Mental Models of the Underworld

This is the first in a series of posts inspired by the Bryan Lovell Meeting at the Geological Society, 24th to 25th Nov 2016. More details here

At the end of two days talking about watery hazards such as flooding, drought, landslips and sinkholes came a session focused upon communication skills to explain those risks to the people who are affected by them. But there's a catch: it's not enough just to use what you think are simplified words in place of your usual engineering or geological jargon. First, you need to establish whether you have any concepts in common to which you can refer!

These Psalms Were Made For Walking

Some Psalms are known as the "songs of ascent", to be sung by pilgrims while walking up the steep road to Jerusalem for the major festivals. A friend was telling me this morning how he had done this himself earlier this year, an experience which had changed his understanding of the Psalms forever. But it turns out most of the Psalms have a sense of movement about them.

For example, what comes to your mind when you think of Psalm 23?

International Women's Day: Why I'm Pledging for Parity in the Rail Industry

The theme for this year's International Women's Day is to Pledge for Parity: "to change everything, we need everyone" because everyone can contribute to creating an inclusive culture. So what does that look like in engineering, and particularly the rail industry? I highly recommend the ICE's series of Engineering Change short talks (you could use these as conversation starters in a team briefing this month!)

Engineering change takes all of us - yes, you too! (image (c) Institution of Civil Engineers)

The Perfect Storm? Climate Change, Flooding and Resilience

Following the flooding across Yorkshire over Christmas, this week I'm speaking at a panel debate in York entitled "A Perfect Storm: Climate Change, Cuts and Floods", bringing a civil engineering perspective to a national (and international) problem. Come and join us at 7.30pm on Thursday 18th Feb, Quaker Meeting House, Friargate. 
So how can I summarise in a ten minute opening speech (alongside contributions from a climate expert, a flooded resident and a firefighter) what are the most important things we need to do to become more resilient to flooding, and are we doing them? Well, as I've written in my earlier posts, to consider a problem holistically I like to start from first principles. So here is the flooding problem as we face it in the UK: 

1) Rain falls out of the sky (and more rain is coming)
We live on an island next to the Atlantic Ocean, which is warming up as a result of climate change. The prevailing wind blows warm wet air over the UK, depositing its moisture as it goes (especially on the west side of the Pennines - sorry Cumbria!). My gut feeling in December was that something was seriously wrong with the weather and our infrastructure was likely to suffer the consequences. The Met Office confirmed this as the average temperature over the month of December was 8.0 degrees, a whopping 4.1 degrees higher than the long term average of 4 degrees and much larger than the previous record (6.9 degrees in 1934). 
Warm winters usually mean wet and windy ones, as storms blow in off the sea and this winter has been unusual, but not unexpected given what we know about climate impacts. Therefore, while we cannot control the weather itself, we do have a choice about limiting our carbon emissions now to prevent making it worse. 

ICE Triennial 2: Why Engineering Change Needs All of Us to Get Involved

This morning, an opinion piece about the value of learning by heart got me thinking. Does the ubiquitous  availability of sat-navs mean that the Knowledge, the detailed memorisation of routes through Central London required to become a London taxi driver, is no longer necessary? Or is there value in spending several years and discipline to get by hard work what any visitor can get off their smart phone? 

You could ask a similar question about engineering practice. A trend in the rail industry, where a quarter of experienced rail engineers are expected to retire in the next ten years, is to meet the shortage of skilled resources with project managers and new software to automate planning processes as much as possible. The ICE have been asking what the role of engineers will be in the future, in an age of Building Information Modelling (BIM), driverless cars and other technologies such a 3D printing or off-site fabrication. When people can look up anything that interests them on the internet, do we still need textbooks and engineering courses? 

In Praise of Precision

If you care about using language precisely, does that make you a pedant or a good engineer? This question has been coming up a lot lately, because people regularly use embankment, cutting and earthwork as if all three words mean exactly the same thing, whereas to a ground engineer like me, they are completely different. What's the difference then? 

• An embankment supports the railway track above natural ground level and was built by human hands, usually from poorly compacted soil, ash or rubble (because the Victorians had no access to the kind of compaction plant we would use today). The only way to find out what an embankment is made from is to drill boreholes, because there are no decent construction records from the 1830s and it could vary dramatically over a very short distance. If an embankment fails, your track could be left dangling in mid-air like those photos from Dawlish.
• A cutting is where the natural ground level is higher than the railway, so material can fall off or be washed onto the track, which can cause a derailment (whether this material is soil, pieces of rock or rotten tree stumps). Cuttings are slopes within the natural ground, so there might be layers of different types of soil, bands of hard and soft rock or places where groundwater emerges onto the slope (springs). You need to consult the geological map (and ideally some borehole data) to work out the ground conditions.
• An earthwork is "any structure made of earth" ie it is the general team we use to mean both embankments and cuttings.

So why use language precisely? Firstly to aid communication, because you can then ensure that you're not talking at cross purposes, and secondly because the public expects professional people to know what we are talking about. 

ICE Triennial #1: On Desmond and Destruction

It was a dark and stormy night...

So I began my blog two years ago in December 2013 telling my engineer's tales of how climate change is affecting UK infrastructure through storms, floods and landslides. This week, as the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris have worked through many stormy nights (literal and metaphorical) to try and hammer out a deal, the ICE hosted the Triennial Summit with the American and Canadian societies of civil engineers, a conference about resilience, climate and meeting the infrastructure needs of the future for cities around the world.

A review of 2013/14
2013/14 was a bad winter for the railways, as I wrote about in more detail a few months later in March 2014, when it had been confirmed as the wettest three month period in UK history in some places. The railway at Dawlish was wrecked by ferocious waves caused by the St Jude storm's high winds, cutting off rail access to Cornwall and it was only reopened in time for Easter.
There were over 100 landslides on the rail network, including several places like the Hastings line where multiple incidents happened on the same line. A presentation by a rail engineer for Kent at the Yorkshire Geotechnical Group in May told a sorry tale of fighting the elements to get the lines reopened again, but in some cases it took many weeks because it was impossible to get materials in or out by rail where the line was blocked in both directions.

Following the Yellow Train!

“Yellow Car” is a good way to keep children quiet on long journeys, as you score points if you’re the first person to shout whenever you spot one (and other than my friend Miles, there aren’t that many yellow cars on the road. I like playing a different version when I’m out on track, because spotting the yellow train is even more rare (there is only one which covers the whole country!)

So why is it painted yellow? This is Network Rail’s colour, chosen to look like no-one else’s livery and probably also because most of the “yellow plant” (rail-mounted kit for maintaining the track and wires) and engineering trains (essentially freight trains transporting ballast or track) need to be visible in the dark, because we rail engineers rarely have the luxury of being able to do construction work during the day!

But the yellow train I like to watch out for is an HST (that’s your average intercity-type passenger train to non-trainspotters) painted bright yellow and marked “New Measurement Train” on the side. This one train is a piece of technology that has revolutionised how we maintain the UK railway because it travels the whole passenger network over a regular cycle and measures the condition of the track and the overhead wires (are they in the right place and delivering the right amount of power?), saving thousands of hours of track inspection time. 

The circular economy and sustainable concrete

Do engineers need to significantly change how we use materials to make what we build sustainable? I've been thinking recently about this question in the context of concrete, one of the most frequently used materials in construction. In this post I'll be exploring the two main problems with concrete: that it is extremely energy-intensive to manufacture, and it is difficult to re-use without downgrading the quality.

For example, industry statistics show that last year the UK construction industry used 15 million cubic metres (37.5 million tonnes) of ready-mix concrete and 25 million tonnes of concrete products from blocks and pre-cast walls to driven piles.  

Castleton cement works in Derbyshire
(picture by Dave Pape)

Concrete is formed from two materials: cement and aggregate. Quarrying is required for both elements (with attendant environmental and landscape impacts), but the cement also requires a chemical reaction to occur: calcium carbonate (ie limestone) is heated to a high temperature (300 degrees C) to drive off CO2 and form calcium oxide instead. Therefore making cement produces CO2 both from the fuel used for heating and from the reaction itself (although this can be somewhat recovered when used, as hardening cement absorbs CO2 to form calcium carbonate again). 

Renewable Heat for Community Buildings

Acomb - the story so far

What do you do when your boiler is very old and you know that the next time the gas man comes to fix it, it might not recover? Most people would replace it with a more efficient new gas boiler, but the issue is: given that fuel prices are on a steady upward curve with the expectation that this will only get worse over the next 20-30 years, why lock yourself in to an old technology and high bills?
For Acomb Methodist Church, the answer is obvious: power the new boiler with renewable heat. Work is still in the early stages of getting prices, but I thought it would help to summarise the story so far.

Making a difference in Manchester

A group of London engineers recently made a video of "Engineering Happiness" featuring engineers dancing to the song "Happy" at locations around the capital where civil engineers have changed lives, from the Thames Barrier and sewage works to the Olympic Park and the new Crossrail tunnels.

Here's my own story of engineering pride: I saw a tram today at Manchester Airport.

Wildlife (and weeds) on track - October

My first site visit of October took me to a rural stretch of railway near Corby which included a stunning brick viaduct across a wide valley – the bridge has been repaired so often with so many different colours of brick that it’s hard to tell which are the original bricks!
On the wildlife front, we saw a stoat running along near the track, a hedgehog, a pheasant and several different butterflies.

Winter Woes for a (not very) resilient railway

This week, I had an interesting discussion with the asset management engineer at Network Rail who is responsible for all the earthworks between London and the Scottish border on the east side of the Pennines. On his wall, he had a set of Met Office maps which compare the rainfall in a particular month with the 30-year average: the South East and South West are completely covered in deep blue, indicating greater than 200% and 300% of the normal average rainfall for three months in a row (Dec 2013 to Feb 2014). Fortunately for my colleague, the East Coast Mainline has mainly kept out of the danger zone, so we've escaped the worst of the problems.

Good news - British railways are getting better!

Here is a good news story that you don't hear very often: Britain is currently undergoing the biggest investment in railway infrastructure since the  Victorian era, with plans now approved for £37bn of investment over the next 5 years (note that this figure includes normal operations and maintenance as well as enhancement work).
And no, I'm not talking about HS2, being the only railway project most people have heard of! In fact, I'm talking about what's happening to improve our existing railways: Network Rail has a big vision for how we could make the railways work better and the long term funding to make it happen. And a recent report by the European Commission which compared progress in all EU countries since 1990 concluded that we have the most improved railway network in Europe. 

Storms, Floods and Landslides - An Engineer's Tale

At this point in my blog, I could try to explain to you the science behind climate change, and the ever-growing body of evidence demonstrating that the atmosphere is getting warmer and that this is almost certainly the result of human activity releasing astonishingly huge quantities of greenhouse gases. I could show you the 5^th report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published this year demonstrating yet again the consensus from scientists across the world about this problem.
But I won't, because you learned the basics of the greenhouse effect at school and people have an uncanny tendency to switch off as soon as anything is mentioned that relies upon them understanding any details about the workings of the troposphere. I am not a climate scientist, I'm a civil engineer. So instead, I will tell my own story of how the change in our climate is already affecting us in the UK and my daily work through storms, floods and landslides.