A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 20

Day 20

Today was our public works staff meeting. Only the superintendents of each division were at this meeting. Our supervisor usually begins each meeting by going over items and issues that relate to the entire department as a whole. Then each of us gives a division report – most of the time the majority of the discussion centers around projects we are working on. There’s a lot going on so the meeting took quite a while. After the meeting my supervisor and I went into the field to check on some of the operations. Some of the crews were out patching while others were working on a repair to an electric line damaged by a contractor working for a private developer. Another crew was excavating an area to determine why sinkholes keep showing up in the surface. The photo in this post shows the hole they were excavating. You can see a concrete storm sewer near the top of the surface.

In the afternoon one of the project engineers and I met with two representatives from an engineering consulting firm. They have been working on a culvert lining project for us. Today they showed us the plans which are about 90% completed. Next they will be finishing up the hydraulic calculation. We wanted to be sure the liner would not reduce the capacity so we are performing the calculation to document that it will not. Then they will submit the plans and specs to permitting authorities, although we suspect there could be no actual permit required. But we will submit just to make sure.

I also spent some time today discussing the road project with the engineer managing the job and prepared a write-up about the project for the city’s newsletter. Today was also the last summer intern’s final day with us. He will now go off to find a full time job as an engineer so if anyone is looking for a new civil engineering graduate who is hard working, friendly, and intelligent, drop me a line!

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