February 2024 President's Report
Michael R. Cunningham, PE, Senior Principal Engineer, Kleinfelder
As a BSCES member and volunteer leader, one thing that I can count on this time of year is hearing how successful our New England Regional Future City and Model Bridge Competitions were. The Future City Competition was held on January 20, 2024, and the Model Bridge Competition was held on February 3, 2024. It was a big year for both! The 25th anniversary for Future City and 33rd anniversary for Model Bridge. Thank you to our STEM Outreach Program sponsors for their contributions towards our program this year, to Reed Brockman, from AECOM, our Public Awareness & Outreach Committee chair, and the rest of the committee for their efforts planning and coordinating these and other events and activities each year. Thanks also to the volunteers that helped at the competitions and to Wentworth Institute of Technology for hosting both events and making in-kind contributions towards materials and equipment costs. Lastly, thank you very much to The Engineering Center Education Trust (TECET) staff for coordinating numerous “last minute” details, particularly CORI checks for our volunteers. This required extra effort and I appreciate their commitment to making sure everything went smoothly. The continued success of these two signature STEM events is a remarkable legacy.
I want to mention that the 2024 ASCE Northeast Student Symposium will be hosted by the University of New Hampshire and held from April 19 to April 21, 2024. This great student event includes steel bridge and concrete canoe and competitions.
The BSCES Awards Committee, chaired by BSCES Vice President Anuja Kamat, associate professor, civil engineering at Wentworth Institute of Technology, is still accepting nominations for the 2024 BSCES Section and Employer Recognition Awards! BSCES has over ten award categories. The awards will be presented during our Annual Awards Celebration this June. The deadline for submission of award nominees has been extended until Friday, March 22, 2024. This is an excellent opportunity to recognize individuals and employers that have made significant contributions to the civil engineering profession and their communities. If you know of a worthy candidate, please submit a nomination. The list of awards and nomination forms are available here.
The special theme of this month’s newsletter is Water & Environmental Solutions and our featured group is the Environmental & Water Resources (EWRI) Institute Boston Chapter. I am excited for this issue because water resources is my discipline of expertise in civil engineering. My 26 years and counting of helping municipalities and state agencies in New England with their water resources challenges has been rewarding. You can say this for all areas of civil engineering, but the water resources projects that civil engineers deliver provide such tangible human health and public safety benefits to the public.
Thank you to my employer, Kleinfelder, which is a 2023-2024 BSCES Society Sponsor and the sponsor of this issue of BSCESNews. Check out a great article in this issue from Gus O’Leary from Kleinfelder titled Over the River and Through the Levee: The York Street Pump Station and Connecticut River Crossing Project in Springfield, one of our proudest accomplishments with our client, the Springfield Water & Sewer Commission! Congratulations to the Commission and the entire project team. This newsletter also includes three other article from authors who work for Kleinfelder – a feature group article about the ASCE EWRI Boston Chapter written by BSCES Secretary Rishabh Iyer, Bridging the Past to the Present: The Story of the Carlton Street Footbridge by Andre Martecchini, and D’Angelis Water Treatment Facility PFAS Upgrades by Kirsten Ryan and Tyler J. Bernier. We also have a legislative report from our BSCES Legislative Fellow, Bruce Jacobs.
Finally, it is timely that the Summer/Fall 2023 edition of the Civil Engineering Practice journal was officially released this month, coinciding with the special theme of this month’s newsletter. A copy is available on the journal website here. This special edition consists of “articles and research papers that highlight the transformative projects and groundbreaking initiatives spearheaded by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.” What a great endeavor this edition of the journal is! Thanks to Gautham Das, journal editor in chief, the Journal Editorial Board, and the sponsors of this edition of the journal: the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Dr. Ali Touran from Northeastern University for making this edition possible.
Best wishes to you all for a wonderful leap day; please put it to good use!
