California's Bay Bridge

This bridge deserves many articles alone and many have already been published because it is a pretty awesome engineered bridge. I love these time-lapses though and I just came across this one so check out this video.

And after watching that I think if I had to walk down one of those "cat-walk" paths up to that pillar I would have died.

Safety Awards

Some of these are construction related so I let this slip into my blog plus it is pretty darn funny to see. This came from a email going around and I loved it. So starting from the bottom up, here are the safety awards of the year!

17th place - The delivery man

16th place - The grinder's face shield

15th place - Scaffolding

 14th place - The welder's mask

 13th place - The baggage cart

(personally I think this was a joke)

 12th place - The painters

 11th place - Shipyard Mechanics

 10th place - HVAC crew

(not sure if this is work or a suicide attempt...)

 9th place - The hard hat

 8th place - The Biological weapons expert

 7th place - Weapons of Mass Destruction warehouse

 6th place - Truck mechanic

 5th place - The electrician

 4th place - The fork lifters

(personally I thought this was just clever)

 3rd place - The power company

 2nd place - The airplane mechanic

 And 1st place - City Council maintenance team!

 Just a bonus - The rifle range helper

So credit goes to whoever started this email but I thought it was pretty darn hilarious, so kudos to that person.

Dallas Spaghetti Bowl

November 2012 we went to Dallas/Fortworth over Thanksgiving and there are some pretty cool roadways there, there is also a lot of construction making some really neat bridges that go on for a half mile or more. On Thanksgiving day we went on a drive and found this spaghetti bowl type of interchange in the Greater Dallas area, it was so bizarre because this was miles away from downtown Dallas and so I don't understand why they needed all of these roads but it was pretty cool to see so check out this video we took.

I thought it was pretty neat how they also included the artwork on the columns so that it had some aesthetic appeal. Glad I got to see this.

10 Tallest Super Structures

I received an article from the ASCE smart brief that mentioned the world's 10 tallest buildings and it is amazing to see these monsters so have a look below.

1. Number one goes to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at 2,717 feet, it is 745 feet taller than the second tallest building! It best enjoy its 1st place position though because once the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia is finished it is rumored to exceed this giant. 

2. Next up are the Abraj Al-Bait Towers in Mecca, Saudi Arabia at 1,972 feet, but it is the world's tallest hotel in the world. 

3. Taipei 101 with 101 stories above ground and 5 stories below it is 1,667 feet tall.

4. The Shanghai World Financial Center in a close 4th at 1,614 feet.

5. The International Commerce Center in Hong Kong hits 1,588 feet.

6. Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur soars to 1,483 feet.

7. The Zifeng tower in Greenland stands an even 1,480 feet tall.

8. Willis Tower (Sears Tower) in Chicago is 1,450 feet high.

9. Ninth is the Jin Mai tower in Shanghai at 1,364 feet tall.

10. Finally the tenth tallest building is the Empire State Building at 1,250 feet in the Big Apple, although this held the title for the world's tallest building for nearly 40 years before these other nine massive structures over took it in height, and soon it will be number eleven once the World Trade Center is completed in New York.

Wow at the pace that these supertall structures are being erected we can only anticipate when a mile high building will be among us.

Sam White Bridge

So last year, as a part of the massive I-15 Core project which is building/re-building 63 bridges, the largest bridge move in the western hemisphere took place when the Sam White Bridge was moved into its final location. Now I am trying to remember, but I'm pretty sure as my dad and I were adding things all together we estimated the bridge weighed 3 million pounds. It started  at around 11pm and we had to leave at 3am but they finished about an hour or so later. But here are some pictures I took while we walked around.

On this shot you can almost see how long this beast is, it is massive.

Here is a shot at the SPMT (self propelled modular transports), you can see the huge beams necessary to hold it all together, at one point those beams started shaking up and down...they stopped for a while before moving again haha, guess they had to tweak some things.

Things are looking good

So in ASCE's smart brief I found a link to this USNews article that reported civil engineering as being the 26th best job for 2012. It says that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates between 2010 and 2020 there will be 51,000 jobs in that field that need to be occupied, now of course civil is very broad so the range of jobs there is huge but none the less this is some positive stuff. It makes me have a very good outlook on how things are going to be. Check out the link for the full article and see what other jobs hit the top 25.

US News Money

Doesn't this make you excited?

As nerdy as this might be, I think it is pretty hard for anyone to at least not consider going into engineering after watching this youtube clip. For anyone who is already thinking about going that route, well then this just seals the deal for you.

"Why be an Engineer?"