Engineering

World Standards Week 2009 (WSW), ANSI’s annual series of meetings and events for the standards and conformity assessment community, is just around the corner!  Events are scheduled from Monday, October 5 to Thursday, October 8, including the Legal Issues Forum, the Open Forum for Standards Developers, the Leadership and Service Awards, the Annual Business Meeting, and more.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, said his agency has submitted a report to the White House outlining at least six corridors for possible service as well as cost and timeline estimates.

Reflections - A broad-brush view of the world's water.

A new technology that could help prevent dangerous sinkholes, and also detect structural problems with bridges.

Beyond Failure: Forensic Case Studies for Civil Engineers presents the circumstances of important failures that have had far-reaching effects on civil engineering practice. More than 40 case studies, including the Silver Bridge collapse in Point Pleasant, W.Va., the levee breaches in New Orleans, and the Challenger space shuttle explosion, are organized around eight common topics of undergraduate engineering courses.

Federal flood control dams across the country have the capacity to be retrofitted with hydroelectric turbines. About 64 of 871 federal dams should be further studied for hydropower potential, according to a review by federal agencies.

NEHRP released its 2009-2013 strategic plan laying out the program's direction for the next four years.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)  has determined the probable cause of the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the inadequateload capacity of the gusset plates at the U10 nodes, which failed under a combination of (1) substantial increases in the weight of the bridge, which resulted from previous modifications, and (2) the traffic and concentrated construction loads on the bridge on the day of the accident.

The National Transportation Safety Board this week will release a final ruling on the cause of the 2007 collapse of a Minneapolis bridge.

If you missed the ASCE 138th Annual Conference, you can now listen to and view videos of presentations by ASCE Executive Director Patrick J. Natale; 2008 President David G. Mongan; 2009 President D. Wayne Klotz; and the CEO Forum.