Getting Sued and Other Tales of the Engineering Life - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

"What is it," a friend of Meehan's once asked, "that you engineers actually do? " The nine stories in this book, drawn from different periods and episodes in the author's life, clearly and entertainingly convey both the human and technical sides of an engineering education and the life of a consulting engineer. Meehan, who carried a journal with him during the course of his work, brings a quite different perspective to ordinary and extraordinary situations. Thought to be practical by nature, engineers are also idealistic: "...somewhere out there," Meehan imagines, "is the perfect design, the Perfect Dam." Snowbound on the Rio Pangle and A Dam for La Pra Plerng tell about his investigations of possible dam sites on a plateau in Thailand and in the Chilean Andes. In the first story Meehan solves an intriguing geological puzzle: "If nature had already built a reservoir here, we should only have to repair the breach in the rockslide dam to restore nature's lake for our own purpose. And yet in all of the site explorations...we found only loose broken rock. When I tried to pump water out of [an abandoned] shaft, it rushed back in as fast as the fifty gallons a minute we could pump. That was at least a number, and when I took that number and translated it mathematically into a leakage rate for a reservoir, the rate was such that the reservoir would never fill. But that's not what happened! It had filled before! Something prevented the water from leaking out. But what? Then I would look over that forlorn landscape again; at the porous gravel, and the loose rocky debris of the fans and the rockslide. Whatever it was, it must be hidden from view. There was a secret waiting to be uncovered; this stony valley was teasing me with clues...." At Lam Pra Plerng as an AID soil engineer, Meehan unfolds a series of political and social misadventures, portrays warm friendships and everyda

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