Infrastructure

Preventive medicine for pipelines

05/17/12 — Nationwide, our network of more than 2.5 million miles of pipeline is aging. More than a third of the pipeline infrastructure is over 50 years old, and a reliable method to monitor corrosion hasn't really existed. Until now. Jerome Singer, professor emeritus of EECS and engineering science, and two Berkeley Engineering alums have developed a way to keep tabs on pipeline health by using an MRI machine similar to the ones used in hospitals. Their technology is called the Magnetic Response Imaging System (MRIS), and it will be able to look at the state of underground pipelines.

A bridge built to sway when the earth shakes

02/06/12 The New York Times — Venture deep inside the new skyway of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and it becomes clear that the bridge's engineers have planned for the long term. The new eastern span of the Bay Bridge is meant to last at least 150 years after its expected opening in 2013. "We wanted to make this bridge flexible so that when the earthquake comes in, the flexibility of the system is such that it basically rides the earthquake," said its lead designer, Berkeley Engineering alumnus Marwan Nader (M.S.'89, Ph.D.'92 CE).

California turns to Chinese company, labor to build most of new Bay Bridge span

10/19/11 Public Radio International — Much of the actual construction of San Francisco's new Bay Bridge was actually done in China. The bridge was then shipped piece by piece to the port of Oakland for assembly. California officials have estimated that they'll save at least $400 million by relying on low-wage Chinese labor. UC Berkeley civil engineering professor William Ibbs says doing it this way makes a lot of sense.

Under construction: Engineering the Bay Bridge

04/08/11 — Slated to open in late 2013, the new eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge is meant to do what the old one didn't: withstand a major Bay Area earthquake, sustain only limited damage and quickly admit emergency vehicles and traffic. It must deliver a performance to match its “lifeline” designation. It's also a lifeline for Marwan Nader (M.S'89, Ph.D'92 CE)-because he's bet his career on it. Read part 2 of our story and watch a slideshow of the new Bay Bridge construction.

Japan dam failure renews focus on California dams

03/17/11 California Watch — As Californians closely watch the catastrophe at Japan's nuclear plants, many engineers are also studying the failure of a dam in Japan's northeast Fukushima prefecture. The extent of the damage is still unknown. "One dam failure is too many," said Nicholas Sitar, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley.

Preparing infrastructure for earthquakes

03/11/11 National Public Radio — The Japanese have invested heavily in infrastructure and buildings designed to withstand quakes. To better understand the structural precautions Japan had in place during Friday's 9.0 earthquake and whether the U.S. employs similar technology and building codes, host Robert Siegel talks with Stephen Mahin, professor of structural engineering at UC Berkeley and director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center.

Illustration of the Bay Bridge’s new self-anchored suspension segment.

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.

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 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)

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.

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.

Gulf deep-water drilling should resume on case-by-case basis, expert says

07/22/10 Bloomberg.com — U.S. regulators could end a blanket ban on deep-water oil drilling by increasing oversight of troubled wells and improving safety industrywide, a UC Berkeley engineering professor who studies catastrophes said in an interim report on the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Robert Bea said regulators should determine which drilling operations should be suspended "on a case-by-case basis" as the industry works to improve blowout prevention equipment, inspection procedures and worker training programs.

Energy Secretary emerges to take a commanding role in effort to corral well

07/16/10 The New York Times — Energy Secretary and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Steven Chu may hold a Nobel Prize in physics, but he has no training in geology, seismology or oil well technology. Nevertheless, he has stepped in repeatedly to take command of the effort to contain BP's runaway well, often ordering company officials to take steps they might not have taken on their own.

Damage control

07/12/10 California Magazine — In 1985, Jack Moehle, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Berkeley, traveled to Chile to sort through the rubble left in the wake of the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked the coast. He was one of a number of Californian and Chilean engineers who collaborated to study the structural damage. As a result of their research, both the United States and Chile modified their building codes to nearly identical standards. This year, Moehle and a Berkeley reconnaissance team returned to Chile in the aftermath of the 8.8 magnitude shaker on February 27. Because of the similarity in building codes, the sort of damage Moehle has found could predict how California would fare in a major quake.

Berkeley quake trial shows bridge safety ideas

05/27/10 San Francisco Chronicle — A mock-up bridge and a mock-up rail car shook, rattled, but never rolled as earthquake engineers from UC Berkeley demonstrated a system designed to keep bridge traffic moving even in the strongest of seismic shaking. The 30-foot, scale-model bridge, designed and built by researchers at the university's Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, was erected on a huge "shake table" that created the same violent ground motions that have marked major quakes in California, Japan and Chile.