Civil Engineering Photos

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

When pouring concrete contractors cannot simply begin or end placing concrete at any given location in a structure during a given pour. Due to many reasons, including rebar placements and concrete’s inability to stick to itself once dry, pours need to be done in a manner that completes a predetermined structural element. In some cases, this means pouring thousands of yards of concrete in one continuous operation for hours and even days. Pictured above is a concrete pumper’s boom working into the night on a 2 000 yard pour, comprised of approximately 200 trucks, that lasted more than 12 hours. In the background of the photograph is the job’s tower crane silhouetted against the setting sun.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Why are those plywood sheets pink? The reason is the wood actually is not regular plywood. The pink is an indicator of the fire treated nature of the wood panel. Fire treated wood like this is required for many applications by the building code in most areas. These particular panels will be a backer for carpenters to screw or nail into when they install a wood sheathing finish to the atrium wall currently under construction.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Featured above is a classic single span concrete bridge over a small river. The river is a minor branch of the Muskegon River in Muskegon, Michigan close to where it enters Muskegon Lake. Over the course of the lumber boom of the 1800’s this river carried billions of board feet of lumber from the interior regions of the state to the saw mills on the coast of Lake Michigan. These logs were in turn sawed into lumber and used to build homes, buildings, and other timber structures.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

What you are looking at is the steel that is in all the reinforced concrete structures around you. The large number of bars that you see are meant to hold the tension force in the foundation of this underground parking structure. One of the main costs in reinforced concrete construction is the labor to place all the resteel where it is needed. As you can see from this photo the number of resteel bars is staggering. Rest assured though, each bar has its proper place calculated by a competent structural engineer!

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

This is a steel rail road bridge over the Huron River in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It has concrete piers which is typical of bridges of this type. Concrete is excellent in compression, widely available throughout the world, and relatively affordable. For these reasons concrete is used for many civil engineering applications.

Photo Credit: Alex Mead

Featured above is a brick road. Common throughout the world before the large spread use of concrete and asphalt, they can still be seem in many cities, kept as reminders of the past. Requiring large amounts of labor to construct and maintain, brick roads are rarely built today.