Civil Engineering

Four recent catastrophic building collapses and a near miss are raising concerns about the state of America’s aging buildings and questions about who, if anyone, is checking their safety.

Many cities have buildings showing signs of aging and in need of repair. In New York City, where a seven-story apartment building partially collapsed in December 2023, the median building age is about 90 years, and many neighborhoods were built before 1900. ...

Is anyone willing to share PE practice materials?

I'd love to have access to the NCEES practice exams (old or new) with the geotechnical focus. I have some school of PE materials and McGraw Hill exams I could share.

"America is built on light wood framing. It is the most common construction method for the most common building type in the US. This video explores how and why light wood framing came to become such an American standard. By comparing it to the rise of the hamburger, we trace the parallels of convenience and ubiquity that hamburgers and wood framing share. The video also explores an exhibition called 'American Framing' at Wrightwood 659 to see models and 2x4 constructions up close and personal."

A commercial building under construction I saw the other day. It caught my eye because of the shoring still being up

Some parts that stood out to me:

When officials from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), first visited the Heritage Crystal Clean Grand Rapids facility, they displayed “a bit of skepticism on the front end, you know, not really understanding what we were doing,” recalled Brian Recatto, the president and CEO of Heritage Crystal Clean. “They wanted us to do a bit more modeling as we installed the equipment, which we did, to prove that we didn’t need an air permit.”

Since then, both Recatto and Trueba say that feedback has been increasingly positive. “They [Michigan state officials] love the fact that we’re destroying the contaminants versus transferring the contaminants,” said Recatto.

A spokesman for EGLE confirmed that the agency has visited the facility, but said the agency could not assess its performance.

"This is new technology and EGLE hasn’t reviewed it (we haven’t seen any performance data yet) thoroughly enough to comment on it,” EGLE spokesman Scott Dean told Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.

“So, in a nutshell, that’s what we do … we use temperature and pressure to create an environment that completely annihilates PFAS.”

The chemicals break down into water, salt, and carbon dioxide, he said. After that, the water is then recycled back into the system it came from.

Recatto said the facility’s daily capacity is expected to be 160,000 to 165,000 gallons of leachate. More PFAS Annihilator systems were being installed at the time he spoke with the Examiner.

He estimated the wastewater treatment plant will be sending “a couple hundred gallons a day of concentrated material to be processed in the Annihilator.”

Even when water treatment results in greater than 99% reduction, the remaining water still has PFOS and PFOA levels above the proposed federal ceiling, the group noted. PFOS and PFOA are two of the most widespread and best understood PFAS chemicals, the group said in a statement. Those “forever chemicals” have been linked to cancers, birth defects, thyroid disorders, and other chronic diseases in humans and other animal species, the organization’s statement said.

Trueba said that “like any industrial water, this water is safe enough to put back into the water treatment facility in Wyoming, Michigan, for water purification and reclamation. No industrial waste water (post initial processing) is safe for human consumption until it goes through the local water treatment facility, in this case the city of Wyoming.”

What do you think it means for both professions?

Some photos from a tour of the historic facility that is still in use as one of the waterworks' intakes. It's really quite incredible how well preserved it is and the ongoing conservation efforts. The chamber is the same width as the main floor all the way to the bottom which is well below the bottom of the Ohio River, and was entirely dug by hand. The tour guides were excellent and very knowledgeable, and have a website with a lot of information:

https://cincinnatitriplesteam.org/index.htm