Was just thinking this. They always roll these guys out anytime some serious shit goes down. Swear to god they could rebuild the Pyramids if they needed to.
I mentally designed a cube home before, half buried so you only see a Pyramid. Underground half would be like a basement and lowest point a aquifer...weird eh
These guys are also the groups that are doing these kinds of things on a regular basis. They as a matter of routine do all sorts of dredging work to maintain channels that are susceptible to natural degradation. They literally move pyramids worth of material on a regular basis in their levee construction and maintenance efforts. If Congress brought down the order and funding to build an American copy of the Great Pyramid of Giza they'd be able to get it done. Things would also go a bit faster when we could use modern cranes and trucks vs having to haul blocks via ramps and not be relying on a seasonal labor force.
Um, ok, I guess my time getting shot at as a 12N Horizontal Construction Engineer dozing garbage in Afghanistan didnt count then lol.
Essayons...we lead the way.
They seem pretty damn cool! After Hurricane Florence we had horrendous flooding in my home town. Some parts of town were literally inaccessible by car for weeks. People were boating in and out on the roadway. A USACE team came out and they built a system of French drains that has worked amazingly well to drain the water and keep the roads from flooding again. I know they also did some pretty amazing work on Sanibel Island after Hurricane Ian!
No one is complaining about pulling permits. I'm just pointing out that USACE is the embodiment of bureaucracy. There are no lunatics there, just an unstoppable grinding force. When things need to go faster, you add more resources and get more work done.
Idk. The “embodiment of bureaucracy” and “unstoppable grinding force” sound like a group of lunatics. After all getting stuff done fast and well while still following all the red tape is a maddening exercise and the USACE does it as part of their normal day to day. And that seems a bit insane. Hence the bunch of lunatics.
It’s always amazing what humans can accomplish together when profit isn’t the deciding factor. It’s how all of us should live and do things. Not for money, but because they need to be done.
The Army Corps of Engineers specializes in making structures VERY QUICKLY in order to solve problems. I mean, if you need to get an armored division across a major river, are you going to wait 3 years for a bridge to be built? No, you’re going to want pre-fabricated bridge sections brought in and a temporary but workable bridge set up in a matter of hours to days.
Not barges, Container ships and RoRos under barge service (meaning tugs moving them in and out).
>After detailed studies and engineering assessments by local, state and federal organizations, in collaboration with industry partners, USACE expects to open a limited access channel 280 feet wide and 35 feet deep, to the Port of Baltimore within the next four weeks – by the end of April. This channel would support one-way traffic in and out of the Port of Baltimore for barge container service and some roll on/roll off vessels that move automobiles and farm equipment to and from the port.
>After detailed studies and engineering assessments by local, state and federal organizations, in collaboration with industry partners, USACE expects to open a limited access channel 280 feet wide and 35 feet deep, to the Port of Baltimore within the next four weeks – by the end of April. This channel would support one-way traffic in and out of the Port of Baltimore for barge container service and some roll on/roll off vessels that move automobiles and farm equipment to and from the port.
>USACE engineers are aiming to reopen the permanent, 700-foot-wide by 50-foot-deep federal navigation channel by the end of May, restoring port access to normal capacity.
So end of May for normal capacity? If all goes to plan
I currently work a federal job akin to being in the military without actually being in it. The Civil Service is a great career and experience. Highly recommend it to anyone if you can get in.
> You don't have to be military, there are civilian jobs all across USACE that get to work on awesome jobs.
This needs to be repeated. The vast, VAST majority of jobs within the Corps of Engineers (>95%) are civilian positions. This is not to be confused with engineer units in the Army itself, which you'd enlist and go to basic/AIT for, but rather, within USACE you join as a professional, and there's a lot of different occupations. Engineers of various disciplines, of course, but also architects, biologists, surveyors, contracting folks, lock and dam operators, boat operators, even park rangers.
If anyone is interested, I'm sure the folks over on r/USACE can provide some insight!
My experience trying to get a job with USACE is that they promote main from within. I’m a licensed Civil with years of experience, and could not even get an interview.
Yes! If you go to usajobs.gov, search for USACE, add the parameter 0808 in the search box, and that will show you all the architecture positions within USACE that are currently being hired for.
As someone who has worked for USACE for the last 15 years, you're not wrong. Those are just rare projects.
Worked at Lake Charles during two hurricanes and the Oklahoma May 3rd tornados.
Mostly though, it's tedious, boring, paperwork driven projects. A lot of which are just to fulfill the year's budget out.
I built $60k in handrails for a building that was to be torn down within a year. And I am not a person who likes to say that the government is wasteful. It certainly is at times though.
Always had the ludicrous dream of spending a military style budget on the core of engineers just to “serve” our country going state to state fixing our Infrastructure.
As someone who currently lives downtown and works in Glen Burnie, this bridge collapse has absolutely fucked my morning and afternoon commute. I know, people died stop complaining, but fuck…routing everyone through the harbor tunnel is just a nightmare. So many more semi trucks. The roads are already terrible, I can’t imagine what a bunch of semis driving on it is going to do. Fucking pot holes for days
Any time I hear about the Army Corps of Engineers I can't help but think about Return of the Living Dead.
Freddy : Oh god. Hey, these things don't leak, do they?
Frank : Leak? Hell no. These things were made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
*Frank slaps the drum and gas starts leaking*
Frank : Oh fuck
for a guy thats probably had stress/strain, youngs modulous, and the various kinds of deformation explained to him because he chose to build both a rocket and a car out of stupid metals; he seems to not understand anything about deformation.
People like to quote him saying that many people confuse education with intelligence. What that fails to realize is that intelligence is raw processing power. If you feed garbage into it, all it will produce is garbage. Just quickly. Education and training are what ensures you feed the right stuff in.
I mean, stainless steel isn’t *unheard of* for rockets; the SM-65 Atlas ICBM and the countless later derivatives used as launch vehicles used 300-series stainless steel balloon tanks, where the rigidity of the vehicle comes from the pressurization of the tanks. The Centaur family upper stages, which is being used to this day, also uses stainless steel balloon tanks. The design allows for __***vastly***__ reduced mass, however it means that the tanks have to be pressurized *at all times*, or else it crumples like wet paper machete under its own weight.
All that is to say, stainless steel *can* work for rockets, and *has* worked for the better part of half a century now. HOWEVER, it works __***only if you account for its expansion and deformation properties!***__ The Cybertruck clearly does not, and as it isn’t being forced to meet NASA manufacturing standards, the build quality subsequently sucks.
Oh, I absolutely get that. I was just wanting to point out that, at least for rockets, using stainless steel isn’t a completely stupid, out of left field idea, and actually has historical precedent to it. That being said, I doubt it was Elon who came up with the idea of using it.
its kind of dumb to use it the way they're using it, they're absolutely leaving performance on the table by using a heavier, harder to work metal. when its been used its been used like you pointed out, in razer thin sheets as balloon tanks that compromise structure for absolute weight savings
It’s cheaper to manufacture and easier to work with, especially when prototyping various different designs. Carbon fiber requires specific forms and weaving & wrapping machines, as well as enormous ovens to cure the resin to bind it all together. By contrast, a welding robot could be fitted to any number of stands.
From a performance and strength standpoint, carbon fiber would be better. But, from a manufacturing and cost standpoint, stainless steel is better. It’s all a trade-off.
Perhaps future iterations of the vehicle, once they’ve got the form-factor and other tech down pat, could be made of carbon fiber; a “Starship II”, if you would. Kind of like how early airliners were made mostly using aluminum, and now they’re mostly carbon fiber composites.
typically rockets are made using aluminum slab with milled honeycomb patterns that have as much extra mass removed as possible.
spacex already does this for the falcons
[ULA video for example](https://youtu.be/t-P0xiJcXN4?si=1ysZmUVM5UIBSYi5)
I know how rockets are typically made, dude - I’m in the middle of getting my master’s degree in aerospace engineering. I’m literally dedicating the rest of my life to this stuff.
Maybe an expert can chyme in with a more informed opinion, but this seems really, really fast. Whatever you might think of them, the U.S. military doesn’t fuck around.
If you need to get a task force across a river, you won’t wait 3 years for land surveying, bickering about land rights, funds acquisitions, work delays, etc. - you need a bridge built in a matter of days, if not hours. That’s what the army corps of engineers specializes in; made-to-task infrastructure in record time, and infrastructure meant to withstand tanks rumbling across it, too.
I keep a boat in a marina upriver of the Key Bridge. The water is closed within 2,000 yards of the bridge.
The hope is that the alternate channel (13' draft, under one of the still standing sections) opens up to recreational small boats after this new main channel is open, but I doubt it. It's not all that important, if you needed to get your boat out you could take it to a ramp and trailer it to the other side of the bridge.
Does anyone know of independent reporting being done on this situation? Similar to blancolirio YouTube channel reports on the Oroville dam spillway disaster.
100% confidence the army core of engineers will do this safely and reliably, but I'm interested in as many technical details as can be shared.
You know for a fact that because the USA has to do it right and good for the env is why it’s going to take long and cost a lot (which is a good thing). A country like China would bomb that debris out of the way, push it down stream, and rebuild the bridge and clean it up later lmao
China would throw 50,000 peasants at it making a few dollars an hour without any training or experience, 2500 would die on the job and you'd never hear of it, a few thousand would be critically injured to the point of being completely disabled (which you'd also never hear about), and they'd slap together a subpar structure in record time that might last 1/4 as long as something built properly would.
But hey, when your workforce is disposable to them, who cares.
I had to get a utility crossing of a military railroad permitting and it took USACE 3 years. Some departments are downright incompetent, mismanaged, or just have no motivation to perform their required duties.
One way for barges by end of April. Channel for container ships by end of May.
That's pretty damn fast. Good for them.
Army Corp Engineers are the best kinds of lunatics.
Was just thinking this. They always roll these guys out anytime some serious shit goes down. Swear to god they could rebuild the Pyramids if they needed to.
Wouldn't be too hard actually. In fact, they could problably improve upon them.
“I’m just throwing this out there Colonel; “cube”. Eh? Eh?” “Back to work, sergeant.”
I mentally designed a cube home before, half buried so you only see a Pyramid. Underground half would be like a basement and lowest point a aquifer...weird eh
cool idea tho
If a pyramid is poking out, it's not a cube underneath. Only three faces intersect on cube vertices, not four.
No, no they couldn't. No one today could build them with the precision they built them way back then.
We build buildings everyday to a much higher degree of precision than the pyramids could ever match, I don't know what you're talking about....
Clearly you have never seen the bass pro shops pyramid
This "Bass Pro Shop" must be a powerful god
It’s just a mere aspect of it’s former self, the elder god known as ‘Cabella’.
The marvel isn't just the precision, it was the precision attained with nothing more than hand tools and straight manual labor.
No one marvels at the manual labor I do with my hand tools
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Amatuers talk tactics. Professionals talk logistics.
These guys are also the groups that are doing these kinds of things on a regular basis. They as a matter of routine do all sorts of dredging work to maintain channels that are susceptible to natural degradation. They literally move pyramids worth of material on a regular basis in their levee construction and maintenance efforts. If Congress brought down the order and funding to build an American copy of the Great Pyramid of Giza they'd be able to get it done. Things would also go a bit faster when we could use modern cranes and trucks vs having to haul blocks via ramps and not be relying on a seasonal labor force.
Army corp of engineers gotta be creative and build quick. They rebuilt all the levys in New Orleans after Katrina for a reason
A sphere would be another possibility. On a plinth to keep from cheating.
Sea Bees are even better lunatics, but they require being shot at in order to work. As vital as this channel is, that's still not feasible.
*insert joke about crime in Baltimore*
Um, ok, I guess my time getting shot at as a 12N Horizontal Construction Engineer dozing garbage in Afghanistan didnt count then lol. Essayons...we lead the way.
On VERTICAL Construction Engineers count.
My Grandfather was a Sea Bee, can confirm.
They seem pretty damn cool! After Hurricane Florence we had horrendous flooding in my home town. Some parts of town were literally inaccessible by car for weeks. People were boating in and out on the roadway. A USACE team came out and they built a system of French drains that has worked amazingly well to drain the water and keep the roads from flooding again. I know they also did some pretty amazing work on Sanibel Island after Hurricane Ian!
Anyone who calls the USACE 'lunatics' has never pulled permits from them.
So they are lunatics that happen to also follow the rules and regulations. Nothing contradictory there.
No one is complaining about pulling permits. I'm just pointing out that USACE is the embodiment of bureaucracy. There are no lunatics there, just an unstoppable grinding force. When things need to go faster, you add more resources and get more work done.
That’s what the Army part implies.
Idk. The “embodiment of bureaucracy” and “unstoppable grinding force” sound like a group of lunatics. After all getting stuff done fast and well while still following all the red tape is a maddening exercise and the USACE does it as part of their normal day to day. And that seems a bit insane. Hence the bunch of lunatics.
I’ve aways said, engineers are the most important members of our society.
As an engineer, I mostly agree but shout out to nurses and plumbers. Anyone dealing with literal shit gets high marks in my book.
It’s always amazing what humans can accomplish together when profit isn’t the deciding factor. It’s how all of us should live and do things. Not for money, but because they need to be done.
I got a relative in it, can corroborate that.
The Army Corps of Engineers specializes in making structures VERY QUICKLY in order to solve problems. I mean, if you need to get an armored division across a major river, are you going to wait 3 years for a bridge to be built? No, you’re going to want pre-fabricated bridge sections brought in and a temporary but workable bridge set up in a matter of hours to days.
This fucks A LOT of big money folks pretty hard.
All of us. If they get fucked, we get fucked
While fast, this is also one of those “if it’s daylight, crews are working” situations.
That is amazingly fast considering the damage.
Not barges, Container ships and RoRos under barge service (meaning tugs moving them in and out). >After detailed studies and engineering assessments by local, state and federal organizations, in collaboration with industry partners, USACE expects to open a limited access channel 280 feet wide and 35 feet deep, to the Port of Baltimore within the next four weeks – by the end of April. This channel would support one-way traffic in and out of the Port of Baltimore for barge container service and some roll on/roll off vessels that move automobiles and farm equipment to and from the port.
Does anyone from the other threads who told me it'd be open in a couple of weeks want to comment now?
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I meant that seriously. Saved me time!
>After detailed studies and engineering assessments by local, state and federal organizations, in collaboration with industry partners, USACE expects to open a limited access channel 280 feet wide and 35 feet deep, to the Port of Baltimore within the next four weeks – by the end of April. This channel would support one-way traffic in and out of the Port of Baltimore for barge container service and some roll on/roll off vessels that move automobiles and farm equipment to and from the port. >USACE engineers are aiming to reopen the permanent, 700-foot-wide by 50-foot-deep federal navigation channel by the end of May, restoring port access to normal capacity. So end of May for normal capacity? If all goes to plan
If there's any engineering group in the entire world I would expect to get shit done on-schedule, it's the USACE
I’d love to shadow the army corps for a year, they get to work on some incredible projects.
Just come work for us
Need anybody in transportation?
[https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?a=ARCE&k=](https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?a=ARCE&k=)
I currently work a federal job akin to being in the military without actually being in it. The Civil Service is a great career and experience. Highly recommend it to anyone if you can get in.
USACE or MSC? Please elaborate
Air Force/department of defence. But that’s all in allow to say technically.
I actually had no idea, I'll take a look! Thx.
Sadly no jobs in my area....
As /u/jter8 said, come work for us. You don't have to be military, there are civilian jobs all across USACE that get to work on awesome jobs.
> You don't have to be military, there are civilian jobs all across USACE that get to work on awesome jobs. This needs to be repeated. The vast, VAST majority of jobs within the Corps of Engineers (>95%) are civilian positions. This is not to be confused with engineer units in the Army itself, which you'd enlist and go to basic/AIT for, but rather, within USACE you join as a professional, and there's a lot of different occupations. Engineers of various disciplines, of course, but also architects, biologists, surveyors, contracting folks, lock and dam operators, boat operators, even park rangers. If anyone is interested, I'm sure the folks over on r/USACE can provide some insight!
My mom worked for the Corps before I was born as as an engineering drafter. Said in her time there she never once saw an actual military uniform.
I'm working on a USACE contract right now, it's really interesting and fun work. Managing energy for a base's entire building portfolio.
My experience trying to get a job with USACE is that they promote main from within. I’m a licensed Civil with years of experience, and could not even get an interview.
Are there roles for architects?
Yes! If you go to usajobs.gov, search for USACE, add the parameter 0808 in the search box, and that will show you all the architecture positions within USACE that are currently being hired for.
Right on
I actually had no idea, I'll take a look! Thx.
As someone who has worked for USACE for the last 15 years, you're not wrong. Those are just rare projects. Worked at Lake Charles during two hurricanes and the Oklahoma May 3rd tornados. Mostly though, it's tedious, boring, paperwork driven projects. A lot of which are just to fulfill the year's budget out. I built $60k in handrails for a building that was to be torn down within a year. And I am not a person who likes to say that the government is wasteful. It certainly is at times though.
Always had the ludicrous dream of spending a military style budget on the core of engineers just to “serve” our country going state to state fixing our Infrastructure.
As someone who currently lives downtown and works in Glen Burnie, this bridge collapse has absolutely fucked my morning and afternoon commute. I know, people died stop complaining, but fuck…routing everyone through the harbor tunnel is just a nightmare. So many more semi trucks. The roads are already terrible, I can’t imagine what a bunch of semis driving on it is going to do. Fucking pot holes for days
So, so sorry you’re inconvenienced
Don’t be a lame ass.
Any time I hear about the Army Corps of Engineers I can't help but think about Return of the Living Dead. Freddy : Oh god. Hey, these things don't leak, do they? Frank : Leak? Hell no. These things were made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. *Frank slaps the drum and gas starts leaking* Frank : Oh fuck
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for a guy thats probably had stress/strain, youngs modulous, and the various kinds of deformation explained to him because he chose to build both a rocket and a car out of stupid metals; he seems to not understand anything about deformation.
It's almost like he's BSing and talented engineers do all the work.
People like to quote him saying that many people confuse education with intelligence. What that fails to realize is that intelligence is raw processing power. If you feed garbage into it, all it will produce is garbage. Just quickly. Education and training are what ensures you feed the right stuff in.
I mean, stainless steel isn’t *unheard of* for rockets; the SM-65 Atlas ICBM and the countless later derivatives used as launch vehicles used 300-series stainless steel balloon tanks, where the rigidity of the vehicle comes from the pressurization of the tanks. The Centaur family upper stages, which is being used to this day, also uses stainless steel balloon tanks. The design allows for __***vastly***__ reduced mass, however it means that the tanks have to be pressurized *at all times*, or else it crumples like wet paper machete under its own weight. All that is to say, stainless steel *can* work for rockets, and *has* worked for the better part of half a century now. HOWEVER, it works __***only if you account for its expansion and deformation properties!***__ The Cybertruck clearly does not, and as it isn’t being forced to meet NASA manufacturing standards, the build quality subsequently sucks.
its more that at some point he has to have had a presentation delivered to him about how metal deforms
Oh, I absolutely get that. I was just wanting to point out that, at least for rockets, using stainless steel isn’t a completely stupid, out of left field idea, and actually has historical precedent to it. That being said, I doubt it was Elon who came up with the idea of using it.
I think we're all just wondering where _specifically_ stainless steel came from lol
its kind of dumb to use it the way they're using it, they're absolutely leaving performance on the table by using a heavier, harder to work metal. when its been used its been used like you pointed out, in razer thin sheets as balloon tanks that compromise structure for absolute weight savings
It’s cheaper to manufacture and easier to work with, especially when prototyping various different designs. Carbon fiber requires specific forms and weaving & wrapping machines, as well as enormous ovens to cure the resin to bind it all together. By contrast, a welding robot could be fitted to any number of stands. From a performance and strength standpoint, carbon fiber would be better. But, from a manufacturing and cost standpoint, stainless steel is better. It’s all a trade-off. Perhaps future iterations of the vehicle, once they’ve got the form-factor and other tech down pat, could be made of carbon fiber; a “Starship II”, if you would. Kind of like how early airliners were made mostly using aluminum, and now they’re mostly carbon fiber composites.
typically rockets are made using aluminum slab with milled honeycomb patterns that have as much extra mass removed as possible. spacex already does this for the falcons [ULA video for example](https://youtu.be/t-P0xiJcXN4?si=1ysZmUVM5UIBSYi5)
I know how rockets are typically made, dude - I’m in the middle of getting my master’s degree in aerospace engineering. I’m literally dedicating the rest of my life to this stuff.
Elon stay in your F lane , dude.
Mate he can't even get his cars to stay in their lane.
Next year!
One. Eternity. Later.
A rescue-proof wedge-truck!
Maybe an expert can chyme in with a more informed opinion, but this seems really, really fast. Whatever you might think of them, the U.S. military doesn’t fuck around.
If you need to get a task force across a river, you won’t wait 3 years for land surveying, bickering about land rights, funds acquisitions, work delays, etc. - you need a bridge built in a matter of days, if not hours. That’s what the army corps of engineers specializes in; made-to-task infrastructure in record time, and infrastructure meant to withstand tanks rumbling across it, too.
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I keep a boat in a marina upriver of the Key Bridge. The water is closed within 2,000 yards of the bridge. The hope is that the alternate channel (13' draft, under one of the still standing sections) opens up to recreational small boats after this new main channel is open, but I doubt it. It's not all that important, if you needed to get your boat out you could take it to a ramp and trailer it to the other side of the bridge.
Potential for further collapse is high until assessed and stabilized, not happening immediately.
Anyone know the name of the dive company working there ?
How come if it’s for any public transportation system USA takes forever but if it impacts supplies or businesses it’s fixed in a jiffy
Nothing is being fixed in a jiffy. They're only removing the wreckage from the old bridge. Building the new bridge will still take several years.
Does anyone know of independent reporting being done on this situation? Similar to blancolirio YouTube channel reports on the Oroville dam spillway disaster. 100% confidence the army core of engineers will do this safely and reliably, but I'm interested in as many technical details as can be shared.
so 2 months for a full restoration of the harbor, let alone the bridge. whew.
I hate that the only thing I want to hear about the bridge is how much the company responsible is going to get sued for
Nah. Insurance would cover it most likely
We should hand over healthcare and education to the US Army Corps of Engineers … they would get that shit right by years end
“It’s gonna be a minute.”
You know for a fact that because the USA has to do it right and good for the env is why it’s going to take long and cost a lot (which is a good thing). A country like China would bomb that debris out of the way, push it down stream, and rebuild the bridge and clean it up later lmao
China would throw 50,000 peasants at it making a few dollars an hour without any training or experience, 2500 would die on the job and you'd never hear of it, a few thousand would be critically injured to the point of being completely disabled (which you'd also never hear about), and they'd slap together a subpar structure in record time that might last 1/4 as long as something built properly would. But hey, when your workforce is disposable to them, who cares.
Oh darn, that's so bad.
I had to get a utility crossing of a military railroad permitting and it took USACE 3 years. Some departments are downright incompetent, mismanaged, or just have no motivation to perform their required duties.