Podcast: The Infrastructure Show

Hear the impressive story of how Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport has become one of the country’s model green airports. DFW, the third busiest airport in the world in terms of aircraft movements and the seventh busiest in terms of passenger traffic, covers more than 29.2 square miles and supports more than 300,000 jobs. In 2008, DFW launched an airport-wide Sustainability Policy and Program, as part of the airport’s strategic plan. The key elements of the Sustainability Initiative to date include: environmental management, energy efficiency and renewable energy, waste minimization and recycling, wildlife management, safety management, emergency response, asset development, and a clean vehicle fleet program. The hosts talk with Jim Crites, DFW Executive Vice President of Operations, about these notable green achievements

Whenever a high-visibility infrastructure failure occurs, the main question everyone wants to know is: why? Was it a design error? A failure of materials? A result of human error? It is the job of the forensic engineer to investigate all the myriad of factors that might have led to a failure. Such investigations often are lengthy, and costly. But they are essential, to prevent recurrence of similar failures. The hosts talk with Dr. David Corr, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University, about this topic, with a focus on two significant infrastructure disasters: the collapse of the Mianus River Bridge on Interstate 95 in Connecticut in 1983, and the 2006 failure of ceiling panels in the Fort Point Tunnel – a part of the Big Dig in Boston. Also included are details on the Marcy Bridge Collapse, which occurred in 2002 in Upstate New York

The 91 Express Lanes is a 10-mile road located in Orange County, California. Opened in 1995, it was the first privately financed toll road built in the U.S. since the 1940s. It was also unique in that it was the first fully automated toll project in the world, and also marked this country’s first application of congestion pricing, in which tolls increase at times of busiest road use, and decrease during less travelled hours, with high-occupancy vehicles paying discounted tolls. As with any project that was a first of its kind, the 91 Express Lanes have proved to be a learning experience, and they have been studied by transportation professionals around the world. The hosts discuss this topic with Chris Norby, Member of the Orange County Transportation Authority’s Board of Directors, and Orange County Supervisor, 4th District

High-speed rail refers to passenger train service operating at an average speed of 124 mph or higher. Most European countries have extensive high-speed rail networks, as do Japan and China. The United States currently has no high-speed rail service. Although technically Amtrak’s Acela Express is a high-speed train, which does in fact briefly reach 150 miles per hour on some routes, its average speed is significantly less – for example, 80 miles per hour between New York City and Washington, D.C. High-speed trains have had real success abroad, but are market conditions in the U.S. suitable for this technology? The hosts talk with Rick Harnish, Executive Director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, about this topic, mainly focusing on the Midwest states

The Bayonne Bridge, completed in 1931, connects Bayonne, NJ and Staten Island, NY. The world’s fourth longest steel arch bridge, it stands 151 feet above the Kill van Kull tidal strait. It is this 151 foot height above mean water level that presents the problem for container ships travelling to reach the container terminals at Staten Island and Port Newark. Some container ships today are too high to pass under the bridge, but this problem will become worse when the Panama Canal expansion is completed, and the next generation of larger container ships, called “Post-Panamax” vessels, will be afloat. The hosts talk with Frank McDonough, President of the New York Shipping Association, about the challenge the Bayonne Bridge presents to New York and New Jersey shipping, and the options that have been discussed to address the bridge’s height problem

Inadvertent water loss – leakage – within water distribution networks is an infrastructure problem that exists throughout the country and around the world. The hosts talk with Bill Bresnahan, 1st Deputy Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Water Management about the causes of leakage and how the City of Chicago addresses the challenge of stopping leaks. Chicago draws water from Lake Michigan via two intake cribs and processes it through the two largest water treatment plants of their kind in the world. The Department of Water Management’s 12 pumping stations send the water through more than 4,200 miles of distribution mains. These stations have a combined pumping capacity of some 2.1 billion gallons daily, and they distribute water to 2.9 million customers in the City and 2.5 million others in the nearby suburbs

The hosts talk with James Carter Jr., Chief Engineer for Bridges and Structures with the Norfolk Southern Corporation, about the impressive Heartland Corridor Project. The Heartland Corridor Project is a collaboration between the Norfolk Southern Railroad and state and federal governments, intended to improve rail service between the Port of Norfolk and places in the Midwest. Among other elements of the project, it will provide a more direct routing for double-stacked container trains between Norfolk, Virginia and western Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio, as far as Columbus. The project was begun in 2007, with completion anticipated in 2010. Included in the podcast is information on tunnel modification, intermodal terminals, double-stacked trains and freight, and funding

Tom Taylor, Branch Chief of Surveys Coordination/New Technologies for Caltrans District 4, talks with the hosts about the advanced survey technologies used in rebuilding the I-580 ramp in Oakland, CA, totally destroyed in a tanker fire on April 29, 2007. This ramp is a critical element of the Bay Area freeway network. It was rebuilt in only 26 days in an extremely fast-track project that used innovative contracting methods and relied on extensive use of advanced measurement technologies. These included aerial photography and photogrammetry, laser scanning, and the use of advanced survey instruments for field measurement of the damage and exact position and dimensions of the remaining structure — thus defining the gap that needed to be filled by the replacement ramp

Interviewed is Linda Figg, whose company, Figg Bridge Engineers of Tallahassee, FL, designed the new Minneapolis I-35W Bridge to replace the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge that collapsed on Aug. 1, 2007. The new bridge opened on September 18, 2008. Linda discusses this fast-track project, features of the new bridge, and lessons learned from the bridge failure and replacement

The hosts introduce this series of podcasts with a definition of the infrastructure and a discussion of why it is important to us. They talk about trends in infrastructure characteristics and condition and consider why the infrastructure has been so much in the news recently. Then they move on to an assessment of the nation’s infrastructure, talking with Casey Dinges of the American Society of Civil Engineers about his organization’s Infrastructure Report Card. This broad assessment of our infrastructure is prepared by the ASCE every 5 years. It grades the condition of our bridges, dams, roads, rail systems, inland waterways, and 10 more systems. Casey describes the most recent Report Card, released in January of 2009