What Everyone Should Know About Earthquakes and Structures

Most people understand that earthquakes can produce catastrophic damage to the built environment. However, given that large earthquakes are relatively rare, and that the television news cameras typically move on a few days after any disaster, a lot of people’s understanding of the effects of earthquakes may be shaped more by bad disaster movies than …

Nonlinearity and the Foundation Engineer

One of the challenges of real-world engineering problems is the need to predict the behavior of a system which may be complex, dynamic, nonlinear and subject to uncertainty as to loading and response. Foundation problems are a good example of this. The behavior of a foundation is complex; it is a soil structure interaction problem …

Sometimes Lightning Strikes Twice

On 27 May 2018, a string of thunderstorms dropped several inches of rain in Howard County Maryland, causing a torrential flash flood to rise several feet above lower Main Street in Ellicott City – the second time in two years that historic central business district suffered such a severe flood. Flood waters carried away automobiles …

Should Temporary Structures be Designed with Higher Allowable Stresses?

Traditionally, designers of temporary structures for use in construction had little guidance binding on their designs. Some owners, particularly infrastructure operators, provided standards and guidelines that permitted increased allowable stresses for certain temporary conditions. Sometimes the increased allowable stresses were limited to new materials or were subject to other stipulations. However, this practice came from …

What Nate Silver Can Teach Engineers

Nate’s Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise (The Penguin Press, New York, 2012) was released in the run-up to the 2012 election. Silver and the FiveThirtyEight.com project were well on their way to accurately predicting most of the electoral college and Senate results and there was a good deal of interest and controversy in the political media regarding …