Monday, January 31, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Progressive Failure in Manaus Port
In November, 2010, there was a progressive failure of a river port in Manaus. This was not picked up by the media. I was given access to the security camera's video of the accident in progress. It appears to have been the classical set up for such a failure: construction activity (construction of a fill, some excavation) to accommodate lower river levels due to an unusual drought in the Amazon (yes, Global Warming is leaving its imprint everywhere) sparked the failure.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Levee Failures Continue
There is a bigger picture: the deterioration of U.S. infrastructure, an investment of past generations that loses value everyday. Lost value comes from its decreased capacity to allow individuals and organizations to do their work or live their lives (which includes protecting them from loss and allow them to generate income) but also from the fact that it will cost increasingly more dollars to rehabilitate or rebuid the infrastructure. This now from the New York Times:
CANTON, Mo. — The levees along the Mississippi River offer a patchwork of unpredictable protections. Some are tall and earthen, others aging and sandy, and many along its tributaries uncataloged by federal officials.
The levees are owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, even individual farmers, making the work in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri last week of gaming the flood — calculating where water levels would exceed the capacity of the protective walls — especially agonizing.
After the last devastating flood in the Midwest 15 years ago, a committee of experts commissioned by the Clinton administration issued a 272-page report that recommended a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.
But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.
More...
There is a bigger picture: the deterioration of U.S. infrastructure, an investment of past generations that loses value everyday. Lost value comes from its decreased capacity to allow individuals and organizations to do their work or live their lives (which includes protecting them from loss and allow them to generate income) but also from the fact that it will cost increasingly more dollars to rehabilitate or rebuid the infrastructure. This now from the New York Times:
CANTON, Mo. — The levees along the Mississippi River offer a patchwork of unpredictable protections. Some are tall and earthen, others aging and sandy, and many along its tributaries uncataloged by federal officials.
The levees are owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, even individual farmers, making the work in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri last week of gaming the flood — calculating where water levels would exceed the capacity of the protective walls — especially agonizing.
After the last devastating flood in the Midwest 15 years ago, a committee of experts commissioned by the Clinton administration issued a 272-page report that recommended a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.
But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.
More...
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Sixth International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
This conference is taking place in August. The general report for the Session on Foundations can be downloaded from here.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Geotechnique is publishing a 60-year Jubilee issue. Geotechnique published for the first time in 1948, and the commemorative issue has papers that cover the contributions made by the journal to various subdisplines of geotechnical engineering. The foundation engineering paper addresses contributions to shallow and deep foundations and offshore foundations.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
New NAE Members:
Amadei, Bernard
Armstrong, Robert C.
Arvind
Assanis, Dennis N.
Austin, Wanda M.
Baughman, Ray Henry
Bhattacharya, Pallab K.
Blumberg, Paul N.
Brown, Gerald G.
Bruschi, Howard J.
Calabrese, Gary S.
Chang, Mau-Chung Frank
Cheng, Stephen Z.D.
Cundall, Peter A.
Dodds Jr., Robert H.
Dwork, Cynthia
Dzombak, David A.
Fiorato, Anthony E.
Fogarty, Thomas J.
Foley, James D.
Fu, Lee-Lueng
Grest, Gary Stephen
Grosz, Barbara J.
Haderle, Donald J.
Harrison, J. Michael
Hudson, John L.
Hunkapiller, Michael W.
Iglesia, Enrique
Kleinberg, Jon M.
Kurtz, Anthony David
Lin, Burn-Jeng
Lipo, Thomas Anthony
Livanos, Alexis C.
Lockett, Michael J.
Luenberger, David G.
Malkin, Stephen
Marr Jr., W. Allen
Martin, John C.
Miller, James A.
Mills, David L.
Nayar, Shree K.
Nikias, Chrysostomos L. 'Max'
O'Neill, Malcolm R.
Raghavan, Prabhakar
Rahmat-Samii, Yahya
Raibert, Marc
Rath, Bhakta B.
Richards-Kortum, Rebecca Rae
Robinson, Stephen M.
Rokhlin, Vladimir
Russell, Thomas P.
Sawyer, Robert F.
Sethian, James A.
Siegel, Paul H.
Singh, R. Paul
Sinha, Kumares C.
Sites, Richard L.
Spaepen, Frans
Suo, Zhigang
Tirrell, David A.
Walt, David R.
Weiner, Andrew Marc
Yeh, William W-G.
Yoon, Roe-Hoan
Yortsos, Yannis C.
New NAE Foreign Associates:
Akasaki, Isamu
Dowling, Ann P.
Healy, Thomas W.
Inoue, Akihisa
Leontiev, Alexander I.
Milner, Arthur John Robin Gorell
Ramm, Ekkehard
van Santen, Rutger Anthony
Watanabe, Tadashi
Amadei, Bernard
Armstrong, Robert C.
Arvind
Assanis, Dennis N.
Austin, Wanda M.
Baughman, Ray Henry
Bhattacharya, Pallab K.
Blumberg, Paul N.
Brown, Gerald G.
Bruschi, Howard J.
Calabrese, Gary S.
Chang, Mau-Chung Frank
Cheng, Stephen Z.D.
Cundall, Peter A.
Dodds Jr., Robert H.
Dwork, Cynthia
Dzombak, David A.
Fiorato, Anthony E.
Fogarty, Thomas J.
Foley, James D.
Fu, Lee-Lueng
Grest, Gary Stephen
Grosz, Barbara J.
Haderle, Donald J.
Harrison, J. Michael
Hudson, John L.
Hunkapiller, Michael W.
Iglesia, Enrique
Kleinberg, Jon M.
Kurtz, Anthony David
Lin, Burn-Jeng
Lipo, Thomas Anthony
Livanos, Alexis C.
Lockett, Michael J.
Luenberger, David G.
Malkin, Stephen
Marr Jr., W. Allen
Martin, John C.
Miller, James A.
Mills, David L.
Nayar, Shree K.
Nikias, Chrysostomos L. 'Max'
O'Neill, Malcolm R.
Raghavan, Prabhakar
Rahmat-Samii, Yahya
Raibert, Marc
Rath, Bhakta B.
Richards-Kortum, Rebecca Rae
Robinson, Stephen M.
Rokhlin, Vladimir
Russell, Thomas P.
Sawyer, Robert F.
Sethian, James A.
Siegel, Paul H.
Singh, R. Paul
Sinha, Kumares C.
Sites, Richard L.
Spaepen, Frans
Suo, Zhigang
Tirrell, David A.
Walt, David R.
Weiner, Andrew Marc
Yeh, William W-G.
Yoon, Roe-Hoan
Yortsos, Yannis C.
New NAE Foreign Associates:
Akasaki, Isamu
Dowling, Ann P.
Healy, Thomas W.
Inoue, Akihisa
Leontiev, Alexander I.
Milner, Arthur John Robin Gorell
Ramm, Ekkehard
van Santen, Rutger Anthony
Watanabe, Tadashi
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