the East Bay Municipal District, the pumping plant built last year at Middle River, Calif. was not unusual in design. What was unusual was the speed with which it...
Dredge-and-Fill Saves $2 Million at Steel Mill Built in Swamp
The Georgetown Texas Steel Corp., in late 1973, accepted the challenge of developing a previously cleared cypress swamp on the east side of the Neches River across from Beaumont, Texas....
Kamburu Dam: Diversion Conduit Designed into Spillway Saves $1,000,000
Careful coordination of dam construction operation with river stages over several seasons, and a construction sequence that called for building the spillway, in effect, from the top down,...
New River Gorge Bridge: World's Longest Steel Arch
The world's longest steel arch bridge, spanning the New River Gorge Bridge in the south central area of West Virginia, is scheduled to be completed in Sept. 1977. The main...
Recording River and Reservoir Water Depth
At the Kerr Reservoir on the Roanoke River in Virginia and North Carolina, reservoir bottom was surveyed before reservoir filling and twice thereafter, to determine rate of siltation....
A Hydrographic Surveyor's Most Memorable Day
Holbert Fear's most memorable day in a career as a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey was in 1917, near Hanna, Wyoming. Fear was sent out to measure the flow of the North Platte...
Pasco-Kenneewick Bridge�� The Longest Cable-Stayed Bridge in North America
This 2503-ft long structure, built in an earthquake zone, is only the second of its kind to be constructed in the U.S. It boasts a continuous concrete girder, supported from steel cables...
Harnessed Water Power Spawns First Great Industrial City
Lowell, Mass. was founded in 1822 at a site on the Merrimack River. The city's developers brought together some of the most advanced ideas of the day in the areas of power...
1842: Old Croton Aqueduct Brings Water, Rescues Manhattan From Fire, Disease
From 1774 to 1835 Manhattan experienced tremendous growth but needed better water supply to protect public health and to fight fires. Several proposals for providing water were forwarded...
The Magnificent Obsession of TVA
Before the TVA came, the Tennessee Valley region was one of the nation's poorest: no electricity; deep, gullied erosion of the hilly farm country; periodic devastating flooding...
Inflatable Dam Regulates River Level
Inflatable dams are economically feasible for maintaining a required constant water elevation on rivers and streams where flooding poses problems. Puncture resistant material, inflated...
Gabions, Perforated Pipe and Gravel Serve as Fish Screens
A type of structure to prevent juvenile salmon from diverting to irrigation ditches has been developed on the Merced River in central California. It was built after cost considerations...
Today's Northwest Passage
The Lower Snake River Project received the outstanding water resources engineering project award for 1976 from ASCE. The lower 140-mile (225-km) reach of the Snake River from its mouth...
First Bridge Across the Yukon River
Until recently, the Yukon River was a major obstacle in constructing a roadway to the oil-rich North Slope of Alaska. But on October 10, 1975, that obstacle was hurdled when the first...
The Le Grande Hydroelectric Development
The James Bay Hydroelectric Project, presently under construction in northern Quebec, is one of the world's largest energy developments. Four major powerhouses are planned...
Return to search