Welcome everyone to ASCE's new Communities of Practice! The goal for these CoPs is to provide a place where all of our members can interact with each other - share your own experiences, ask questions, and meet others with common interests in the civil engineering world and beyond. Thank you for joining one of our pilot CoPs, Sustainability & Resilience! We hope that you'll find this space welcoming and that you start your own discussions, create blog posts, and attend virtual events that will be coming in the future.
To help get things started, let's get to know each other. Please reply to this post and tell us who you are! Respond with your name, where you are from and a little bit about what you do. Also, if you'd like, please add an example of something you've seen on the topic of sustainability & resilience that was surprising or new that inspired you and maybe changed the way you do some of your work moving forward. I'll go first.
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Hi everyone, I'm Lauren, and I'm a Technical Manager working for Woodard & Curran, a firm that focuses on water and the environment across consulting and operations. I grew up, went to college, and still live and work as a civil engineer on site development projects in Maine. We all know that water flows downhill, so fundamentally, the best place to put a wastewater treatment plant is in a low spot near a body of water where the clean, treated water can easily be discharged. But also, fundamentally, this is also often one the first places to flood during an extreme storm event. As a civil engineer, I've worked with my colleagues on projects on how to protect wastewater treatment facilities from the impacts of flooding, but there is not always an opportunity to do everything that we want. I've been pulled into a number of projects working with electrical engineers on upgrades to the electrical equipment associated with treatment plants and pump stations, and it's been really interesting to see how seemingly simple changes like raising an electrical switchgear at a small pump station a few more feet above ground can help to protect a community's wastewater system in storms. It definitely has me thinking more about the importance of site elevations in design!
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I encourage everyone who has joined the Sustainability & Resilience CoP to reply to this post, and introduce yourself. Welcome everyone!!
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Lauren Swett P.E., M.ASCE
Engineer
Woodard and Curran
Portland ME
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