The Intelligent Landscape: How AI Is Broadening the Reach of Geospatial Intelligence
By Dan Gruidel Geospatial data has never been more abundant or more essential. From climate resilience and emergency response to infrastructure planning and utility management, organizations depend on geospatial intelligence to make informed decisions. Yet, most geospatial work has been the domain of specialists: remote‑sensing analysts, photogrammetrists, lidar technicians and cartographers. These roles required years of training and deep technical mastery. The tools were powerful, but the barr...
Regulations, Treatment Options and Potential Carbon Shortages: Everything You Need to Know About PFAS in Drinking Water
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been the headline-grabbing “contaminant of the moment” across the water sector, driving a remarkable wave of regulation, litigation and treatment innovation. Their persistence, mobility and resistance to degradation have led to widespread presence in soil, water and even human bloodstreams, where they are correlated with the increased risk of some cancers, suppressed immunity, developmental delays in children, decreased fertility and high blood pre...
Future Forward Powered by ACEC: The Grid Can’t Wait for Washington to Figure This Out
Powered By: There’s a version of the AI story that gets told almost exclusively in the language of software, through terms such as models, agents, tokens and parameters. It’s a compelling narrative, but it’s also incomplete. Behind every large language model or newly built data-center campus, there’s an infrastructure question that’s considerably harder to answer than the technology question: Where does the power come from? How does it get there? Who pays for what it takes to deliver it? These a...
Water Works: Go Big! A Case for Regional Stormwater Facilities to Address Existing Development
After what seemed like an eternity, the street redevelopment in front of my beloved downtown coffee shop is finally complete. It’s almost eerily quiet now that the fleet of excavators, dump trucks and compactors has moved on—most people would’ve simply gone elsewhere for their morning caffeine hit while the chaos was in full swing. As a true stormwater nerd, however, I dutifully braved the noise and dust to observe the refurbishment of the storm sewer, including the addition of small-media filte...
Code Update: ACI CODE-318-25: Updates You Need to Know
ANDREW TAYLOR, PHD, S.E., FACI GREG ZEISLER The American Concrete Institute (ACI) recently published the 2025 edition of ACI CODE-318, “Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete—Code and Commentary.” This latest version includes numerous changes, such as refinement of the one-way shear provisions introduced in ACI CODE-318-19, alignment with other ACI codes (e.g., ACI/PCI CODE-319-25, ACI/PTI CODE-320-25, ACI CODE-440.11-25), coordination with ASCE/SEI 7-22, and improved and clarified c...
Executive Corner: What the Tea Leaves Tell Us About the A/E Industry Outlook
With geopolitical instability, persistently high interest rates, tariffs and rising energy costs, the A/E industry, along with the overall U.S. economy, is certainly facing some significant headwinds. And yet, A/E industry results in 2025 generally were very strong, and year-end backlogs, along with business leaders’ sentiment, seem to point to continued growth in 2026. Poll Results We recently conducted an informal poll of client firms, including participants in our annual “A/E Business Valuati...
Thoughts From Engineers: Synthetic Storms for Flood-Risk Assessment
Important national efforts are underway to better prepare for the elevated flood risk strongly linked to a nonstationary climate. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, for example, is developing a new Atlas 15 to be better aligned with current and future flood risk. In addition, Stochastic Storm Transposition (SST) has emerged as a tool with the potential to help identify and assess flood risk under extreme conditions. The methodology uses high-resolution gridded radar data of recent stor...
Transportation Troubleshooting: Why Congestion Pricing Works; What Cities Are Learning from It
Many people think of traffic congestion much like the weather: something that can be predicted but not controlled. Yet, the first full year of congestion pricing in lower Manhattan demonstrated that gridlock isn't a force of nature but a manageable challenge when the right tools and policies are applied. Mobility Matters Congestion is the predictable result of many factors, ranging from road design and carpool culture to the availability, efficiency, price and safety of mass transit. City and re...
Engineering The Future: Engineering What’s Next: Alternative Fuel Vehicle Adoption
Anticipating the future and its opportunities is becoming more critical than ever, as opposed to reacting to past events. One of my favorite quotes attributed to Wayne Gretzky is “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” The speed of change continues, and it’s dizzying. Full Systems Approach I had the privilege to co-organize a daylong workshop at the State University of New York at Buffalo, School of Engineering, on freight operations and the challenges and opportunitie...
From The Editor: Engineering Can Be Exciting!
Sometimes it’s difficult to define the things that interest you—or, more specifically, what excites you. Early Major Project I’ve been traveling on U.S. 31 between U.S. 30 and Indianapolis for years. A long while back, I designed part of the first bypass of Kokomo, Ind., when I was working with the Indiana Department of Highways. At that time, it was one of the largest projects I had worked on; it was exciting. The corridor selected was fairly open, so the choice of alignment was only limited by...
Video: New Roundabout Under Construction at McIver and Old Florence Roads in Darlington County
New Franklin City Hall
June Issue 2026
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