Civil engineering

Superstructure rising

03/02/11 — Not long after the Loma Prieta quake struck, Marwan Nader (M.S'89, Ph.D'92 CE) gazed at the hole in the Bay Bridge as he stood a safe distance away, part of a Berkeley team inspecting the damage. Twenty-two years later, he's still standing on the bridge, so to speak. As lead design engineer of the self-anchored suspension (SAS) bridge, he is responsible for the standout architectural feature of the new portion of the bridge that will replace the old eastern span.

A 411 on water’s next drop

02/02/11 — In the south India city of Hubli, turning on the tap is no easy task. Residents frequently skip work, postpone errands or keep children home from school in anticipation of the precious-but notoriously unreliable-arrival of water along urban pipelines. Missing a delivery can translate into days without household water. “Literally, people wait around their house until the water comes on,” says Anu Sridharan (B.S'09, M.S'10 CEE). Sridharan is part of a Berkeley-based student team pursuing a novel-but surprisingly simple-fix to what is a common occurrence in the developing world. Their project, called NextDrop, deploys ubiquitous mobile phones to alert residents when water is flowing in a neighborhood.

What he learns from earthquakes prepares us for the big one

01/26/11 Contra Costa Times — The findings of Jonathan Bray, professor of geotechnical engineering at UC Berkeley, help determine whether a building can withstand an earthquake. "The science is focused on engineering systems that are supported on or within the earth," he said. "Whether it's foundations for buildings, building an earth dam or constructing a lifeline like a highway, we have to understand the stability of the geology, the soil and the rock."

Berkeley zero net energy cottage deserves study

01/11/11 San Francisco Chronicle — Karen Chapple, an associate professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, has built a 450-square-foot cottage that lays claim to "zero net energy status." With the help of students from UC Berkeley engineering professor Ashok Gadgil's civil and environmental engineering course and a grant from the UC Transportation Center for further study, Chapple built the cottage this fall for $98,000, and wants to see further development in this housing trend.

Chlorine substitutes in water may have risks

01/07/11 National Public Radio — Water systems across the country are changing the way they disinfect drinking water because the traditional disinfectant, chlorine, can leave behind toxic chemicals. But alternatives to chlorine are turning out to have risks of their own, says UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering David Sedlak, who wrote an analysis in the journal Science.

Wheels of change in South Africa

12/14/10 — More than 9 million South African children walk to school every day. Three million walk for more than an hour, and in the rural countryside, some walk more than four hours. “It's madness,” says Louis de Waal (M.S'72 CEE), who grew up in rural South Africa and spent his professional life designing and building thousands of kilometers of roads there, many of which opened up inaccessible places deep in the country's interior. Now retired, De Waal is on a mission to improve mobility for all South Africans, especially in rural areas. The goal, says the 73-year-old Cape Town resident, is to keep children in school and help adults reach work more easily, ultimately easing poverty and slowing the flood of people forced to move to urban areas for work.

Earthquake symposium on risk of collapsing buildings stirs some controversy

12/01/10 Los Angeles Times — Structural engineers gather at UCLA Wednesday to talk about the threat from and economic impact of building collapse in an earthquake. Jack Moehle, a professor at UC Berkeley's Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, comments on building codes, safety and lessons learned from this year's 8.8 earthquake in Chile.

Flight delays cost more than just time

11/04/10 — Domestic flight delays put a $32.9 billion dent in the U.S. economy, and about half that cost is borne by airline passengers, according to a study led by UC Berkeley researchers and released last month. The comprehensive report analyzed flight delay data from 2007 to calculate the economic impact on both airlines and passengers, including the cost of lost demand and the collective impact of these costs on the U.S. economy. The report was commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration to clarify key discrepancies in earlier studies.

Flight delays cost you $17B, cost U.S. $33B, UC Berkeley study shows

10/18/10 San Francisco Business Times — A study from UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies crunched numbers from 2007 for the Federal Aviation Administration for a report showing that domestic airline flight delays cost the U.S. economy some $32.9 billion a year, and passengers pay half that cost, or about $16.7 billion. Civil engineering professor Mark Hansen, lead researcher on the study, said it was the first time anyone had analyzed data this way, coming up with a direct cost.

UC researcher puts buildings through earthquakes

10/14/10 ABC News — It is an uncomfortable fact for Californians that most of the structures in which we live and work pre-date the latest earthquake building codes. So how will those buildings fare in the next big one and how can we best fix them? Wael Hassan's dissertation at UC Berkeley looks at older forms of structural engineering to see how they will hold in a major earthquake. (Video)

Teachers at the top of their game

10/05/10 — Berkeley faculty know their material. Yet to teach it so that students not only understand but find inspiration and wonder in it, takes special talent and dedication. In April, civil and environmental engineering professor Juan Pestana-Nascimento and associate professor Dan Klein of electrical engineering and computer sciences joined two other faculty members elsewhere on campus in receiving the Berkeley 2010 Distinguished Teaching Award. In the award's 51-year history, only 236 faculty have received it, among the thousands who have taught Berkeley courses.

Experience keeps UC Berkeley’s Robert Bea in the hot spotlight

09/27/10 San Jose Mercury News — Shuttered in his home office, Robert Bea is plugging away at a report that will, once again, make him a target. The UC Berkeley engineering professor is investigating, with a group he assembled, the April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The blast killed 11 workers and created the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The report, due in December, likely will place blame on oil giant BP, which leased the platform, and the facility's operator, Transocean. And it is likely to bring a volley of public-relations cannonballs to Bea's front door, as did his criticism of Army Corps of Engineers following the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. But despite the stress, health problems and angst, Bea is not apologizing.

PG&E exceeded its own maximum pressure standard on San Bruno pipeline

09/17/10 San Jose Mercury News — Federal investigators have determined that the natural gas in the pipeline that exploded in San Bruno was running at a higher pressure than the maximum limit PG&E has told the public it maintained. "Between 375 and 400 psi still sounds safe, but it's all premised on a defect-free line," said Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley with extensive pipeline experience. "Here's where the demands on the pipeline from internal pressure have to be matched with a set of capacity questions. Was the steel brittle? Did we have a combination of corrosion and fatigue?"

Fremont, Livermore have Bay Area’s highest risk gas pipelines

09/14/10 San Jose Mercury News — PG&E's highest-risk gas pipelines in the Bay Area are in the East Bay, according to a regulatory filing last year. The risk was ranked by combining the likelihood they would fail and the consequences to life and property if they did fail. Typically, engineers consider the population density of communities, the age of the pipelines and other factors, such as nearby earthquake faults, when assessing pipeline risk, said Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley who has worked extensively on natural gas and oil pipelines.

PG&E involved in many gas line breaks in state

09/11/10 San Francisco Chronicle — Eleven of the incidents on PG&E pipelines in the last 10 years were caused by other people digging into buried lines they didn't know were there. "Someone's doing construction on a site, they may or may not have called PG&E, they're working with a backhoe, they snag the pipeline, and then all it takes is a little ignition source," said Kofi Inkabi, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.

One engineer’s effort to tame a dangerous world

09/08/10 — Robert Bea's got a problem. In fact, he's got several: The Deepwater Horizon. Hurricane Katrina. California's fragile 100-year-old levees. These are just three of more than 600 disasters or disasters-in-waiting Bea has investigated in his 57-year career as a flood protection engineer, oil and ocean engineer, risk management specialist, UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering and one of the nation's foremost authorities on disaster mitigation. Since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig, the 73-year-old Texan has been traveling from coast to coast, investigating the site, serving on advisory panels, writing reports, and giving abundant media interviews, hoping to make sure nothing like this accident ever happens again.

The inconvenient truth about traffic math: Progress is slow

08/28/10 The Wall Street Journal — This month's 60-mile traffic jam in China has demonstrated a frustrating truth about traffic: It is far easier to measure than mitigate. Mathematicians, engineers and planners are making steady advances in assessing traffic congestion and explaining it, but traffic math's strides in reducing congestion are modest, simply because the number of cars often exceeds roadway capacity. If population and the economy keep growing, "there is absolutely no way congestion can stop increasing," says Alex Bayen, an associate professor of systems engineering at UC Berkeley.

New Orleans may still be vulnerable to major storm

08/27/10 National Public Radio — Many believe that one of the worst disasters in U.S. history - the flooding of New Orleans - wasn't caused by Hurricane Katrina but by the failure of the flood protection system. Five years later, billions of dollars have been spent to protect the city, but the new flood protection system still leaves New Orleans vulnerable to a major storm. Robert Bea, an engineering professor at UC Berkeley, has spent some 14,000 hours studying New Orleans flood protection since Katrina, and believes that even with the new upgrades, the levees and floodwalls are inadequate, more of a "patchwork quilt" than a true flood protection system.

Can New Orleans’ revamped levee system withstand next storm?

08/26/10 PBS NewsHour — The state of the levee system in New Orleans continues to be a major concern, especially during hurricane season. PBS NewsHour speaks with Bob Bea, civil engineering professor at UC Berkeley, about the current coastal protection system in the city.

Shining new light on the Statue of Liberty

08/09/10 — Liberty, equality, tolerance, freedom of expression. As the national debate on immigration reform heats up, who hasn't been thinking deeply about those lofty ideals we celebrate every Fourth of July? Perhaps there's no better time to revisit the Statue of Liberty, the elegant monument that graces New York Harbor as an enduring symbol of the principles our nation was founded on 234 years ago. Her long and complicated story is the subject of a new book, Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty, by Yasmin Sabina Khan (M.S'83 CE).