Get Started for FREE
Sign up with Facebook Sign up with X
I don't have a Facebook or a X account
 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Scoop.it!
About 23 miles of the coast road are closed. Alternative route from L.A.: via Monterey
PIRatE Lab's insight:
First official estimates of the infrastructure repair:m many months.
No comment yet.
Sign up to comment
Scoop.it!
The White House move would fast-track the construction of some infrastructure projects, including pipelines, highways and airports.
Scoop.it!
To connect servers around the world, there are actual cables that run under the ocean. The New York Times mapped current and future cables, with a focus on the ones owned by Amazon, Facebook, Googl…
Scoop.it!
The lapse in funding leaves many potential projects in limbo.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This inability to support even core elements of our government's operations and infrastructure and efforts aimed at the public good is disappointing to say the least.
Scoop.it!
From
www
The contractor hired by SoCal Gas to clean residences affected by the Aliso Canyon gas leak was “neither equipped nor trained for proper cleaning as required by Public Health,” health officials say.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Man, this is truly getting strange. Just when I think we have turned a corner, it goes down bizzaro street again.
Scoop.it!
Super-typhoon Haiyan, the single most powerful storm ever recorded, is an unsettling harbinger of troubles to come.
Weather systems across the globe have gained intensity and force over the past few years due to our rapidly warming planet. New defenses are needed to protect our metropolitan centers, most of which are located within a stone's throw of the ocean. The solution: fight nature with nature. Supplementing civil engineering projects with ecological defenses is only part of the overall solution to dealing with our rapidly changing environment. Early warning systems, effective evacuation strategies, education, and better building codes must be integrated into the larger scheme of of sustainable city development and planning if we plan on living anywhere near our growing oceans... Via Lauren Moss
|
Scoop.it!
By the 2070s, climate change will reduce snowpack and increase extreme rainfall in the Sierra Nevada and California’s reservoirs will likely be overwhelmed. That’s according to a new study by UCLA climate scientists, who predict that run-off during so-called atmospheric rivers will increase by nearly 50 percent, leading to widespread flooding across the state. We’ll
Scoop.it!
A widespread investigation has found that communities across Canada are facing a crisis in lead-contaminated drinking water. Even one of the country's most famed, eco-friendly ski resorts is not immune. As Marc Edwards explains to host Marco Werman, the problem is in some ways man-made, and governments are further complicating the situation in the way they're repairing pipes. Edwards was a primary whistleblower in the Flint water crisis but has also been specializing in Canada's water infrastructure for the past decade.
Scoop.it!
WASHINGTON -- Consider a hedge if you're in need of a fence. When managed properly, hedges cost less, outlast wooden fences, are more attractiv
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This is an example of "green infrastructure" and an example of how our old approaches were superior over some of our modern takes.
Scoop.it!
Brazil's National Museum once held thousands of years of heritage. Now all that's left of Latin America's largest natural history museum, once home to 20 million artifacts, is smoldering debris. Nick Schifrin reports how the tragedy has also drawn anger at the government.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
We are used to the Hoover quote about the measure of a society being how well we protect our innocent, defenseless members of our society: the young, old, and infirm. Perhaps we need to add in "our history" or "our legacy" to this term. See also:
Scoop.it!
The firm that designed the new Bay Bridge eastern span warned Caltrans as the bridge neared completion that some of its welds could crack prematurely under the constant pounding of cars and trucks, The Chronicle has learned. In their November 2010 evaluation, the T.Y. Lin engineers identified a section of the eastbound deck near Yerba Buena Island as being of particular concern, because lopsided welded connections are under high stress and thus are especially vulnerable to premature cracking. Critics said Caltrans' actions undermined the span's status as a lifeline after an earthquake - a road intended to be open for emergency vehicles and trucks within a day - and could shorten its predicted 150-year life span. "What they've apparently done is rationalized the acceptance of excessive fatigue damage at these locations," said Bob Bea, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at UC Berkeley. When confronted with the problem, Caltrans' chief engineer, Brian Maroney, said builders could use laxer stress-level standards set by a national group, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, instead of the state guidelines. [...] Martin Pohll, a retired Caltrans structural steel expert who served on the agency panel that sets California's guidelines, said the state intentionally kept its standards higher than the national group's. Top officials from Caltrans, as well as its seismic peer review panel and bridge consultants, gathered for a briefing about the ill-fitting sections in October 2010. In a verbal presentation, T.Y. Lin's chief bridge designer, Marwan Nader, and consultants hired by the bridge's main contractor, the joint venture American Bridge/Fluor, said it was unlikely the welds would crack from traffic alone, according to minutes of the meeting. [...] the engineers said, welds on roughly half of the eastbound deck and a quarter of the westbound deck probably had excessive stress levels that didn't conform to Caltrans' standards. Hundreds of galvanized steel rods and bolts that hold together the signature tower, seismic-stability structures and other features of the span were manufactured to levels harder than Caltrans normally allows on bridges, a factor that may have left them more vulnerable to being invaded by corrosive marine air. -- Design flaws, corrosion, fabrication errors and snapped bolts dogged construction of the still-incomplete bike path, leading to at least $3.8 million in cost overruns.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
While I don' think this is nearly as problematic as our joke-of-a-design levee system in New Orleans and elsewhere around our country, this "dumbing down" of safety standards on the fly is simply unacceptable. This is crazy. To put in this kind of time and money and faith, we expect our engineered structures to be able to withstand routine and predicted peak stresses well. The whole argument of "the U.S. knows better than we dumb Californians" simply doesn't fly. If we ordered a part that is to be to specific tolerances, then it should have been to specific tolerances.
|
