Articles

CE Club February 2017 Update

Land Development with Pape-Dawson

Fernando Ceballos of Pape-Dawson spoke with the Civil Engineering Club about land development and specifically, how civil engineers plan for water and wastewater control. The presentation started off with a broad overview of land development and city planning. Students were asked to consider their previous land development activity with ForeSITE Group and how they laid out four city blocks of development. Fernando pointed out to the students that in addition to considering the location and arrangement of various buildings on a development they also needed to consider things like flood plains, rock, aquifers, gas lines, other existing utilities, and the topography of the site. Land development involves the coordination of several different team members including environmentalists, city officials, city engineers, surveyors, geotechnical engineers, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, plumbers, electricians, and architects.

For the team activity, Fernando split the classroom into four groups that were each given a scaled down plan of a residential development. The students had to lay out water and sanitary sewer systems on plan using scales. The students were given restrictions such as the longest distance permitted between man holes, space constraints, and a requirement for straight lines between man holes. Each team had a variety of pipe sizes to choose from based on the number of houses they planned on each system servicing. At the end of the class, the students added up an estimated cost of their system based on prices given to them by Fernando. The goal of the exercise was to find the most cost-effective solution.