The Purple Pioneers: Irvine Ranch Water District Continues To Innovate
IRWD’s Michelson Water Recycling Plant repurposes water for multiple uses. The Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD) has always set itself apart as a proactive and pioneering organization in mitigating environmental challenges. In the early 1980s, for example, IRWD pioneered what’s now known as “purple pipe” used to convey recycled water for other uses. Purple pipe now is the universal symbol for pipes conveying recycled water, with purple used to distinguish such conveyance from potable wate...
‘Adaptive Reuse’ Leads to Innovative Partnering Opportunities
Where the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino once stood, Atlantic City will create a development corridor to connect a convention center to retail space, boardwalks and beaches. (Wikimedia Commons) As public assets become weathered through time, repair and maintenance costs accumulate. Without attention, the assets lose value and eventually become inefficient and unsafe. With local-government budgets stretched to the breaking point, thousands of public assets throughout the country have spiraled...
High-Strength Steel Takes Salesforce Tower Chicago to New Heights
Salesforce Tower Chicago anchors Wolf Point, a mixed-use development at the confluence of the Chicago River’s three branches. (Steelblue) The Chicago River has been transformed into a vast recreational park, with opportunities for residents and visitors to access and enjoy the river at almost every mile. The most-notable stretch is the Chicago Riverwalk, which extends about 1.25 miles from Lake Michigan to Wolf Point. Here, an extraordinary mixed-use development is being completed that fea...
Help Wanted: Smart People; Transportation Industry Addresses Workforce Expansion and Diversification
Bentley Education partners with the National Society of Black Engineers to engage with talented engineering students. The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is a generational investment, promising impactful progress in rebuilding and modernizing America’s aging infrastructure, tackling the climate crisis, improving road safety, and more. Infrastructure owners are actively launching “shovel-worthy” projects for designers and contractors to deliver on IIJA’s promise,...
New Wittpenn Bridge Demonstrates the Criticality of Inspection
An estimated 178 million trips are taken across the nation’s more than 617,000 bridges, but approximately 7.5 percent of the nation’s bridges are considered structurally deficient, and 42 percent of all bridges are at least 50 years old. Considering recent incidents of bridge collapses in the news as well as the ‘C’ grade the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives the nation’s bridge infrastructure, the criticality of bridge inspection can’t be understated. A prime example of an agi...
Getting Geotechnical: The Making, Shaking and Remaking of San Francisco’s Treasure Island
Treasure Island is a 400-acre artificial island in San Francisco Bay. San Francisco Bay’s Treasure Island—a flat, 400-acre, rather headstone-shaped island—is entirely artificial, “… constructed by emplacing 260,000 tons of quarried rock in the shoals for the island/causeway perimeter rock walls (a freshwater reservoir was quarried in the rock of Yerba Buena Island). Approximately 23 feet of dredged bay sand filled the interior, was mitigated from salt, and then 50,000 cubic yards of topsoi...
Natural Wonders: Safety, Accessibility and Aesthetics Shape Pedestrian Suspension Bridges
By Sean O’Keefe There’s something wonderful about a walk in the woods: the nearness of nature, the wind rustling through trees, the magical light almost any time of day, and never knowing what’s around the next bend. For Gus Smithhisler, P.E., it’s an adventure that never gets old. Smithhisler is a Natural Resources Engineer for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), where he has worked since graduating from Ohio State University in 1994 with a degree in Civil Engineering...
Data Centers: Provide Unique Circumstances and Challenges for Stormwater Detention
By Carol Brzozowski This article is based on a webcam interview recorded by Todd Danielson, the editorial director of Informed Infrastructure. You can view a video of the full interview at the top of this page or by visiting bit.ly/3FxF3o4 E-commerce is fueling a need for data centers and warehouses that require massive stormwater treatment systems; and designing, manufacturing and installing these systems can require a different approach from other types of structures. S...
Emerging Cyber-Solutions Are Updating Urban Infrastructure
By Gordon Feller Cities are working hard to adopt state-of-the-art technologies. Several forces are driving them to embrace emerging innovations: agencies are working on interconnected problems; increasingly diverse communities are pushing governments to meet their needs; and government operations are becoming more complex, working daily with massive datasets. As a result, municipalities have concluded that they must have reliable, next-generation connectivity. With the right infrastr...
The Very Model of Modern Major Terminal: Kansas City Replaces Three Outdated Terminals with a Cutting-Edge Jewel
Credit: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) Kansas City International Airport (MCI) has its origin in the “Great Flood of 1951,” which more or less destroyed the facilities of Mid-Continent Airlines and Trans World Airlines (TWA) at Fairfax Airport as well as damaging Kansas City Municipal Airport. The city already was planning to build a larger airport, and the catastrophe, of course, lent greater urgency to these plans. Ground was broken north of Kansas City in 1954, and the new airport’s...
Video: New Roundabout Under Construction at McIver and Old Florence Roads in Darlington County
Promenade at The Point
June Issue 2026
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