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DAILY 12-05-06 MD RE C13
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The Washington Post
Tuesday, December 5, 2006 C13
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SURVEY
SAYS
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Last week’s survey
asked: Have you ever
missed school for a
vacation? More than
500 readers
responded:
No
29%
Yes
71%
WEATHER
TODAY’S NEWS
Back to the Beach:
It’s Myrtle for This Turtle
K Where do turtles go for the winter?
The answer appears to be Myrtle Beach, South Carolina!
Ed, a loggerhead turtle, was
found this summer on Hooper’s
Island in the Chesapeake Bay.
One of his flippers had become
tangled in fishing line. Ed was
taken to the National Aquarium
in Baltimore where he had surgery to remove the damaged flipper.
But that’s where the sad part of
Ed’s story ends. Last month, the
aquarium, working with the Virginia Aquarium, attached a tracking device to Ed’s back and released him in waters off Frisco
Beach, North Carolina.
Ed has swum about 400 miles
homework. But is that really all
you use the Internet for? Go to
www.kidspost.com and tell us:
SPEAK OUT
THIS WEEK’S TOPIC
Internet Use
TODAY: Sunny;
cold.
HIGH
A new study that KidsPost
wrote about last week said that
80 percent of kids said the
Internet helped them with their
K Most of the time I spend on
the Internet is for:
A. Homework
B. Fun
C. Equal parts homework and
fun
D. I don’t use the Internet
LOW
44 27
NATIONAL AQUARIUM
Thanks to a tracking device on his back, you can follow Ed’s trip to the beach.
since his release and is just off
the coast of Myrtle Beach. It’s
common for adult loggerheads to
migrate long distances, looking
for areas in which to eat and
nest.
You can track Ed’s progress by
going to www.aqua.org. The
tracking device probably will stay
on his back for several months
before falling off.
Correction: A graphic in
Wednesday’s KidsPost about
smoking was missing some
numbers. Twenty-three percent
of high school students smoke
cigarettes; 8 percent of middle
school students do.
TOMORROW:
Sunny; windy.
High 50. Low 36.
ILLUSTRATION BY FIONA MULHOLLAND,
11, ARLINGTON
WEATHER
TRIVIA
WHAT’S THE AVERAGE
WINTER WATER
TEMPERATURE IN
MYRTLE BEACH,
SOUTH CAROLINA?
ANSWER: LOW 50S.
ISTOCKPHOTO
WRITE KIDSPOST, THE WASHINGTON POST, 1150 15TH ST. NW, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20071. K E-MAIL US AT [email protected] K FAX US AT 202-496-3780. PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR NAME, AGE, ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER.
w
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i d sp o s t
/k
T
one supports more weight,” he explained.
Architects Atsushi Ishizaki and Chuong Cao also wanted a four-story corner
lobby with glass walls and no concrete
columns. It took a while for Herringa to
come up with a way to make that happen: two thin, slanted steel columns
that hold up the corner of the building.
The relationship between architect
and engineer is a little like a kid and parent — a role Herringa knows as the father of 3- and 6-year-old girls. Architects are always coming up with
different things they want to do, Herringa said. It’s the engineer who has to
say: No, you can’t do that, but you could
do this instead.
— Margaret Webb Pressler
Making It Work
A professional engineer uses
science and math to turn ideas into
something useful. Engineers played a
role in just about every important
achievement of recent civilization,
including electricity, indoor plumbing,
television, the Internet, health care,
automobiles, highways and space
flight.
There are more than 2 million
engineers in the United States, working
in 19 main fields of engineering. Some
examples:
Go
Go online
online to
to
see
see photos
photos of
of
the
the building’s
building’s
progress.
progress.
st.co m
A Structural Engineer Bears a Weighty Burden
here is a building under construction next door to KidsPost, and we’ve been watching
it get built from our windows.
It made us wonder how a building is put
together.
A structural engineer is the person
who figures out how to turn an architect’s design into a real building. How
thick should the floors be? How many
columns does each floor need for support?
Matthew Herringa
is the engineer for
the 12-story office
building, Columbia
Center on 15th
Street NW, and he
does complex math
and physics all day
long. “It’s everything
from algebra to calculus and some differMatthew Herringa
ential equations,” he
makes the architects’
said, referring to addesigns hold up.
vanced types of math.
To figure out how
much weight a column in a building
must support, Herringa first adds up
the weight of all the concrete, steel and
other building materials above the column, then adds in the weight of the furniture and the people who will be in the
offices. Then he figures out how many
columns there are and how much
weight each one has to support.
It’s not always simple. You might
have seen a building being built in
which some columns look like they’re
leaning. That’s because buildings have
complicated interiors, and columns
can’t always go straight up and down.
One fifth-floor column in Herringa’s
building, for example, is slanted because “if we had gone straight down
with that column, it would’ve ended up
in the electrical room,” he said. He had
to calculate how to angle the column so
it missed the electrical room below. It
still had to be structurally sound — that
is, hold up the building’s weight.
Things can get especially difficult
when architects ask for something unusual. The architects on this project
wanted the floors to have a lot of open
space, and that meant fewer columns —
and more calculations for Herringa.
“The more you spread the columns out,
you need bigger columns because each
ington
po
Problem-Solving
sh
CHALLENGE:
A four-story-high
lobby with no
concrete
columns.
SOLUTION:
Two round,
42-foot-high
steel columns
(one is shown at
right) support the
weight of the
eight stories
above them.
Chemical engineers figure out how
to turn raw materials into valuable
products, including plastics, medicines
and man-made fabrics.
Industrial engineers use knowledge
of science, design, mechanics and
human behavior to make complicated
systems work more efficiently. This
could include the flow of people
through an amusement park, patients
through a hospital or toys from where
they’re made to the store shelf.
Mechanical engineers help with
the building, design, production and
maintenance of mechanical systems,
including machines in factories or
engines on planes.
Traffic engineers use research and
technology to make roads, bridges,
signs and traffic lights more efficient so
traffic can move smoothly and safely.
BUILDING ILLUSTRATION COURTESY MONUMENT REALTY
When it’s finished, this 12-story office building will have an open, four-story entrance, as shown in the drawing above.
If You Build It . . .
Here are some of Columbia Center’s design challenges and Matthew
Herringa’s engineering solutions:
CHALLENGE: Upper floors extend
from the side of the building but
with no support underneath (left).
SOLUTION: Thick concrete slabs
sit on top of outside columns
(shown below), helping support the
floor that extends out.
CHALLENGE: Electrical room gets in
the way of a support column.
SOLUTION: Use fewer columns, but make each thicker to support more weight.
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CHALLENGE: Build large areas, for offices, that don’t have columns (above).
SOLUTION: Build the column at an
angle around the electrical room
while still supporting the weight of
the floors above.
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