Invent Civil

In the past couple of days, the spill from the TVA plant has been gaining a lot more publicity.  This is thanks in part to two lawsuits that have been filed against the TVA.  The first suit is by a local landowner claiming $165 Million in damages to a nearby subdivision.  The second suit was [...]

On Monday, December 22, 2008 a retention pond at a steam plant in Tenessee was broken.  Surrounding roads and lands were flooded and ruined.  The good news is that there have been no injuries reported to date.  The Knoxville News Sentinel has posted an intriguing video of the aftermath:

The worst part of the whole break [...]

A recent post from the L.A. Creek Freak led me to one very interesting resource for up-and-coming stormwater management practices: Rainwater as a Resource.
Rainwater as a Resource is a report developed by “TreePeople”, a non-profit group from L.A. dedicated to sustainable development.  The report focuses on 3 sites that were chosen as pilot programs for [...]

1.0 Intro:
When I first found out that AutoCAD was adding a catchment delineation tool to Civil 3D, I was pretty excited. In fact, this tool was one of the reasons why I thought it’d be a good idea to create my AutoCAD to EPA-SWMM script. If you don’t know where to find the catchment and [...]

Thanks to the good people over at WaterWired, I came across the free online version of “Unsaturated Zone Hydrology for Scientists and Engineers”.  Apparently, Prentice-Hall and the USGS have made the textbook free for download. This will make a great addition to my list of open courseware for civil engineers.
Unsaturated Zone Hydrology for [...]

An article from stormh20.com covers an interesting story about the use of permeable pavement in some of Chicago’s aging alleys.  The article goes quite in-depth about the issues encountered in the design and implementation of the new permeable alleys.
The city started out with a select few pilot projects, and upon completion they proved to be [...]

I just finished reading an interesting article over at stormh2o.com, which covers two projects that are dedicated to the improvement of stormwater quality in Los Angeles County.
The first project uses the area below a recreational park to collect and infiltrate water, which maintains water quality while recharging the local groundwater:
At the northern, upstream side [...]

Low-impact development is an approach to stormwater management where the watershed under post-development conditions is made as close as possible to the pre-development properties.  This requires the stormwater design to include various methods that manage stormwater quantity and quality in a natural manner.  In their article “Understanding LID”, stormh2o.com talks about the common errors in [...]

This is an interesting video for all us civil engineers out there. Watch as this road collapses after some regional flooding in Freeport, Maine.

[Freeport Road Collapse] - via civil3d.com

Though I haven’t seen EPA-SWMM used extensively up here in Ontario, I was required to learn a bit of the program during my undergraduate studies. The first thing I noticed was how tedious it was to have to draw all the subcatchments freehand, and then to enter all the areas, widths, slopes, etc manually. [...]