Author Archives: Mike Roselli
In Colorado for Labor Day Weekend. Kim and I took a trip up to the Rocky Mountain State Park today and hiked up to Alberta Falls. Unbelievable. Pictures can’t express what you can see here. Also met Lars and Henriette at the continental divide, as they continue their wild trek from Alaska to Argentina on motorcycle. Keep going guys, you can make it!
Happy Labor Day everyone.
So it seems there were a few damages from the Virginia earthquake earlier this week. The biggest damages on the news? The National Cathedral and the Washington Monument. The Washington Monument suffered some cracking at the very top and has since been closed indefinitely to the public until damages can be assessed. As for the National Cathedral, gargoyles, spires, buttresses, and walls cracked, shifted, or fell and shattered. Other homes and businesses near the epicenter were damaged as well.
While damages under 6.0 earthquakes are rare, they do indeed occur, especially in a region less known and under-designed for quakes. In fact, the area falls in a zone of very small seismic risk (see the 2012 International Building Code Map, courtesy of USGS), which is a big part of the problem. Another part of the problem is the age of these structures. Newer buildings and building methods are much safer than they used to be in this regard, but many older buildings will suffer problems, especially since there is little desire to improve them and little funding to do so. Continue reading
I’m very excited and can’t wait to hear Dream Theater’s new album, hitting shelves next month, with new drummer Mike Mangini. It’s preordered and in the pipeline, but when I have a chance to take a listen, I’ll post my review. In the meantime, I’ve kept my ears fresh by following former DT drummer Mike Portnoy’s new band, Adrenaline Mob. These guys rock, really, really hard. Their EP is available on iTunes.
In other artistic news, my friend Jessica Prescott published a guest post that I wrote on her poetry blog. If you think you have what it takes to pen a magnificent six-word short story, Ernest Hemingway style, head over to the comments section and give it a shot.
A very unusual earthquake struck Mineral, Virginia this afternoon at about 1:51pm EDT. I was sitting at my desk at work when it struck, and felt it here in Raleigh, North Carolina. At first we didn’t know what it was, or if it was related to nearby construction in the area, but most at the office felt it. Intense! This will be my first earthquake. Here is a link to the quake at the USGS website.
It was more like a small tremor here in Raleigh. As exciting as it sounds to witness such an unusual force of nature, what’s important is that the damages were few and far between. It was felt from South Carolina to Maine, but the extent of damages occurred at the Washington National Cathedral. In fact, some very funny internet meme’s are already circulating about the quake. Important to note here that earthquakes less than a 6.0 magnitude rarely cause damages to roads, buildings, or bridges, but if there’s any doubt, structures should be evaluated.
I worked on a few earthquake simulations at the Constructed Facilities Lab at NC State. We had a shake table to use to simulate the effects of an earthquake, similar to this one. You may hear peers or even members of the media refer to the “Richter Scale.” This is wrong! The Richter Scale was abandoned years ago because of the upper limit on it’s order of magnitude and it’s unreliability at around 600km away. MMS, a similar logarithmic scale, replaced Richter. It is similarly based on orders of magnitude, i.e. a 6.0 earthquake is 10-times as strong as a 5.0 earthquake, a 7.0 10-times as strong as a 6.0, and so on, but without the inherent problems of the older method.
Recent events such as the earthquakes in Chili, Haiti, and Japan have brought Earthquake Engineering back into the spotlight. This is a very important field and one that deserves more research funding than it receives. Very rare to have an earthquake of this magnitude in this area of the United States. If you felt it, congratulations. Now get back inside and go back to work.
Went backpacking last weekend in Uwharrie National Forest. I forgot just how far twenty miles was with a pack. Talk about hot, I also forgot why I hadn’t backpacked in the beginning of August before. Made stroganoff at camp with the trusty Whisperlite, and we filtered most of our water from the streams we crossed. Looking forward to revisiting the trail in the fall when the leaves change color!
Hot on the heals of budget deals, deficit raising, and spending cuts in Washington comes a report from the American Society of Civil Engineers saying that our failing infrastructure will impact the US Gross Domestic Product by 2.7 trillion dollars by 2040. All due to funding gaps between what we use and what we actually pay to maintain. This will cause 400,000 lost jobs, lower incomes, lower spending, and lower exports, worsening the US trade position. Transportation is quite possibly the MOST important infrastructure to a first world economy, it would be a shame to have made decades of investment to watch it crumble. Care about your transportation systems? Vote accordingly and write your congressmen, both local and national.
Full story: Reuters
Left turns are terrible. When they aren’t extremely hazardous for drivers, they cause significant delays for other movements in the intersection because of dedicated left turn phases. Engineers have been plagued with this problem for years and have come up with many solutions, but usually the public doesn’t want anything to do with them. Even when they work exceptionally well, the Jughandle, the Michigan Left, and the all-powerful SPUI (single point urban interchange) all took time to introduce to the public. Even the roundabout is feared in areas where drivers don’t use them often, and the super-street causes uproar over driveway access to businesses. A personal favorite of mine, one I studied extensively in an unconventional intersection design course, is the Diverging Diamond Interchange. I designed a hypothetical DDI for Raleigh back in undergrad. It’s neat, but it’s been a hard press on the public to try something as different as driving on the wrong side of the road. Continue reading
A new transportation bill is going to decide how the United States spends money on transportation for the next six years. Unfortunately, those to whom this legislation has the most impact have the smallest voice. According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights report “Where We Need to Go: A Civil Rights Roadmap for Transportation Equity“, most funds only cover highways and very little public transportation. Millions of poor and working-class people are cut off from being able to go anywhere because the average cost of owning a car is around $9,500 a year and the current poverty level is at $22,350. I’ve long been a proponent of public transportation for it’s efficiency but it’ll never work as well in the United States as it does in countries in Europe due to our population density. This does NOT mean we don’t need it. We sprawled ourselves out much too far and built too many roads out to suburbs, roads that require upkeep and gas taxes to maintain. Now we pay the price for making the wrong investments without seeing the true cost of a highway system that squeezes every dollar out of American transportation funding.
Public transportation is very important in urban areas, and without it, many can not get to the job they need to live the American dream. It seems that the millions of Americans who have always had access to a personal vehicle don’t understand the lives of people who don’t, and don’t want to pay for them to have an opportunity to work and contribute to society. As a country we need to rethink our transportation policies, so that highway drivers understand the real cost of an American transportation system, and mass transit is finally given the funding it needs to become useful to Americans in highly populated areas.
Full article in Wired.
Someone shared this video with me recently and I wanted to post it. It’s a video showing numerous contained demolition experiments for graduate student projects at the NC State Constructed Facilities Laboratory. I worked in this lab in the summer of 2006 on many graduate theses, and at least one of these experiments I recognized from actually standing nearby when the beam exploded. Others I recognize from projects I worked on, but I may not have been present for, such as the experiment on adding FRP (fiber reinforced polymer) strips to steel beams to increase their strength.
Enjoy the video. The music is fantastic.
Two weeks ago, an unfortunate collision occurred at a railroad grade crossing in Maine. Reuters reports that a dump truck was hit by an Amtrak train and the driver was fatally wounded. Four passengers aboard the train were injured as well. Terrible. At-grade railroad crossings are some of the most dangerous intersections we have on our road system and they should be avoided whenever possible. Fortunately, many public agencies are fully aware of hazards associated with them and are taking steps to fix them. Here is a list of policies in the United States associated with at-grade crossings, published by the Federal Highway Administration. If you live in North Carolina, rest assured that NCDOT can and will use its power to remove, abandon, close, or regulate all railroad grade crossings. That is, if politicians don’t try to stop the sensibilities of the engineers there.
You might also be interested to know that railroad companies are also very aware of these hazards. CSX, for example, is “firmly opposed” to at-grade crossings and supports policies in place by the USDOT and state agencies to limit their use. You can read more about their leadership in this area on their website.
It’s a shame to see collisions on train tracks. Look both ways when you have to cross tracks and don’t, under any circumstances, try to “beat” the train or drive around protective barriers. It’s not worth it.