August e-update

Have You Voted for Technical Region Director?

Voting 2005

Online voting for your ASCE leadership is convenient and easy for members who have a valid e-mail address on record. Vote by clicking on the 2005 Election Ballot icon. Online voting ends Monday, Aug. 15, at 1:00 p.m. EDT. For Election Web site support, call 800-974-8099 or e-mail by clicking here.

Note: If you were not an Institute member as of May 15, you are not eligible to vote for the Technical Region Director position.

Infrastructure includes constructed facilities that shelter and support human activities: buildings of all types, communications, energy generation and distribution, transportation of all modes, water resources, and waste treatment and disposal. ASCE defines sustainable development as "the challenge of meeting human needs for natural resources, industrial products, energy, food, transportation, shelter, and waste management while conserving and protecting environmental quality and the natural resource base for future development."

In February 2005, ASCE convened all seven of its institutes, six of its divisions, councils and committees, and the Civil Engineering Research Foundation, in the Forum on Technical Opportunities for Sustainable Infrastructure. The Forum concluded that engineers, and other decision makers, such as planners, architects, contractors, owners, and operators of infrastructure, need sound practices to guide their decisions for functional, safe, economical, esthetic and sustainable infrastructure

The Forum recommended that ASCE, in cooperation with other professional and trade organizations and federal, state and local governmental agencies, create a program, Practice, Education and Research for Sustainable Infrastructure (PERSI). PERSI will assess current practices and knowledge and develop an agenda for:

4. Education of current and future infrastructure professionals and technicians.

1. Provide the practices needed for substantial renewal of America's infrastructure to respond to marketplace values and meets society's needs.

2. Embed sustainability provisions in the practices regularly used for planning, design, construction, commissioning, operation, maintenance, renovation and removal of infrastructure.

3. Assist all educational programs in architectural, civil and construction engineering, and related technology, in incorporating principles for sustainable infrastructure in their curricula.

4. Establish an enduring program of research to provide critically needed knowledge for improvement of practices for sustainable infrastructure.

5. Engage the U.S. infrastructure community in international efforts for sustainability.

The PERSI report was approved by the ASCE Committee on Sustainability in early June 2005, and has been adopted by Dennis Martenson, current President-Elect of ASCE, as his Presidential Initiative. Detailed planning for PERSI is proceeding. To download the report, follow the link www.asce.org/instfound/techcomm_cs.cfm, and scroll down to "Highlights."

Application Deadline Fast Approaching for 2006 Visiting International Fellowship

The International Council (IC) of the Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI) invites applications for Visiting International Fellows. The fellowships are intended to assist faculty, professionals, or graduate researchers in developing countries with participating in cultural and technical exchange with EWRI members at the World Water and Environmental Resources Congress 2006 in Omaha, Nebraska (May 21-25, 2006) and in supplementary activities during their visit to the United States. Application forms for the 2006 Visiting International Fellowship must be submitted by the potential host along with an abstract of the paper by September 16th.

Would you like a place to meet and discuss issues related to preservation or do you just have a special interest in the history of civil engineering? ASCE has established an e-mail listserv to help members connect and discuss these issues.

Just join the newly established History & Heritage listserv. To become a member of this new listserv, go to http://lists.asce.org/history/ and you will be directed to the listserv subscription page. Then, just follow the subscription instructions on this page. Once you sign up, you should receive an email from @lists.asce.org asking you to confirm your subscription.

This listserv is for any ASCE member with an interest in the history of civil engineering and the preservation of its artifacts.

If you have any questions about this listserv, please contact Carol Reese (creese@asce.org) staff contact for the History and Heritage Committee.

“Gravity Sanitary Sewer Design and Construction”, ASCE Manual of Practice No. 60/WEF Manual of Practice No. FD-5, is being revised and updated after 22 years of informing and educating engineers.

The chapter on estimating and forecasting quantity of wastewater is the subject of this survey. We are looking for recent data on wastewater flow measurements -- including infiltration and inflow -- from specific land uses. Indoor water use data would also be helpful, i.e., water use at times when there is no outdoor water use (irrigation, car washing, washdown, etc.) – typically during winter months -- can be a good estimate of wastewater flow.

Please send data to Howard Selznick, M.ASCE, at hls@stanfordalumni.org, fax (408) 487-2222, or mail c/o HMH Engineers, Inc., 1570 Oakland Road, San Jose, CA 95131 by September 15, 2005. Your contributions and help are greatly appreciated.

Training program based on interim voluntary guidelines to help water utilities

Reston, VA—Drinking water and wastewater utilities now have a comprehensive training program to incorporate enhanced security measures into facility design, operation and management. This modular-format program is based on three recently-released interim voluntary security guidance documents. Both the training program and guidance documents were funded by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The training program provides managers, operations personnel, design professionals and regulatory officials involved in drinking water, wastewater and stormwater utilities with detailed practical assistance for implementing improved security measures in new and existing facilities of all sizes.

The three training programs and guidance documents were developed by the American Water Works Association (AWWA), the Water Environment Federation (WEF) and American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Interim Voluntary Security Guidance for Water Utilities Training Module (developed by AWWA), Interim Voluntary Security Guidance for Wastewater/Stormwater Utilities Training Module (developed by WEF) and Interim Voluntary Guidelines for Designing an Online Contaminant Monitoring System Training Module (developed by ASCE) are provided in MS Word, MS PowerPoint and PDF formats on a CD-ROM, available through each organization's Web site: www.awwa.org, www.wef.org and www.asce.org.

The training program’s modular design allows instructors to easily tailor the material to suit utilities’ individual needs and target audiences, including management, operations personnel, facility designers, and regulatory and elected officials. The program includes full sets of MS PowerPoint presentations, instructor guidelines, quizzes and exams.

The guidance documents and related training materials, along with feedback from industry professionals and additional research, will be the basis for the development of voluntary consensus standards, to be published in late 2006.

EWRI’s Watershed Management Conference, held last month in Williamsburg, was a big success. One of this year's highlighted sessions was on the UNESCO HELP Basins Project. HELP (Hydrology for the Environment, Life, and Policy) is creating a new approach to integrated watershed management through the creation of a framework for water law and policy experts, water resource managers, and water scientists to work together on water related problems. Over the last several years, 11 watersheds or basins in North America have become HELP Basins. To read more about this project, visit www.ewrinstitute.org and click on UNESCO Basins Project on our main page.

Bureau of Reclamation's Hydraulic Laboratory to Celebrate 75th Anniversary

The Bureau of Reclamation began using hydraulic models in 1930 in the laboratory of the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station in Fort Collins to study problems encountered in the design and construction of engineering structures. The unprecedented scale of Hoover, Shasta, and Grand Coulee Dams made the establishment of a hydraulic laboratory necessary to evaluate various aspects of the new designs. Models could be tested under various conditions until sufficient information was obtained to establish the most favorable design. The use of scale models and the establishment of scaling relationships to simulate full scale hydraulic structures in smaller scale models were established in Europe early in the 20th century.

Investigations with hydraulic models had their start in the Bureau of Reclamation in August 1930 when thirteen engineers, technicians, and craftsmen from the Denver Reclamation Office began working in the hydraulic laboratory of the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station in Fort Collins, Colorado. The 242 square meter laboratory was originally built in 1912 under the direction of Ralph Parshall.

This year, the Water Resources Research Laboratory (Hydraulics Laboratory) will host an open house with guest speakers, and laboratory tours to commemorate seventy-five years of historical operations in support of development and conservation of water resources in the Western United States.

Bureau of Reclamation staff at Hydraulic Laboratory,

Ft. Collins, Colorado, April 1931

Back Row: Richard R. Randolf, Emory W. Lane, Virgil C. Hammond, Joseph N. Bradley, Charles W. Thomas, Graydon C. Wright. Front Row: Vincent T. Bliss, Robert A. Goodpasture, Walter H. Price, James W. Ball, Richard J. Willson, William O. Parker, Whitney M. Borland.

The National Science Foundation-funded CLEANER ("Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research") Project Office, administered by The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has one CLEANER Executive Director position available. The Executive Director will be the chief operating officer of the National Science Foundation-funded CLEANER Project Office and will closely with the CLEANER Project Office principal investigators and committees to create a CLEANER community consensus plan. For a summary of CLEANER visit http://cleaner.ncsa.uiuc.edu. This position will be located at NCSA's ACCESS facility in Arlington, Virginia. For a more detailed job lisiting, visit http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/AboutUs/Employment/ActivelySeekingYou.html.

A position for Senior Programme Specialist, Chief of Section on Hydrological Processes and Climate at the Division of Water Sciences, UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, is currently open for recruitment. Applications are now being accepted only through UNESCO RecruitWeb online. The closing date for applications to the position is September 4, 2005. For more information, visit

The organizing committees for two upcoming conferences are currently seeking abstract submissions.

SPREAD THE WORD

Please forward this message to your friends and colleagues who share an interest in environmental and water-related issues and would like to hear from the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Encourage your friends and colleagues to JOIN EWRI and receive all the benefits of being and EWRI Member.

This e-mail was addressed to the email address bparsons@asce.org as a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers Environmental & Water Resources Institute. To update your profile, please visit http://www.asce.org/myprofile