Sponsor Meeting 3

This week, Charles had me taste a bit of what civil engineers must face when not on site. As soon as I saw him, Charles told me to sit down at a drafting bench and do so calculations. He taught me how to calculate the slope of piping by measuring the lateral footing of the pipe and the inversion of each side. At first I thought I was going to mess up because I actually had to find the numbers myself, whether it was measuring the drawing or inspecting the paper for the inversions. After I finished one set of plans, he gave me another to work on. This set of plans, however, was several pages longer than the previous one I had completed. After about and hour or so he told me that he finished the estimations of road projects the company will do in 2010. He told me he he used a spreadsheet, which took him about four hours to complete. The overall cost to do the 15 road projects was estimated to be 7.2 million dollars. This is only in the following year. I can only imagine how much the projects this year will cost. Next week Charles plans to have me either on site seeing how sewer problems emerge or watching videos of what happens in the sewer. Either way, I will get a better understanding of how sewers work and how cross contaminations or leaks occur.