Infrastructure

Towers in earthquake country — designers say the new ones are safe to their core

10/15/19 San Francisco Chronicle — Jack Moehle, professor of structural engineering, comments on the safety of towers that have transformed San Francisco's skyline over the past decade.

Waze hijacked L.A. in the name of convenience. Can anyone put the genie back in the bottle?

08/21/19 Los Angeles Magazine — Traffic apps, like Waze, turned L.A. neighborhoods into "shortcuts." Los Angeles Magazine recently spoke to UC Berkeley's Alex Bayen and Susan Shaeen about how we got here and whether this trend can be reversed.

How can companies like Airbnb, Lyft or Uber help in disasters?

06/19/19 — Berkeley Engineering researchers suggest that emergency management agencies and local relief organizations should leverage Airbnb, Lyft, Uber and private citizens to ensure equity in emergency evacuations.

PEER grant to improve seismic safety of natural gas infrastructure

05/17/19 PEER — The California Energy Commission awarded a $4.9 million grant to the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center on May 15 to improve the seismic risk assessment of natural gas storage and pipeline infrastructure.

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority partnership advances ‘future energy’ educational program

05/04/19 — UC Berkeley and the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) are teaming up to establish a new educational program to accelerate infrastructure systems for sustainable energy.

Nighttime traffic on U.S. Highway 101 south of San Francisco

Shifting gears

05/01/19 — The integration of self-driving vehicles requires policy decisions that consider how travel behavior will shift with the introduction of new mobility choices.

Berkeley research makes lead pipes safe

04/03/19 American Chemical Society — UC Berkeley researchers develop a rapid, cost-effective method to make lead pipes safe.

Large ceiling beams at the Transbay Terminal

Transbay Terminal’s cracked beams may be vulnerable

09/27/18 NBC Bay Area — Calling cracks in specially fabricated beams at San Francisco's new Transbay Terminal potentially “catastrophic,” Rune Storesund, executive director of UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, said, “You want to be looking at imperfections in the steel.”

House and car destroyed by tornado in Texas. Photo by Volkan Yuksel / Wikimedia Commons

NSF funds extreme events reconnaissance network

08/15/18 PEER — The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network, which aims to improve reporting and coordination by the natural hazards engineering community in the aftermath of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme events. UC Berkeley is one of StEER's three primary nodes.

Construction cranes on the Los Angeles skyline

A seismic change in predicting how earthquakes will shake tall buildings

06/28/18 New York Times — "There are going to be large changes coming" in the calculation of risk faced by by tall buildings during a major West Coast earthquake, adjunct civil and environmental engineering professor Norman Abrahamson told a conference of earthquake engineers in Los Angeles.

Scans comparing the Hume Lake Dam before and after drainage

Dam scanning

06/01/18 — CEE professor Robert Kayen used lidar technology to evaluate the health of the Hume Lake Dam.

Joseph Charbonnet and his Grad Slam presentation

Berkeley water engineer lands 2018 ‘Slammy’

05/04/18 Graduate Division — At the UC-wide Grad Slam competition on May 3, environmental engineering doctoral student Joseph Charbonnet brought home the first-place ‘Slammy' - and $9,000 in prize money - for his three-minute talk on using manganese-coated sand to capture, clean and re-use stormwater.

Dam scanning

02/16/18 — Two civil engineering students built a 3-D model of Berkeley's campus to better understand what's going on with one of California's many aging dams.

High-speed rail tunnel construction site

Trump infrastructure plan’s tunneling claims raise questions

01/05/18 Newsweek — The Trump administration contends that underground tunnels to carry high-speed rail lines can be built without a dime of federal funding. But critics, including civil and environmental engineering professor C. William Ibbs, head of Berkeley's Construction Management program, suggest there's nothing easy about that kind of tunneling, and it will surely require government oversight.

A ‘stillsuit’ for cities

11/06/17 — Berkeley water expert David Sedlak, a professor of civil & environmental engineering, says cities may soon have to develop their own version of the science fiction novel Dune's "stillsuit" to recycle wastewater for drinking.

High-speer rail demo outside the Capitol in Sacramento

13.5-mile tunnel will make or break California’s bullet train

10/23/17 LA Times — A critical part of California's high-speed rail project is a 13.5-mile tunnel through the Diablo Range - a landmark project whose costs may greatly exceed initial expectations. "This is not good news for taxpayers of California," says civil engineering professor William Ibbs, who has consulted on similar rail projects around the world.

Brains for buildings, packaged in a smart briefcase

10/02/17 — Building-in-Briefcase is a new toolkit consisting of wireless sensors that monitor and communicate overall building health and function. The system, which can be used to retrofit intelligence into existing buildings, is designed to increase energy efficiency.

Simple sanitation, a Q&A with Ashley Muspratt

09/12/17 — Over 90 percent of wastewater generated on the planet every day is dumped into the environment without any treatment. CEE alum Ashley Muspratt is working on a solution.

Boot camp participants at California Memorial Stadium.

Fresh ideas for nuclear power

08/24/17 — Two dozen students from all over the world gathered at Berkeley for two weeks over the summer to discuss, plan and help start building a new nuclear energy sector. The students, along with professional mentors and speakers, were part of the 2017 Nuclear Innovation Boot Camp.

Armen Chouldjian demonstrates the web app he and Anuj Shah developed for BART

For BART engineering interns, a focus on safety, reliability and innovation

08/23/17 Mass Transit — When EECS senior Armen Chouldjian returns to UC Berkeley in the fall, he'll ride BART knowing his summer internship helped increase safety and reliability for all the transit system's riders.