June 2007  |  Volume 77, Number 6

Perfect Harmony

By Darrell E. Waters

The elegant expansion of the Orange County Performing Arts Center has added two venues, including a new concert hall designed to meet exacting acoustic requirements that is a study in collaboration at its finest.

The Underwater Way

By Richard Bentwood, P.E., BCEE, M.ASCE, Raul Banuelos, P.E., Paul Liu, P.E., M.ASCE, Russell Pierson, P.E., Jon Kaneshiro, P.E., M.ASCE, Craig White, P.E., M.ASCE, and Joe Van Ryzin, Ph.D., P.E.

When stringent surface water runoff regulations forced the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to construct a bypass system for part of its Stone Canyon Reservoir Complex, the engineering solution included two tunnels and a 4,200 ft (1,280 m) long underwater pipeline constructed of high-density polyethylene. The innovative approach helped to reduce the final cost of the project by more than $10 million.

The ERP Report

A large portion of the destruction from Hurricane Katrina was caused not only by the storm itself but also by problems with engineering and engineering-related policies, problems exposed by the storm. This article is a distillation of some of the major findings of asce’s Hurricane Katrina External Review Panel report, The New Orleans Hurricane Protection System: What Went Wrong and Why.

The Millstones of Barbegal

By Wayne F. Lorenz, P.E., and Phillip J. Wolfram, S.M.ASCE

Millstones and millstone fragments discovered within ancient ruins in southern France indicate that the Romans may have used the site to test designs that would enable them to develop more technologically advanced flour mills—powered by water—that increased production and quality.