STUDENT NEWS
Engineers Without Borders members were among three college groups to receive funding in spring 2009 under the UW-Madison Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment. Co-led by CEE graduate student Alison Sanders, the EWB domestic project is partnering with the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa to help provide sustainable engineering solutions to flooding problems in a tribal cemetery. The cemetery redesign will implement a French drain and drainage tile running underneath the site to lower the water table.
A selection committee from the International Activities Council of the Geo-Institute has invited CEE and GLE PhD student Chris Bareither to represent the American Society of Civil Engineers Geo-Institute at the fourth international Young Geotechnical Engineering Conference, October 2 through 6 in Alexandria, Egypt. Bareither’s advisors are Professors Tuncer Edil and Craig Benson.
In April 2009, master’s student Sasanka Gandavarapu was one of two winners in the 2009 AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) GIS for Transportation Symposium Student Paper Contest. His paper detailed use of GIS to assess built environment investment impacts on travel behavior, public health and air quality. Gandavarapu’s advisor is Assistant Professor Jessica Guo.
The board of regents of the Eno Transportation Foundation selected graduate student Ghazan Khan to participate in the annual Eno Leadership Development Conference in Washington, D.C., May 11 through 14. The conference provided him with a firsthand look at how transportation policy is developed and implemented, and enabled him to meet top government officials, association leaders, and members of Congress and their staff. Khan is studying under Associate Professor David Noyce.
Graduate student Adam Bechle received a three-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to develop an automated estuary discharge imaging system to measure estuary discharge using video tracking of water surface movement. Climate change could bring about storms with increased intensity and Bechle’s goal is for his discharge imaging system to provide a long-term solution to monitor these effects on estuary discharge patterns.
Alum recalls the first concrete canoe
By Dave Hein (BS ’72), P.E., Hawaii District Engineer,
Kona International Airport, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii
n the late winter of 1972 one night after classes, I attended an ASCE student chapter meeting in the engineering building. At the very end of the meeting the chapter president said, “We have one more item on the agenda tonight. We received a letter from the ASCE student chapter at Illinois inviting us to build a concrete canoe and come down to Indianapolis this spring and race it against them. They apologize for the late notice, but hope we can make it anyway. They say that last year they made one and raced it against Purdue, but this year they’d like a few more schools to join in if possible. If we can come they’d love to include us.”
And then he asked if there was any interest. When no one spoke up I raised my hand and said, “I’d be willing to act as a chairman for the project, but I’m not specializing in structural engineering. If I can get our funding is there anyone here who would like to lead a design and construction committee?” At this point one of the guys took the bait and said something like, ‘If you get the money, we’ll build it!’”
So the next day I made an appointment to see Professor “Red” Wagner who was the chair of the civil engineering department at the time to explain this crazy project and ask for help. Professor Wagner was totally supportive and provided all the money for materials and lab space to build whatever we needed. And so the die was cast: We were about to make a boat out of concrete. It sounded totally nuts but also like it might be a bit of fun. Nobody had a clue about how we were going to pull this off but that was just a minor detail.
Time was very short and we only had about eight weeks or so for design and construction. Research was difficult and information hard to come by. In the end the guys made a huge boat stuffed with Styrofoam and just buoyant enough to stay afloat with a couple of people in it. It weighed well in excess of 400 pounds and God only knows how thick the gunwales were! But it was a canoe (of sorts), and it floated, and it was the pride and joy of us all. It had Bucky’s name on it. We were on our way to Indianapolis!
That year we put our best (as it were) up against Indiana, Purdue, Ohio State, Michigan State, and a Michigan naval academy none of us had ever heard of. The naval academy canoe was extremely impressive and was a scale model of some sort of military vessel complete with the bow bulb commonly seen on big tankers. It was a thin shell canoe similar to what Purdue and Illinois had at the time and all of them made our effort look like a Model “T” by comparison. But the naval boat had a fatal flaw: Its “engines” were not to scale! It capsized easily. In just about every race the poor thing was upside down almost as soon as the starting gun went off and was swum back to shore by its paddlers. It had an impressive paint job and looked great, though.
Our boat wasn’t the heaviest that year. The guys from Michigan State were caught equally off guard and brought a vessel that weighed well over 450 pounds! It wasn’t all thin shell craft in 1972. Bucky had Spartan and maybe even Buckeye company in the weight class department.
Probably the biggest issue we had to face that first year was the fact that no one really knew how to paddle a canoe! It’s true. Most of us spent more time trying to figure out how to make the 400-pound monster go in a straight line than anything else! The only other name of our effort that I can remember was my good friend and civil engineering summer surveying camp roommate, Ronald Wahl (BS ’72). Ron and I were paired to race together in one of the heats, and we spent the entire time going in circles. We were so bad we almost didn’t get the canoe back to shore before the start of the next race! I think we laughed the whole time. Neither of us had ever been in a canoe before then in our lives. And I haven’t been in one since.
I lost a cylinder in my motorcycle in Indianapolis and had to make repairs to get myself and my girlfriend back home. We rode back much of the way through freezing rain. The guy who towed our monster down there and back ruined the brakes on his car. It was a weekend none of us will ever forget. And I’m sure none of us will ever regret either.
I am very proud of what UW-Madison civil engineering students have done since our modest beginning. Classes that followed ours have built state-of-the-art thin-shell canoes and have gone on to win national titles. They deserve all the accolades they get. We were happy just to get something built that stayed afloat. Everything begins somewhere. Bucky’s first concrete canoe started with a simple invitation one winter day in 1972. It wasn’t perfect, but it was all great fun! Now that building canoes has become a focal point and tradition at Wisconsin gives me great pleasure. I’m so glad to have had a part in it.
