(upbeat music)
(Announcer) Civil engineering is everywhere.
It's in every road you drive. It's in the clean water you drink.
It's where you live, work, and play. it really is all around you.
Civil engineers help improve the lives of millions of people every day.
We're gonna meet three civil engineers and look at some of the real ways
that they're helping communities right now.
America's water waste system is home to an entire ecosystem.
The animals that live in the water,
depend on us to keep their communities clean.
This is James Wanaburg.
James is working to create a healthy habitat
and ecosystem in Washington D.C's Potomac River.
He's a resident engineer for The Blue Plains Tunnel,
part of the DC's Clean Rivers Project.
This tunnel project is using a massive drill
that's almost 30 feet high and over 400 feet long.
(James) This is my office.
(upbeat music)
We're here for D.C Water working on the Clean Rivers Project.
This project is intended to eliminate sewer overflows.
into the D.C. waterways,
which ultimately go down to the Chesapeake Bay.
So, we're cleaning up the rivers. Right now, we're working on a deep tunnel.
It's called the Blue Plains Tunnel,
and this is going to capture storm water underground,
and allow that to be treated later after a big rain event.
The tunnel boring machine we're using here is
an amazing piece of equipment. It's fantastic.
It's 26 foot diameter, and it bores horizontally underground,
like a drill, and it holds back all the earth pressures
and the hydro static forces that are below ground at that depth.
It also allows us to install the pre-cast rings,
they're made out of concrete, pre-cast segments,
and that ring forms the pipe that will be there
permanently after we're finished digging the tunnel.
Civil engineering is a, it's a fantastic profession.
it really deals with engineering all of the world around us.
There's infrastructure on the surface, things that people see and use every day,
like roadways, bridges, things of that nature.
Then there's also a tremendous amount of civil engineering
below the surface that no one ever sees.
That's what we're dealing with here.
In my view, that's one of the best parts of civil engineering
is working on the underground side. It's so much fun.
I never imagined I'd be able to work on something this cool,
but I always had an interest in big projects.
I love being part of it. It's a great mission.
I come to work everyday excited to do this
and we can't wait to see the end result of all the hard work.
My name's James and I'm a civil engineer.
(Upbeat Music)
(Narrator:) Hurricanes can destroy entire communities
that then take years to rebuild,
Maggie Jakes is a Civil Engineer who went to Haiti to help
restore clean drinking water after the hurricane.
Maggie was forever changed through her experiences
in Haiti, helping a desperate community and touching lives.
(Maggie:) So, my junior year in college,
my professor did a presentation on his trip to Haiti
and what he found when he was there. Their biggest problem was drinking water.
They didn't have clean water to drink
and thousands of people are dying each year because of this.
So, he was trying to get civil engineering students
from Merrimack to travel there. 2011 we traveled to Haiti.
For the first time, we went to a town called Manoir.
This is where severe cholera outbreaks hit every year.
There's a big clinic there
and we saw all the cholera tents still set up
from their recent outbreak.
The system was damaged by the 2010 earthquake,
and it was broken in a few places, but the water was relatively clean.
So, we made a few repairs to that.
They were just so grateful that we were there.
Because we were there, we gave them hope.
In the United States, we're really lucky to have access to clean water
and that's thanks to years of hard working engineers.
My experiences in Haiti, and my later years at college,
really opened my eyes to how many possibilities
there really are for civil engineers to help.
My name is Maggie Jakes and I'm a civil engineer.
(wind blowing)
(crowd cheering)
(Narrator:) Ah, baseball, the crack of the bat,
the roar of the crowd, the amazing ball parks
that are home to our national pastime.
Meet Aaron White, the civil engineer
in charge of designing the hurricane-proof retractable roof
at the Marlins Park in Florida.
(Aaron:) This is the first roof in the world
that was designed for a category five hurricane.
It weighs roughly 7,800 tons of steel and it was actually designed to be
positioned in a slightly open position for the hurricanes to let wind
into the space and then back out to decrease the wind pressure on the roof.
Obviously, anytime there's the threat of a rain storm during a game,
you have the problem of a rain delay.
If you know Miami,
it rains here pretty much every day during the summer.
So, they have the ability to close the roof very quickly
if there's an impending thunder storm or rain storm.
So, there's a guarantee that the game's gonna happen every night
and that's extremely important. The mechanization is very efficient.
It's designed so it only costs about 10 dollars
in electricity to move the roof open and closed.
So, early on in the design, we tried to establish what
the minimum height of the roof over the playing field actually is.
So, we scoured the internet
and found some equations that were put out by NASA,
I believe, for the flight of a batted ball.
Through those equations, you can actually calculate the flight of the batted ball
at all different angles of the ball leaving the bat.
So, if it goes straight up in the air, it goes straight horizontally, or a nice
trajectory of a line drive.
So, we actually crated those shapes early on
and put them over the playing field to make sure that the shape of the roof
that was above the playing field would never come in contact
with a batted ball.
We really interact with a lot of people.
So, there's a common conception that engineers just kind
of go in their office and work by themselves doing calculations,
but that couldn't be further from the truth.
I'm Aaron White and I'm a civil engineer.
(upbeat music)
(Narrator) Civil engineers have cool jobs.
They're creative and innovative people.
They make an impact and change lives, making our world a better place.
The bottom line, if you want an amazing career
that makes a difference, then do something real.
Be a civil engineer.
(upbeat music)