The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Student Chapter of ASCE won First Place overall out of 16 universities in the Pacific Northwest Region Steel Bridge Competition in Butte, Montana, April 7 - 9, 2005. Participating schools included University of British Columbia, University of Washington, Oregon State University, and University of Alaska Anchorage. UAA came in eighth.

The UAF trophies include First Place for Overall performance, First Place for Economy, and First Place for Efficiency. The team also won Second Place for Stiffness, Second Place for Lightness, Third Place for Construction Speed, and Tenth Place for aesthetics.

The top three schools are invited to compete in the national competition May 27 - 28 in Orlando, Florida. If you or your firm can make a donation to cover part of the cost for the chapter to go to national competition, please contact J. Leroy Hulsey, ffjlh@uaf.edu, 474-7816.

District Director's Report

By Greg DiLoreto, P.E., F. ASCE, Director, District 12

The ASCE National Board of Direction met April 13-14 in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. For those of you not familiar with that area, it is the suburbs of Washington, DC. The OPAL (Outstanding Projects and Leaders) award gala was held on the evening of the 13^th. The Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award for 2005 went to Rion-Antirion Bridge, a 900 million dollar bridge spanning the Gulf of Corinth linking the Greek mainland and the Peloponnese. It is the world’s longest cable-stayed crossing. Outstanding lifetime achievement awards went to the following: Rear Adm. (retired) Michael Johnson for public works, Jack Lemley for construction, Ralph Peterson for management, Louis Silano for design, and Michael Walton for education. I encourage you to next year attend this grand event.

Each meeting the Board receives a status report on the state of affairs from our Executive Director, Pat Natale. A number of things from that report are important to note. First, the recently released ASCE report card clearly noted the deficiencies in our infrastructure. Members of congress on both sides are literally holding up our report card when they are discussing infrastructure needs. Our website has received more than 1.5 million hits from people looking for additional information on this topic. It has been a lead story on CBS News.com, and MSNBC. I encourage each section to develop your own report card. ASCE staff is ready to assist you in that effort.

We continue to increase our role on Capitol Hill. ASCE government affairs staff have located to our new office, just a block away from the capitol making it easier for us to be at the capitol on a moment’s notice. Other engineering societies are envious of this choice location.

A benefit for our members is the ability to research ASCE published articles using our online proceedings. The ACE Research Library is a comprehensive online tool for locating articles of interest across all disciplines of civil engineering. The Research Library provides unprecedented access to more than 18,500 full-text papers from ACE Journals and proceedings published.

Items approved at the April Board meeting:

• The location of the 2008 Annual Conference will be Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• Creation of and funding for a Building Security Council. The BSC is a newly formed council that will provide review and certification of the security of buildings. Operating in a format similar to LEED’s program by the US Green Building Council, ASCE is poised to begin developing and offering this service in the next year.
• Allowed Institute Representatives to the ASCE Board of Direction, of which there are four, to be eligible for ASCE President-elect without further Board service.
• Enable electronic elections for ASCE national officers.
• Approved or reaffirmed 34 ASCE policy statements.
• Approved the designation of the Philadelphia City Hall and the C. Maxwell Stanley Hydraulics Laboratory at the University of Iowa as ASCE National Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks.
• Approved Bill Marcuson as the official nominee for President-elect for 2005-06.

As always if you have issues or concerns with ASCE please do not hesitate to call or write. I can be reached at (503) 848-3032 or greg@tvwd.org.

The Alaska Section Guide Manual is available in Adobe Acrobat^® (PDF) format on the Special Sections page (1.3MB formatted for online viewing). For convenience the link is also attached to this announcement. Alaska Section Guide Manual