The American Society of Civil Engineers has announced the 2024 New Faces of Civil Engineering in the Collegiate category. New Faces include Brianna Yu, a third-year student at Oregon State University.

Yu is currently the secretary of the school’s ASCE student chapter. She also has a leadership role in the school’s steel bridge team. In addition to her civil engineering studies, Yu volunteers with programs that help with improving education and reducing health disparities.

The New Faces of Civil Engineering program highlights and celebrates the academic and professional achievements of up-and-coming civil engineering students. The New Faces honorees will be recognized during ASCE’s Outstanding Projects and Leaders Gala in October, which is held in conjunction with the 2024 ASCE Convention in Tampa.

The post OSU’s Yu earns New Faces of Civil Engineering recognition appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Brendan Gilbreth, an Oregon State University student, has been recognized as one of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2023 New Faces of Civil Engineering in the Collegiate category.

ASCE‘s New Faces of Civil Engineering program highlights up-and-coming civil engineering students from around the country and celebrates their academic and professional achievements, as well as their commitment to serving others.

Gilbreth is focusing on civil engineering and forest engineering. He currently is treasurer of the university’s ASCE chapter. Gilbreth also was the paddling lead of OSU‘s concrete canoe team from 2020-2022 and has served as ASCE Community Service chair, helping organize volunteers and acts of service in the community through ASCE.

All New Faces honorees will be recognized during ASCE’s annual Outstanding Projects and Leaders Gala in October in Chicago in conjunction with the ASCE convention.

Ten college students were named to the list, including Gilbreth. Another Pacific Northwest student, Peter Yu, also was recognized. He is a civil engineering student at the University of Washington in Seattle and is the UW’s ASCE student chapter president, as well as an ASCE national student ambassador.

After working in UW’s Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory, Yu has pursued the areas of traffic operations, simulation and safety. He independently developed two new highway interchange designs and novel traffic signal control schemes for them and also developed three new kinematic formulas to determine yellow light times at signalized intersections. The work earned him the Best Student Paper Award from the Institute of Transportation Engineers Western District.

The post OSU student earns ASCE 2023 New Faces in Civil Engineering honor appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

By Nate Beck

91��Ƶ Newswire

President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday released a state-by-state breakdown of U.S. infrastructure needs, assigning Oregon a “C-minus” letter grade, as it tries to build support for a $2.3 trillion infrastructure improvement package.

Each state received a letter grade reflecting the condition of its infrastructure, and Oregon’s C-minus is representative of its more than 1,200 miles of roads and nearly 400 bridges rated in poor condition. The administration drew on a variety of public and private data sources to form its grades for state infrastructure.

Oregon’s letter grade mirrors the overall grade it earned in a report from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2019. That trade group overall, finding many of its roads in substandard condition. U.S. infrastructure nationally received a “C-minus” from ASCE in a report last month.

Biden’s infrastructure plan overall calls for spending $115 billion to repair 20,000 miles of roads across the U.S. – a figure that would scratch the surface of the country’s needs. California alone, for instance, has more than 14,000 miles of roads in disrepair.

The administration says commute times have risen 7 percent in Oregon over the past decade, while the average driver in the state spends some $256 annually on vehicle maintenance as a result of poor infrastructure.

The report also outlines a variety of other infrastructure needs in Oregon:

• Over the next two decades, the state will need to spend $6.3 billion on its drinking water infrastructure. Biden’s package would dedicate $111 billion to drinking water infrastructure.
• Biden’s plan would invest $100 billion in broadband infrastructure nationally. In Oregon, nearly 10 percent of residents do not have access to any broadband providers that meet minimally acceptable speeds. Another 45 percent of residents live in areas with only one such provider.
• Some 296,000 Oregon residents are rent-burdened – meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Biden’s proposal would spend $200 billion to increase housing supply.
• Schools in the state face about $857 million in infrastructure needs, while 60 percent of residents live in a “child care desert,” where there are three children for every available slot at a child care facility. Biden’s plan says it will “modernize” child care facilities and schools.
• Biden’s plan would also invest $18 billion in VA health care facilities. More than 300,000 veterans live in Oregon. About half are over the age of 65.

The post Oregon’s infrastructure reportedly in poor shape appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Oregon infrastructure in 2019 is “mediocre” and in need of attention, according to a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers‘ state chapter. Oregon came up short in wastewater, energy, and dams and levees categories.

The report attributed the wastewater struggles to aging systems and an increase in population. State wastewater infrastructure, much of which will soon need to be replaced or rehabilitated, wasn’t designed to handle the number of people that now reside in Oregon, according to ASCE. The systems are on the brink of failure, and the state will have to spend $5 billion on improvements, the group added.

Concern for Oregon’s deficiencies is exacerbated by the possibility of a sizable earthquake, which experts say could hit the Northwest within the next 50 years. ASCE’s report found that Oregon’s dams and levees have not received sufficient funding or upkeep to endure such a disaster.

More than 70 percent of the state’s dams will be a half-century old within the next five years, and nearly a third of its levees were rated “unacceptable” by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Additionally, the state’s petroleum transmission and storage are aging and in poor condition, according to ASCE, and would become unusable in the event of a major earthquake.

ASCE’s main suggestions for improving Oregon’s grade centered on improving infrastructure to withstand such seismic events. The report concluded that improving bridges, dams, levees and drinking and wastewater systems with increased funding and planning is the most important task for the state to consider.

While funding for Oregon bridges increased in 2017 and the category earned a “C” in the report, more than half of the state’s bridges are now considered structurally deficient, and Oregon has fewer bridges in “good” condition than any other western state, according to ASCE.

The state scored better in transportation infrastructure. Bridges, roads and rails were the most successful categories, with praise going to legislation that increased funding in the latter two categories.

With 74,000 total miles of road (2 percent of the country’s total) and a rising population, Oregon has committed more than $5 billion of state money to improve road quality and tackle traffic increases between 2017 and 2027. With 90 percent of pavement in “fair” to “good” condition, the state has also surpassed the mark in roadway quality goals.

While ASCE found many avenues in which Oregon might seek improvements, the state’s grade of C- is higher than the United States as a whole, which earned a D+ score. The state is also on par with its neighbors, earning the same score as California and Idaho, and falling only slightly behind Washington state and Nevada, each of which earned a C grade. Of the states for which report cards have been made, not one had a grade higher than a C.

The post Oregon receives C- on ASCE’s infrastructure report card appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

CORVALLIS – Students hauling gang boxes labeled “STEEL BRIDGE CONSTRUCTION” into Oregon State University’s McAlexander Fieldhouse on Friday reported feeling anxious, self-critical and wracked with doubt.

Entering the field of play to compete for a national championship isn’t always an uplifting experience, even after a full year of planning and preparation.

For these college engineering students the nerves had to do with seeing how their competitors had chosen to answer the engineering problem that was the objective of this year’s (NSSBC). Arrayed around the fieldhouse were dozens of 1:10-scale steel models demonstrating unique approaches from some of the sharpest engineering students in America and beyond.

By Friday – game time – their plans were long since solidified, and it was far too late to change course.

“It’s so easy to look around now at all these other projects and go, a-ha, that’s how I should have done it,” said Austin Brito of the Texas Tech University team. “I feel like we could have gone a little lighter, smaller legs, lighter tubing, and maybe painted it.”

But others were emboldened by what they saw.

“There are a lot of great projects here, and really interesting approaches. But we’re really, really confident,” said Ryan Lam, team captain of California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. “Our trip to nationals last year was our first time going. So we took the best parts of what we saw last year and tried to implement them on our own bridge.”

OSU was this year’s host of the NSSBC, an intercollegiate competition modeled on real-world engineering issues sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers and other industry groups. Entries are judged on five categories – speed of construction, lightness, stiffness, construction economy and structural efficiency. The 43 teams taking part at the fieldhouse had been winnowed from more than 200 schools that competed at 18 regional competitions across North America.

The NSSBC is a bit like the March Madness NCAA basketball tournament for construction engineering nerds. One difference is most people know nothing about the NSSBC. Another is the post-college career path for the bridge-builders is all but assured.

As teams unloaded their gang boxes under a bluebird sky, OSU’s undergrads were ditching Corvallis ahead of the Memorial Day weekend and the final push of the academic year. Campus was instead thick with young people sporting NSSBC badges and team shirts. Some schools hewed heavily to themes, like “Star Wars.”

The contingent that traveled from Tongin University in China painted the arc of their bridge gold, and titled it, “Dragon in the Air.”

“In China, the dragon is a very strong and auspicious element. It is always lucky,” said team captain Tong Liu, whose academic focus is disaster reduction.

Day 1 involved the display portion of the event. Most of the 40 or so judges were local professionals in the private or public arenas.

Points-wise, the construction and load-testing portions on Day 2 are weighted as heavily as others, but they’re likely more fun to watch. Students wear gym shorts along with their hard hats, and zip around in tight vectors exclaiming technical jargon unintelligible to the average liberal arts major.

They’ve been working for months to get their times as low as possible.

“You get to a point where you just know, you can’t do it any faster,” said Scarlet Henriquez of the University of Florida, echoing a common sentiment.

This year’s design problem simulates a request for proposals for a scaled model demonstrating a design for a bridge over the environmentally sensitive Luckiamute River northwest of Corvallis. Damage to the banks must be minimized, complicating construction. High water in the spring means costs can be minimized by completing before summer. The contract was to be awarded to the team whose model best meets the specified requirements and project goal.

It was a straightforward problem – all the better to encourage design innovation. For example, a through bridge may provide greater stiffness than a deck bridge, but would be slower to build. Months out from regionals, teams weighed alternatives based on scoring criteria prior to fabrication.

Planning the project further involved dividing the labor. The evils of the college group project, i.e., spotty buy-in from certain team members, isn’t much of a problem on an elite elective activity like this, said Jacques Neptune, captain of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks team.

After placing in the top 10 last year with an under-truss design, the Alaskans felt an under-truss design would be best to meet the requirements.

Alaska-Fairbanks is a heavyweight in college steel bridge competition. Neptune surmised this might be due to strong student chapters of Associated General Contractors and ASCE, and because infrastructure, bridges in particular, is so important in the challenging wilds of the Last Frontier.

“There’s that, plus there’s not a lot going on. We’re always looking for stuff to do,” Neptune said.

, and they aren’t necessarily college athletic powerhouses, and they certainly aren’t academic elites (no Ivy League schools competed). Among the always-imposing are South Dakota State University, University of Florida, California State University-Northridge and Colorado State University.

And as with the NCAA basketball tournament, the perennial contenders faced off with the Cinderellas. The admitted to feeling out of place among the big dogs like Alaska-Fairbanks and the University of Florida.

By game time Friday, OSU co-captain Chelsea Farnsworth had nearly reached a state of serenity after months of stress. As student co-director of the event, the senior structural engineering major has been involved since the awards banquet of the , held at Brigham Young University, when OSU was announced as the next host.

She’s been involved in everything from lining up team accommodations to sending sample materials to every school. That was all on top of her academic obligations and preparing for a summer internship at Kittelson & Associates where she hopes to prepare for a career in infrastructure engineering.

Farnsworth was finally able to start breathing again as she watched it all come together on Friday.

“Meeting all these people I’ve only ever talked to by email, from all over the country, is pretty cool,” she said.

Farnsworth was an artsy high school senior when she first considered becoming an engineer. A job-shadow program at her alma mater, Bend High School, provided the spark, she said. But with her father a longtime employee of the Oregon Department of Transportation, it was a natural, and unsurprising, pick, at least to her mother, Rochelle.

“This feels so natural for her,” she said.

In the end, the Beavers took 23rd place. But those involved said the NSSBC has been a definite boost for the College of Engineering, helped by last weekend’s perfect weather and lack of large missteps.

OSU co-captain Oscar Gayet pointed out that their competition wasn’t just the 42 other teams at the finals. More than 200 teams from around the world participated in the overall competition.

It was Ecole de Technologie Superieure, aka ETS, a small French-Canadian engineering school, that took the top prize for the second straight year. Teams from Toluca, Mexico, Shanghai, China, as well as Puerto Rico also competed.

The six team members from Tongin University in China were preparing for a trip to Portland following the finals, including the requisite stops at Voodoo Doughnut and Multnomah Falls. Competition for a slot on the Tongin bridge-building team is fierce. Students get only one year of eligibility, and must beat out classmates to compete.

“The bridge is simple, but I think the simple structure is very beautiful,” Shengyi Re said.

The post Team building experience appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The American Society of Civil Engineers recently issued its quadrennial report card, and gave the nation’s infrastructure an . That is the same as the grade given in 2013, but up slightly from the D given in 2005 and 2009.

“The quality of life of any society is tied to the quality of its infrastructure,” said Al Barkouli, chairman and CEO of David Evans and Associates Inc. “If you want an ‘A’ quality of life it can’t happen on a ‘D’ budget.”

Overall, infrastructure in Oregon isn’t as bad as in other states, according to the ASCE. While the group doesn’t assign letter grades to states’ infrastructure, it pointed out areas of particular concern – namely roads, bridges and levees.

Currently, 11 percent of Oregon’s roads are in poor condition, the ASCE reported – more than half of Portland’s roads are rated poor or very poor. Plus, the group labeled 5.3 percent of Oregon’s bridges structurally deficient. Meanwhile, area levees are undergoing structural analysis in order to stay accredited with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Overall, big picture our levees are in pretty good shape,” said Jules Bailey, the interim convener for Levee Ready Columbia. “The assessment we are doing is to make sure they are up to snuff.”

Levee Ready Columbia is a partnership of more than 20 organizations committed to floodplain management. The current levee assessment has uncovered some needed repairs. So far, identified damage is manageable, Bailey said.

“The result (of the analysis) was there is some work that will need to be done,” he said. “It wasn’t as bad a picture as we might have feared. We had feared (levees) would need repairs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It will probably be in the tens of millions. It’s still a lot of money.”

Yet that doesn’t come close to the amount of money needed to fix area roads. Portland has $141 million worth of unmet road repairs every year, according to Portland Bureau of Transportation Communications Director John Brady. In the city’s latest status and conditions report, 47 percent of the arterial and cluster streets are rated poor or very poor. Among local streets, only 6 percent are rated very good while 60 percent are rated poor or very poor.

“Unfortunately cities don’t have rich uncles,” Brady said. “We were very encouraged by the success of the (10-cent gas tax) fixing-our-street campaign. We are committed to spending that money efficiently and effectively where it is needed most.”

Between the fuel tax and a heavy vehicle use tax, the city will gain an estimated $74 million for road repairs.

“That is still a drop in the bucket,” Brady said.

One area where progress has been made is with bridges, according to Bailey, a former Multnomah County commissioner. The new Sellwood Bridge and Tilikum Crossing are open, and repairs are set for the Morrison and Burnside bridges this summer.

“The bridges are in pretty good shape,” he said. “They still need some seismic work. Hopefully the state Legislature will help by taking this up.”

Securing state and federal dollars to deal with these issues is high on the wish list of both engineering firms and local governments.

“Our elected officials have recognized the problem,” Barkouli said. “We hope this year something gets done.”

Portland isn’t alone in its need to deal with infrastructure issues. Nationally, ASCE tagged the nation’s inland waterways and transit infrastructure with its worst grades: a D- for both. Rail lines got the best score with a B, while ports and solid waste managed a C+.

The evaluations covered 16 categories of infrastructure. The ASCE put together a committee consisting of civil engineers from across the country who assessed capacity, condition, funding and public safety to assign each category a grade.

The group has released its report card since 2001 and has never given the nation’s structures better than a D. That has led publications from Forbes to the Washington Post to question how much credibility to put into a report from an organization that stands to benefit from more construction spending.

“I would say, from our perspective, this is credible,” Barkouli said. “We are not going to put something out that is not credible. It is important to our professional integrity to call it like we see it.”

The card relies extensively on reports performed by federal agencies such as the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency. A flurry of recent incidents such as problems with drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and damage at Oroville Dam in Northern California makes it harder to dismiss the group’s findings.

“In general, engineers are not very good salespeople,” Barkouli said. “We are more likely to bury ourselves in the work. We need to take (the grade card’s) findings seriously.”

The post U.S. infrastructure in poor shape, engineering group reports appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Chad Norvell, a project engineer at ��������쾱�������ٱ𲹲� in Portland, was one of 10 young engineers named a new face of civil engineering by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Honorees were announced as part of Engineers Week, which took place Feb. 19-25.

The “new faces” program highlights the achievements of young engineers and their contributions to society. Norvell will receive official recognition during ASCE’s Outstanding Projects and Leaders (OPAL) gala on March 16 in Arlington, Va.

The Portland State University graduate specializes in seismic retrofits of buildings. He has worked on improving seismic safety at more than a dozen schools in the Portland-metro area.

“For me it’s a great opportunity to get connected with the big names in the industry,” Norvell said. “I will get to go to D.C. for the OPAL gala. We will be meeting some of the big players in the civil engineering field.”

Norvell has worked with Engineers Without Borders as a lead for several projects in Nicaragua. He also served as president of the Engineers Without Borders’ West Coast region from 2011 to 2013.

Norvell has contributed extensively to earthquake research by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, with a focus on helping relief efforts in Haiti and Nepal. Currently, he is participating in the Learning from Earthquakes field study program. It will bring engineers to Chile to study the effects of the 2010 Maule earthquake and community resilience.

The ASCE honor helps promote the role that civil engineers play in society, Norvell said.

“It’s fun to be part of something where you are showing young people what civil engineers are doing,” he said.

The post Nishkian Dean engineer honored by ASCE appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.