Thoughts From Engineers: Stormwater Brings Change to the Modern American City
Every age has its infrastructure challenges. The Industrial Revolution, for example, drove scores of people to the largest cities in search of work. Urban areas grew as they never had before, and widespread illness and death resulted from improper sewage disposal and poor sanitation. Cities such as London managed the resulting public health crisis poorly at first, but later more effectively. Through trial and error, analysis, innovation, and tenacity, simplistic solutions gave way to methodolog...
Executive Corner: A Shifting Outlook for the A/E Industry
For the A/E industry, 2024 ended with widespread optimism, strong contract backlogs and record financial performance for many firms. This is based on the reported performance of publicly traded A/E firms and supported by anecdotal observations of private firms. As earnings reports were released in February 2025 from firms such as TetraTech, AECOM, Jacobs Solutions, Stantec and NV5 Global, the news was almost all positive. The following are a handful of highlights: Stantec (Jan. 28, 2025)...
Water Works: How Goodhart’s Law Is Reshaping Stormwater Management
Data-driven performance verification is the backbone of the stormwater treatment industry. Engineers, regulators and municipalities rely on quantitative metrics such as pollutant removal rates and runoff reduction volume to evaluate the success of stormwater control measures (SCMs) and estimate regulatory compliance. We’re entering a promising era in which the standardization of SCM performance evaluation can significantly improve our understanding of how well these practices meet regulatory goa...
Workforce Challenges: Competing for New Structural Engineering Talent
RAOUL KARP, P.E., S.E., (LEFT) and BRIAN QUINN, P.E. (RIGHT) With nine out of 10 firms looking for engineers and more than 10 percent of them considering leaving the profession in their early employment years, now is a critical time for firms to revisit their strategies on how to attract and retain new engineers. There are many factors that influence why an entry-level engineer selects a job and how long they stay with that company. By engaging directly with engineering students and rev...
Thoughts From Engineers: Machine Learning and Gauging Flood Risk
Long before there were “tech kids” by any definition, I was never more content than in the company of the “huge mainframe” computer residing at the local university computing center while still in high school. (I even crafted an elaborate plan to spend the night there—but that story is for another time.) Later on, during graduate school, I combined my interest in software engineering and hydrology and have remained keenly interested in all developments relating to those two fields ever since....
From the Editor: Engineers Often Are the Smartest People in the Room
The “Smart Engineering” special issue each year is always a challenging column for me to write. It’s not that I don’t see the value of smart engineering—it’s just that I don’t know enough about the technical details to create a few paragraphs that would be interesting to our readers. So instead, I will illustrate what I think is a smart engineer, featuring some examples of people I’ve known. Maintain Trust A somewhat funny, but true, definition might be: A smart engineer is one who has det...
Engineering the Future: Engineers Need To Be Among the Leaders and Decision Makers
“You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” That’s my one-line, takeaway quote to students and younger engineers when they ask for one piece of advice. In today’s fast-paced, ever-changing world, if you stand still, you’re falling behind. Gone are the days when you could have a specialty and the design was basically “wash, rinse and repeat.” Artificial Intelligence will do those tasks. When I’m speaking to a group, I illustrate this by asking everyone in the group who is a project en...
Transportation Troubleshooting: Enhancing the Passenger Experience at American Airports
“I think this is one of the most exciting periods in the history of aviation to work in this field.” That’s how my WSP colleague, aviation expert Gaël Le Bris, CM, ENV SP, P.E., characterizes the progress unfolding at airports and in the overall aviation sector these days. He’s well positioned to stake this claim—not only as a vice president on the U.S. aviation planning team, but as a visionary who has authored a study on “The Future of Airports: A Vision of 2040 and 2070” and is involved wi...
Executive Corner: Can the Conventional A/E Internal Transition Make a Comeback?
Sometimes, business structures and models endure through generations; occasionally, they fight to stay relevant. For as long as anyone can remember, the reliable internal ownership transition, in all its subtle nuances and variations, has served as both the primary mechanism for exit-strategy planning and a symbol of “making it” in the profession. Harking back to an apprenticeship approach of centuries ago, young designers would hone their craft under the tutelage of their senior practitioners....
Smarter Solutions: Embrace an Alternative Duct Bank Pathway for Future-Ready Developments
Working on larger-scale projects (e.g., commercial offices, education and healthcare buildings, campus data center environments, etc.) can present unique challenges, among them the crucial need to ensure that spaces are resilient and able to seamlessly accommodate future growth capacity and other changes. When designing agile, future-proofed spaces, it’s necessary to consider the fact that more complex, larger schemes also need more extensive duct bank systems to hold all the communication ca...
Video: Crashes Drop Measurably After Rural Road Safety Improvement Project on US 521 in Lancaster County
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June Issue 2026
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