It Was A Dark And Stormy.... Day
After the massive amounts of flooding we saw the other week in Central Texas, I thought it was fitting to talk about our critical flooding infrastructure. ICYMI, so much rain fell in the watershed that the drought-prone highland lakes filled up
....And then kept filling. At 137% full, the river authority opened up 4 of the 8 gates at Mansfield Dam. For a while, we thought they'd open up all 8 gates for the first time ever. Travis County was in a declared state of disaster.
Check out this drone footage on LCRA’s youtube channel. youtu.be/TV9rEsU4qb8
If you're not familiar with Austin, the river that runs through the downtown area is part of this system. So when massive amounts of floodwaters come from upstream, they have to open floodgates around the city and have the potential for flooding out certain roads and low areas.
Public Trust
I looked at the photos of water being released through Mansfield and was in awe of our collective trust in engineering. Families with cameras were standing just on the other side of a dam holding back an enormous lake of water. Juxtapose that with the drone footage of water crashing over a dam in Marble Falls, TX as they (safely) released water (image below). Even though this is my profession, it's still easy to forget the cutting power of mother nature in a landscape. Our public's trust that we did our engineering correctly is not something we should take for granted.
This also comes from a video on LCRA’s youtube. It’s an amazing, awe-inspiring 2 minutes.
In addition to impromtu family field trips to the dams, Austinites have been reading the flood ops report. Which is fun because I've been talking about a flood ops report for months at my job for a different dam, elsewhere in Texas. It's too bad we we are a few weeks away from official impoundment of that dam so we couldn't just capture all this rain we've been having!
Water Infrastructure
Part of a dam design for an off-channel reservoir (different from the on-channel highland lakes) is a massive pumping station to pull water from the river and into the reservoir. This includes a massive underground maze of pipes.
The main pipes are 120” diameter aka 10 feet tall. They neck down and split out near the pumps into 4 large lines and one semi-large line that goes directly to each of the 5 vertical turbine pumps. For a pipe walk, this is an incredibly ginormous pipe (NBD, I have cool projects).
The maze is mostly dark so we carry in headlamps and flashlights. We also have an H2S sensor because it’s a confined space.
A lot of engineers don’t actually get out on the site to see their designs. Some of it is that the project doesn’t have budget... but that's because the companies winning the projects didn’t feel comfortable enough to justify asking for that budget. Or that the cities couldn't justify that cost to their stakeholders. For an engineer, being able to see the practical design, not just the conceptual design, is huge. You start to understand constructability issues, impact of different design decisions, and scale of the project. You can catch and change things in the field AND it makes you a better engineer for future designs. Especially future designs for the same client or application.
It's so important that the public knows this.
Engineers also have the opportunity to talk to the contractors and the construction workers. These people have a completely different perspective that most engineers don’t consider. They know the finite details of how a project goes together.
Getting engineers out to site is important to public safety.
As a young engineer, it’s especially good to get out in the field. That’s where you learn the most. Study the basis of design report on the airplane. Take a lot of pictures. Let the older, senior engineers make fun of you for being a selfie queen. Oh, just me?
More Dark Mazes
In Rolla, Missouri, this time of year welcomes a Missouri S&T tradition: the experimental mine haunted house.
They are not playing around.People you kind of recognize from Mining Engineering 101 dress up as zombies and headless huntsmen. They hold chainsaws and drip blood on you from the mine shaft. You and Lauren hold hands and run through the maze screaming, grateful to have made it out alive.
Ahh, undergrad life.
Working: Arriving back in Texas after the EWRI leadership weekend where I tried to help provide concrete ideas for how the water and environmental vanguard can be more inclusive to younger, less experienced engineers!
Reading: I've researched candidates for the 2018 election that I chose on a shared google sheets. I'm going to a house get-together where we are crowd-sourcing the research so that we can make informed voting decisions. And have an excuse to sunday funday.
Listening: Dean Lewis, Alice Merton, Sasha Sloan. New Robyn album.