Industry News Briefs

June 11, 2009 Headlines
USDA Awards More Than $1 Billion for Rural Electricity Grid Upgrades
Smart Grids Should Get a Spark From Federal Stimulus Package
States Divided on Raising Road Taxes

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USDA Awards More Than $1 Billion for Rural Electricity Grid Upgrades
U.S. Department of Agriculture (06/04/09)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced the awarding of more than $1 billion in loans to build and repair more than 10,000 miles of distribution and transmission lines and make system improvements that will benefit 60,000 rural customers to 37 rural utilities and cooperatives in 29 states. "President Obama is delivering on his commitment to invest in rural America's infrastructure by funding upgrades to rural utilities and cooperatives," says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. "Rural communities need affordable up-to-date electric service in order to broaden economic opportunities. These loans will enable cooperatives to deliver improved service to more customers." The funding is being provided through USDA Rural Development's Electric Programs.
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Smart Grids Should Get a Spark From Federal Stimulus Package
Investor's Business Daily (06/05/09) P. A1; Bonasia, J.

Tech companies now ensconced in Internet technology are looking to the smart grid, the national infrastructure project that relies on network sensors and software to power electricity, transportation, water, and fuel systems, as a trillion-dollar investment opportunity. According to the Brattle Group, U.S. utilities could spend as much as $1.5 trillion on infrastructure upgrades in the next two decades. The White House has already set aside $4.5 billion in federal stimulus money to build smart electric grids and introduce smart power meters that monitor home energy usage in real time, according to ABI Research. Cisco, IBM, and Intel are among the major tech companies preparing their own products to compete for smart grid infrastructure projects. With its new "Smarter Planet" brand, IBM is developing hardware and software for utility, railroad, and transportation smart grids. "That's a reflection of more businesses seeing the benefits of these technologies to realize a much more efficient infrastructure," said IBM Senior Vice President Steve Mills, who oversees the company's software group.
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States Divided on Raising Road Taxes
Stateline.org (05/29/09) Fehr, Stephen C.

States across the country have seen clashes over raising road taxes, including a showdown between Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter and his fellow Republicans in the state House over the governor's proposal to boost gasoline taxes to fund road repairs. While the House would not back down, the two sides agreed on a $57 million-a-year package of fee and revenue increases, though this was much less than the $174 million Otter had been seeking. It is politically tough to raise taxes during a severe recession, but at the same time states are in dire need of transportation funding, which the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials says totals $545 billion across the country. In Michigan, state legislators are considering higher gasoline taxes and vehicle fees—although this could be tough to pass given how hard the state has been hit economically—while Massachusetts has seen Gov. Deval Patrick pushing for a 19-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax while legislators voted instead to boost the state sales tax to 6.25 percent, putting some funds toward transportation. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal quashed the idea of raising the gas tax that some state lawmakers had been considering, while gas tax hikes are also on the table in Maine, Tennessee, and Texas. Meanwhile, some states have not been able to resolve disputes on transportation taxes, with Georgia and Virginia among them. There have been some victories in efforts to boost taxes, however, as seen in Vermont and Oregon.
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President Includes $5.125 Billion for Civil Works in 2009 Budget Submission
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Newsroom (06/08/2009)

President Barack Obama's budget for fiscal 2010 includes $5.125 billion in funding for the civil works program of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "The budget funds the planning, design, and construction of projects for the Corps' three main water resources mission areas, which are commercial navigation, flood and coastal storm damage reduction, and aquatic ecosystem restoration," says Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Terrence Salt. Included in the budget is $1.718 billion for construction.
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Agriculture Secretary Vilsack Announces Recovery Act Projects for Forest Road Maintenance and Associated Watershed and Ecosystem Restoration
U.S. Department of Agriculture (06/02/09)

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has announced more than $228 million worth of projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) for roads maintenance and decommissioning and associated watershed restoration on Forest Service land in 31 states. "These road maintenance projects will provide for public health and safety, resource protection, and access to lands in the National Forests," says Vilsack. "The rehabilitation of roads will improve water quality by reducing sediments in nearby streams and help to restore natural resources and habitats for fish in areas impacted by deterioration and erosion of road surfaces."
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NIST Processes to Help Build Next-Generation Nuclear Power Plants
NIST Tech Beat (06/02/09)

New nuclear power plants will be designed, procured, and constructed using information exchange processes developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The advanced software applications for three-dimensional modeling and exchange of engineering information will be a critical part of the effort to design and build the next generation of modern, highly efficient nuclear power plants. To maintain consistency between the design requirements and facility configuration documentation to ensure the ability to document and maintain compliance with a plant's license, an automated, integrated, and interoperable configuration management capability must be established. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is leading the effort to develop this capability for new nuclear plant projects. EPRI assessed the results of the NIST-led Automating Equipment Information Exchange (AEX) project and adopted the AEX methodologies and specifications as foundational technology for achieving this new level of integrated and interoperable configuration management for critical equipment in new nuclear power plants. AEX provides a common mechanism for designers and manufacturers using varied software applications to exchange data required to engineer, manufacture and install equipment ranging from fans, pumps, valves, heat exchangers and pressure vessels. The AEX XML specifications are used to automate information exchange among various software systems that support capital facility equipment engineering, procurement, construction, and operations and maintenance work processes. "Automated data interfaces between software systems enable significant reductions in manual transcription costs and errors," says NIST's Mark Palmer, program manager of the construction integration and automation technologies program in NIST's Building and Fire Research Laboratory. "The economic benefits of these XML specifications are estimated to be substantial."
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Protecting Water Resources With Geospatial Data
Water Utility Management (05/09) P. 8; DiMarco, Tony

Repairing the nation's water infrastructure could cost some $277 billion, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It will require information systems that merge geospatial data to help water utilities oversee long-term projects or disruptions along pipelines, for instance. The San Jose Water Company in California has successfully integrated its day to day operations with geographic information system (GIS) technology. The investor-owned public utility, which serves more than 1 million customers, relies on Intergraph's GeoMedia for several applications like digital map creation and to deliver information to workers and customers. "With an information-based management system, we can easily pinpoint water main leaks and determine which water mains need to be replaced and rank them by priority," says Jeff Hobbs, San Jose Water's GIS coordinator. He adds that the utility's system is sufficiently open such that information can be stored in its Oracle Spatial database, its customer information system (CIS), and in applications like Google Earth. The Henry County Water and Sewerage Authority (HCWSA) in Georgia also uses GeoMedia technology for several operations. For example, field employees can connect to a sewer line in the database and remotely retrieve data related to that line, including aerial images.
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Obama Moves to Revitalize Chesapeake Bay Restoration
Science (05/29/09) Vol. 324, No. 5931, P. 1138; Stokstad, Eric

Attempts to restore the Chesapeake Bay have met with repeated failure, but hope has arrived with President Obama's mandate to have EPA supervise a new federal initiative to enforce the Clean Water Act. Concurrent with this was the announcement by the District of Columbia and the leaders of six states to institute a series of two-year deadlines to raise political accountability and restore the bay by 2025. Twenty-two years ago, the Chesapeake Bay Program agreed to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus inflows by 40 percent by 2000, and although this goal was not met soil scientist Thomas Simpson says that "the fact that [the Bay Program] pretty much held the line in the face of growth and development is not a minor accomplishment." Nine years ago, the Bay Program vowed to reduce nutrients enough by 2010 to return the bay to 1950s health levels as well as lower excess sediments entering the bay. Among EPA's options at this point is broadening its reach over concentrated animal-feeding operations or dictating the specific conditions for storm-water permits that local governments must obtain for development. But the agency has little influence over nonpoint-source pollution, with few states mandating that farmers follow best management practices. The Bay Program wants to encourage more action by supplying local governments with more information about their impact on the bay, and enhanced computer models of the watershed and bay have sufficient spatial resolution to forecast how much nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment originate from small watersheds.

PCB Remediation Work Starts in the Hudson River
Engineering News-Record (06/01/09) Vol. 262, No. 17, P. 15; Angelo, William J.

On May 15 General Electric (GE) began dredging a six-mile expanse of the Hudson River near Fort Edward, N.Y., to remove 400,000 tons of sediment tainted with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) discharged into the waterway from manufacturing complexes, and more dredging is planned downriver along a 34-mile stretch to Troy for a 2015 completion. PCBs were discovered to be a human carcinogen that bio-accumulates in fish. A remediation price tag of about $750 million has been calculated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is keeping an eye on a tunnel-collection gallery carved out under the river to collect PCBs that seeped into bedrock. A dozen barge-mounted excavators are using clamshell buckets directed by a global-positioning system to deposit sediment into hopper barges, which will be unloaded at a processing plant equipped with a trommel to separate debris, a pair of hydrocyclones to extract grit and sand, and 12 filter presses for dewatering. Water will be released into the Hudson once it has been processed to potable water standards, while dried sentiment will be transported by rail to a hazardous-waste disposal facility in Texas. "The first phase [of the project] is a full-scale test of whether the best dredging technologies can achieve rigorous EPA performance standards," says GE's Mark Behan. PCBs collected in the tunnels under the river will be pumped through a temporary lift station to a wastewater treatment plant. "The tunnel is part of a remediation plan that has reduced PCB flow to bedrock to less than three ounces per day," notes Behan. "The tunnels will capture and process that."

Traffic Intersections Gaining Speed
Ivanhoe (06/01/09)

Engineers with the Maryland State Highway Administration and the University of Maryland in Baltimore are experimenting with unconventional intersection designs to help speed up traffic movement through intersections. "All the designs share the common feature—try to separate the left turn from the through traffic volume," says Gang-Len Chang, a transportation engineer with the university. According to traffic engineer Saed Rahwanji of the highway administration, "What we try to do is minimize the delay, and one of the things you do to minimize delay is reduce the number of traffic signal phases at the intersection." Ideas include the "continuous-flow" design, where left-turning vehicles start their turn several hundred feet before the intersection, then turn at a signal with a "crossover" to enter new lanes at the right of opposing traffic. Another style is a "median U-turn" style that does not allow left turns, instead requiring drivers to drive past the intersection, make a U-turn at a designated median lane, then turn right at the intersection instead. Some of the designs are already to be proving cost-effective for reducing crowding at intersections and making things easier on drivers.
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Cul-de-sacked
Governing (05/09) P. 23; Swope, Christopher

Governing magazine managing editor Christopher Swope writes that cul-de-sacs appear to be going out of vogue, as demonstrated by new regulations in Virginia that narrow the allowable width of subdivision streets from 40 feet to between 25 and 29 feet and the state department of transportation's refusal to maintain any new cul-de-sacs. Swope says that the unpopularity of cul-de-sacs with the Virginia government lies in the fact that they do not go anywhere and thus do not promote an efficient transportation network. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine recently told the Washington Post, "When you have 350 to 400 miles a year of new roads you have to maintain forever, it's a budgetary problem. But it's not just about the money. It's about making connections between land-use and transportation planning and restricting wasteful and unplanned development." Swope notes that the concept of connectivity via traditional street grids dovetails with the idea of walkability. "A new batch of suburban developers, the creators of town centers, New Urbanist neighborhoods and high-rise condos near transit stations, has found these models to be at least as profitable as dead-end hamlets ever were," he points out.
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ULI Sees Hope in Infrastructure Partnerships
GlobeSt.com (05/31/09) Howard, Bob

Speakers at a recent Urban Land Institute (ULI) panel agreed that a new generation of public-private partnerships could emerge in the next several years as a means of rebuilding California's aging infrastructure and setting the stage for the next round of property development. The event, hosted by the ULI's Los Angeles District Council, discussed various ways in which planners, developers, architects and contractors can leverage federal economic stimulus funds and the $40 billion in County Measure R funds approved late last year into significant growth by rebuilding roads, bridges, water lines, public transit and other infrastructure elements. ULI Los Angeles executive director Katherine Perez remarked, "What we're doing now is getting ready for the next cycle . . . [which] means we've got to put the new infrastructure in place for the new developments to occur." Perez, who served as a vice president of development for Forest City Development before joining ULI in 2008, notes that public-private infrastructure partnerships differ in several ways from the public-private partnerships that have been employed to launch city redevelopment projects in years past. The majority of those projects were designed on a parcel by parcel basis, resulting in a piecemeal approach to upgrading infrastructure. By contrast, he predicts that public-private infrastructure projects would be "a much more integrated, systematic approach to addressing infrastructure."
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PennDOT Considers Using Fly Ash to Make Cement
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (05/26/09) Santoni, Matthew

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) is looking at using the coal-burning byproduct fly ash as a way of strengthening roads, sidewalks, and bridges. As part of an effort to reuse industrial waste, people are looking at using fly ash from power plants and ground-up slag from steel mills to replace some of the cement used in pavement and add strength and durability. "I look at quality, and I know it's going to give us a quality product," says PennDOT Assistant Construction Manager Michael McCart. "The department is moving forward with requiring this instead of making it an option, and that's also part of our 'going green.'" The new specifications PennDOT is developing for concrete are strict enough that suppliers will need to use additives such as fly ash or slag to meet them. According to McCart, as much as 15 percent of the portland cement used in the typical PennDOT concrete mix could be replaced with fly ash, and as much as 50 percent can be replaced with slag.
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Women Faring Well in Hiring and Tenure Processes for Science and Engineering Jobs at Research Universities
National Academy of Sciences (06/02/09) Frueh, Sara; Yeibio, Luwam

Women are still underrepresented in the applicant pool for faculty positions in math, science, and engineering at major research institutions, but those who do apply are interviewed and hired at rates equal to or higher than those for men, concludes a new National Research Council report. The study also found that although women are underrepresented among those considered for tenure, those who are considered get tenure at the same or higher rates than men. Females who applied for tenure-track positions in each of six disciplines--biology, chemistry, mathematics, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and physics--had better odds of being interviewed and receiving job offers than males. But the report sees a gap between the rate of women applying for tenure-track jobs at research-intensive universities and the rate of women earning Ph.D.s, and this gap is widest in disciplines with larger portions of women receiving Ph.D.s. "Our data suggest that, on average, institutions have become more effective in using the means under their direct control to promote faculty diversity, including hiring and promoting women and providing resources," notes Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Claude Canizares. "Nevertheless, we also find evidence for stubborn and persistent underrepresentation of women at all faculty ranks." Further research on unresolved issues, such as why more women are not applying for tenure-track positions, why female faculty continue to experience a sense of isolation, and how nonacademic issues impact women's and men's career choices at critical points, has been urged by the study committee. "Overall the newly released data indicate important progress, and signal to both young men and especially to young women that what had been the status quo at research-intensive universities is changing," says Yale University School of Medicine professor and committee co-chair Sally Shaywitz.
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