Civil Forensic Engineering

The Civil Engineer deals with the nation’s infrastructure. The design of roadways and intersections along with the movement of pedestrians, bicycles and motor vehicles are within the purview of the Civil Engineer. This branch of engineering is divided into a structural and none structural component.

The Structural Civil Engineer is concerned with the load bearing capacity  and the actual Engineering behind a facility such as a bridge or a dam. The none structural  area deals with standard of care in the infrastructure. The structural Civil engineer might design a bridge while the none structural Engineer might do a traffic Study to define the foreseeable carrying capacity of the bridge.

Some of the projects a Forensic Civil Engineer investigates include the following:

·         Bridge Collapse- Forensic Civil Engineers investigated the bridge collapse in the San Francisco earthquake and concluded the bridge was designed and constructed correctly.

·         Skyway Collapse -  Forensic Civil Engineers investigated the Skyway collapse at the Hyatt Hotel in Kansas and concluded the Skyway was improperly designed by the design engineer.

·         O-Ring Failure Space Shuttle- A Forensic Engineer warned supervision that the temperature was too low for a successful launch of the Space Shuttle due to potential O Ring failure. The warning was ignored and the Shuttle failed.

·         Accident Reconstruction – Forensic Civil Engineers are involved in all aspects of determining the causal factors of motor vehicle, pedestrian, bicycle and motorcycle accidents. See http://bikereconstruction.com.

·         Infrastructure Design -  Forensic Civil Engineers evaluate infrastructure design to determine if proper design criteria have been.

The Civil Engineering web site is http://www.asce.org/asce.cfm

 For more information go to www.ForensicCivilEngineering.com.