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Three Cheers for Engineers · Clean Water Works

0:20
Donna Friedman: I was talking to Kim and she said that you were the worst when it came to tapping the table.
0:24
Donna Friedman: Kim who Never going to tell you her last name.
0:26
Donna Friedman: You'll never find out.
0:27
Donna Friedman: Yeah, she's like you can tell that it's Mike tapping and I was like, yeah, you should see the glares that I shoot him.
0:35
Donna Friedman: So we're doing a belated engineer week Every week, Maybe every week.
0:41
Mike Uva: Exactly Do you celebrate engineers week?
0:43
Mike Uva: You're both engineers.
0:44
Mike Uva: Do you do anything special?
0:45
Donna Friedman: Did you bake a cake?
0:46
Donna Friedman: You know what I used to, really I did.
0:49
Donna Friedman: Really.
0:51
Angela Jones: One of these organizations.
0:53
Angela Jones: I used to run engineers week and so we used to have all these activities throughout the week.
0:57
Angela Jones: So in my mind I still go oh, happy engineers week, and then I just kind of quietly celebrate.
1:03
Mike Uva: Can you tell us a little bit about engineer week?
1:05
Mike Uva: What do you know about it?
1:07
Mike Uva: Why do we?
1:07
Mike Uva: Why is it a thing?
1:09
Angela Jones: So national engineers week Now?
1:12
Angela Jones: First of all, it's scheduled to correspond with president's day, because president George Washington was an engineer.
1:20
Angela Jones: So what I'm thinking?
1:23
Angela Jones: This is a story that I kind of remember.
1:26
Donna Friedman: So I know, Wait, look it's on this fact sheet that you printed off for us.
1:29
Mike Uva: Oh, look at that.
1:30
Donna Friedman: You're totally right.
1:32
Mike Uva: And for, and for, and for and for yeah.
1:34
Mike Uva: For his survey work.
1:36
Angela Jones: And so for years now this is where you'll probably get me wrong, I don't know how many years, but there is a movement to celebrate national engineers week, and so every year they come up with a campaign and they built into, like national girls engineering day.
1:55
Angela Jones: They have like all these subsets of national engineers week highlighting the careers of engineers, because you know we're cool, right I?
2:03
Donna Friedman: think so.
2:04
Rick Vincent: You know, come on the engineers, we are.
2:09
Mike Uva: Bars look pretty low.
2:12
Angela Jones: So um.
2:13
Angela Jones: Or hi, D'Venille, how you looking at it, yeah yeah, so it's just been um, something that's been going on for a number of years.
2:20
Angela Jones: People, there's a lot of activities, there are a lot of organizations that do something special.
2:24
Angela Jones: Um really get across to individuals that engineers are in the world Right, both claim.
2:33
Donna Friedman: It seems like a lot.
2:35
Angela Jones: So there's like an exercise that I used to do and I used to go into schools and I used to talk to kids about engineers and what do they do, and I go, okay, so just run me through the exercise of what you do in the morning.
2:47
Angela Jones: Just what do you?
2:49
Angela Jones: What's the first thing you do in the morning?
2:50
Angela Jones: And someone says I get out the bed.
2:52
Angela Jones: I'm like we know an industrial engineer was responsible for the design of that bed and the textiles, the linens that's on there is also touched by an engineer.
3:02
Angela Jones: So what do you do next?
3:03
Angela Jones: And someone goes I turn off the alarm clock.
3:07
Angela Jones: Oh, wow, you know you try to go into the story that everything that is touched has been touched by an engineer.
3:16
Angela Jones: I mean, the students get to the bathroom, right, they go.
3:19
Angela Jones: I go use the bathroom.
3:21
Angela Jones: Well, guess what?
3:22
Angela Jones: The toilet was designed by an industrial engineer.
3:25
Angela Jones: And then you go into.
3:27
Angela Jones: You know there's hydraulics.
3:28
Angela Jones: So there's a mechanical engineer involved, hydraulics.
3:32
Angela Jones: And guess what do you do with the water when it goes?
3:34
Angela Jones: I don't know.
3:36
Angela Jones: Well, you know it's something that you know.
3:38
Angela Jones: It's really highlighted during that week.
3:41
Mike Uva: We wanted to invite a couple of our own engineers here at the sewer district to talk about how they got into the field.
3:48
Mike Uva: All the different kinds of engineers that there are talk about how your careers have taken perhaps different paths from when you started out or what you originally thought you'd be engineering and where you are today.
4:00
Mike Uva: So let's do some introductions.
4:01
Mike Uva: What do you?
4:01
Donna Friedman: think Sure Rick.
4:05
Mike Uva: Rick introduce yourself Rick.
4:06
Donna Friedman: Introduce yourself.
4:07
Rick Vincent: I'm Rick Vincent.
4:08
Rick Vincent: Here at the district I am the collection system design manager, which means I manage a group of engineers who are managing a lot of our projects out in the our collection system, which consists of all the sewers and tunnels and all that kind of fun stuff being in the engineering and construction department.
4:28
Rick Vincent: We get pulled into a lot of different things at the sewer district Reviewing plans that come in from developers in and around the the community, doing some outreach to folks in the community as it relates to our projects and giving people informed, stuff like that.
4:46
Rick Vincent: And then, because the sewer district is great, we get to we all get to do lots of fun things and I enjoy personally enjoy being involved in sort of the social justice type issues that are related to our projects environmental justice and other sort of DE&I aspects that are related to our projects.
5:11
Rick Vincent: So I'm personally passionate about that, so I try to bring that into our designs as well.
5:16
Mike Uva: Angela.
5:17
Angela Jones: Yeah, so Angela Jones, government affairs specialist too here at the district I've been in for over 14 years.
5:25
Angela Jones: My role here is kind of like a liaison role because I work with elected officials and key stakeholders and kind of help them understand the work that we do.
5:43
Angela Jones: And then I also work with my engineering and construction partners and go through the design and the construction side of the projects to fully be able to articulate that to the community and kind of be that voice.
5:58
Angela Jones: You know I'm the interceptor, so I get the calls of my house is about to fall down to.
6:06
Angela Jones: You know you crack my sidewalk or because of the work and my roles, to kind of mitigate all that and to make sure that we are timely and not always reactive but also proactive and in engaging with our customers.
6:28
Angela Jones: My background is in civil engineering, so I started off my career as a design engineer, designing water and wastewater treatment plants.
6:38
Mike Uva: Oh, you started off with water right away.
6:40
Angela Jones: I did I did.
6:41
Angela Jones: Working with a private global engineering firm and just being able to work with a team of engineers to provide a solution for their problems, and so being in a position to be able to have that liaison kind of role that I am now with those firms, just led me to my opportunities and kept opening up doors.
7:08
Angela Jones: And now I'm here at the district.
7:10
Mike Uva: Did you always have the idea that you wanted to be more of a liaison role as opposed to actually designing?
7:18
Angela Jones: I really had no.
7:21
Angela Jones: True, this is what I want to do.
7:23
Angela Jones: Right In high school I went to a special math and science program that exposed us to the engineering world, right I mean.
7:34
Angela Jones: But I didn't have anybody in my family that was an engineer, so I didn't know what it looked like.
7:39
Angela Jones: So my parents I thank them for just putting me in position, putting me where I can take advantage of programs that expose me to the possibilities.
7:52
Angela Jones: And then, once I got in, I kind of navigated through.
7:56
Angela Jones: You know what I liked and what I didn't like.
7:58
Angela Jones: I never forget I shadowed some architects because I first I kind of thought I wanted to design houses and so I went and shadowed an architect's office and I was like, oh, I'm about to die, it was so boring.
8:11
Angela Jones: And in my I probably no shame to the architects, because I've got a lot of architect friends I've always had this notion of giving back.
8:20
Angela Jones: So my father, you know he worked for the post office for years but he was active in his his ward block club meetings.
8:29
Angela Jones: You know he assisted his friends when they were running for campaigns.
8:34
Angela Jones: So I've always just been naturally predestined to just kind of give and do and so, and sometimes being in engineering.
8:43
Angela Jones: Being an engineer, if you're not put in the right role you don't get that opportunity.
8:49
Angela Jones: Well, fortunately it kind of worked out.
8:52
Angela Jones: The private firm I used to work for needed someone who was a little bit more engaged in than the guys and girls.
8:59
Angela Jones: I just got to sit behind the computer and I just kind of was able to kind of show that side and know that my whole purpose, or my sole purpose in life is to make sure that the younger generation has that exposure to be an engineer so they can see that possibility in themselves.
9:21
Mike Uva: Do you think it's a field that kids don't naturally learn about, or you're trying to shut some light on it and make it, yes, an opportunity?
9:30
Angela Jones: Some of the engineers.
9:31
Angela Jones: It's not the coolest, you know it's not cool, it's not sexy.
9:34
Angela Jones: It just depends on what your definition for sexy is right.
9:38
Angela Jones: For me, the opportunity of seeing what you do impact the community as a whole right away is really fulfilling.
9:50
Angela Jones: You know the work that we do.
9:51
Angela Jones: You just can't see it all the time so we got to show it to them.
9:55
Angela Jones: We got to make it cool, we got to make it sexy, we got to give it a possibility and give it a face.
10:03
Donna Friedman: Rick, what about you?
10:06
Rick Vincent: So in high school I always heard math and science.
10:08
Rick Vincent: Used to be an engineer.
10:08
Rick Vincent: That was about the extent of it.
10:10
Rick Vincent: My dad was a public employee in the state of Rhode Island and he was a planner, so that was the closest thing to engineer.
10:20
Rick Vincent: He was a city planner in our city when I was growing up and then he transferred to the state.
10:24
Rick Vincent: I kind of knew that it was going to be engineering.
10:26
Rick Vincent: I probably wanted to do civil engineering just kind of.
10:28
Rick Vincent: But I'm sorry, dad, if you'll listen to this, but I'm way better at math and science than my dad ever was.
10:38
Rick Vincent: So that's why I went engineering as opposed to city planning and he was more of a history major, but anyway.
10:43
Rick Vincent: So I started out as a structural engineer.
10:46
Rick Vincent: I have a degree in structural engineering and my journey kind of was influenced by the employer that I ended up working for.
10:54
Rick Vincent: I was a co-op at a firm called SphereDrip, which doesn't exist anymore.
10:58
Rick Vincent: They were big into railroad engineering, civil engineering of roadways, but also tunnels and bridges.
11:07
Rick Vincent: And I graduated from college I was like I'm a structural engineer, I want to design bridges.
11:12
Rick Vincent: I came out of college and I was like I put in a group and I designed my first bridge.
11:19
Rick Vincent: I was super excited.
11:21
Rick Vincent: It was on Martha's Vineyard.
11:22
Rick Vincent: It was a tiny little 50-foot bridge that was just.
11:26
Rick Vincent: It connected the sort of the island of Martha's Vineyard to the other island, Chilmark.
11:31
Rick Vincent: That was like on the very eastern end or northern end, I think.
11:34
Rick Vincent: So you know, but perfect little assignment for an entry-level engineer.
11:38
Rick Vincent: I literally took a homework assignment from one of my classes to design that bridge.
11:44
Rick Vincent: I literally just plugged and chugged and
11:49
Mike Uva: Plugged and chugged?
11:51
Donna Friedman: That's a little terrifying.
11:51
Donna Friedman: I know we're all adults here and so we know that none of us know what we're doing, but that's terrifying.
11:58
Mike Uva: Well, he knew what he was doing
11:59
Rick Vincent: No back then I was good at calc and stuff, and it was a precast concrete box, girder, bridge, where it was pre-stressed, which means that the rebar in there, they pull it and then they cast the concrete around it and they release it.
12:13
Rick Vincent: And so that rebar is intentioned when it's cast around it and it bonds to that rebar, so it puts it automatically, puts that concrete beam into compression before it's used, so it's already pre-stressed.
12:26
Rick Vincent: And then you put it down on the roadway and when the load hits on it it nets out that stress and it makes it more efficient.
12:34
Rick Vincent: It makes that beam more efficient.
12:35
Rick Vincent: So basically it's like building the load into it but the other direction of what it needs to be, so it brings up the capacity of the beam Anyway.
12:44
Rick Vincent: So I literally had pre-stressed concrete assignments in college and all I had to do was change the dimensions.
12:49
Rick Vincent: But the point of telling that story is that it was super boring.
12:53
Donna Friedman: It goes back to like I'm not going to keep.
12:55
Mike Uva: You got the ones that challenged you.
12:55
Rick Vincent: It was so easy.
12:56
Rick Vincent: It was like I did the drawings too, I did the CAD, I did everything, and it was so cookie cutter where I could just do that again, and all the bridges that I would foresee myself doing were all kind of ODOT-type bridges or, in this case, M-DOT Massachusetts.
13:15
Rick Vincent: So do this again and again, and again, and again.
13:18
Rick Vincent: And some engineers love that.
13:19
Rick Vincent: Some engineers want to just kind of repeat, and that was not me, so luckily, because at that time that company had huge tunnel projects.
13:29
Rick Vincent: They had one, a bunch of tunnel projects.
13:31
Rick Vincent: They had the Big Dig, they had the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority water tunnel, which were these big water supply tunnels, for that was supply water to Boston and the tunnel group needed help.
13:46
Rick Vincent: And so I was relocated out of the structural group with the bridges and into the tunneling underground group and I luckily got a mentor who taught me how to do tunnels.
13:55
Rick Vincent: I did not learn tunnels in college Nobody really does Very few and I loved it because every tunnel is different, no matter where you are, like you can go, even within Cleveland, you can go from one side of the block to another side of the block.
14:09
Rick Vincent: You've got to design that tunnel differently because the ground is different, because the ground is your lining.
14:14
Rick Vincent: That's how tunnel engineering works.
14:16
Rick Vincent: So you have to study the ground, the materials of the ground, and use that to design your tunnel.
14:22
Rick Vincent: I love that because you can also be a little creative.
14:24
Rick Vincent: There weren't a lot of codes written about it another terrifying thing but you used existing concrete codes.
14:30
Rick Vincent: You used the material codes that were there, but the code to design a bridge, there's tons of codes.
14:35
Rick Vincent: I mean it's like it's volumes and volumes of codes that have been and it's just too stringent.
14:43
Rick Vincent: But with tunnels you could be creative, because you've got to get down there, you've got to get around certain things to get there, you've got to be creative.
14:50
Rick Vincent: Well, contractors are creative.
14:51
Rick Vincent: Contractors are really creative in it.
14:53
Rick Vincent: You had to really understand the business of construction to design a tunnel and I love construction.
15:00
Rick Vincent: So it really got me into that mindset of how is this going to get built?
15:05
Rick Vincent: Because you have to understand that to design this tunnel, design the shaft to get down there, all of that stuff, and there's different ways to do it.
15:13
Rick Vincent: I love the fluidity of it, the flexibility of it, and then the challenge of trying to put together drawings and specifications that actually allowed for that fluidity, allowed for the flexibility.
15:23
Rick Vincent: So it suited me really really well.
15:25
Rick Vincent: I was an artist in high school too, so that sort of like that side blended well, that creative side of my personality blended well with this side of engineering, like drawing, drawing, yeah, yeah, mostly drawing.
15:39
Rick Vincent: I hated painting but I love to draw.
15:43
Mike Uva: To a point you just made about tunnels, would you say that the ground that you tunnel in is actually part of the tunnel?
15:50
Rick Vincent: It is the tunnel, the ground is the tunnel.
15:52
Rick Vincent: I mean.
15:55
Rick Vincent: So if you pick any tunnel, the ground around it is what preserves that tunnel, because the earth pressure is your friend.
16:03
Rick Vincent: It puts especially a round tunnel right.
16:06
Rick Vincent: Most tunnels are round but some of them are rectangular.
16:09
Rick Vincent: But the round tunnel is in hoop compression right.
16:12
Rick Vincent: So the ground pushes on that tunnel and keeps it in compression, keeps those forces in the lining locked in, but not so rigidly that the lining of that tunnel can't move.
16:24
Rick Vincent: Sort of imperceptively move, but like the force is like in an earthquake.
16:28
Rick Vincent: If you have an earthquake you really don't worry too much about tunnels, because in earth moving the tunnel's going to move with the ground.
16:35
Rick Vincent: You worry about things that are up above the ground because the ground's moving like this, but the thing up above the ground doesn't want to go, it's already fixed, and then the ground moves below it.
16:44
Rick Vincent: They're like what's happening, shimmying?
16:46
Donna Friedman: below you.
16:46
Donna Friedman: They're missing a lot of good batting options for those last years.
16:49
Donna Friedman: But anyway.
16:51
Rick Vincent: So the ground is your tunnel is the point you really have to understand.
16:55
Rick Vincent: That's the material you're working with.
16:56
Rick Vincent: You've got to be able to put that lining in and preserve and lock in those ground forces.
17:02
Rick Vincent: So it's different everywhere you go, even within this building or this organization.
17:07
Rick Vincent: All the tunnels we built here, they're not all the same.
17:10
Rick Vincent: You can't take one design from one and then move and just cut and paste it into the other one.
17:15
Rick Vincent: You have to start over and look at the ground.
17:19
Donna Friedman: What's your favorite project that you've ever worked on?
17:22
Angela Jones: I used to work for Malcolm Perney, so we were the lead design on the Baldwin Water Works treatment plant here in Cleveland.
17:29
Angela Jones: Oh, where's that Baldwin Water Works right?
17:33
Donna Friedman: on Fairhill.
17:34
Donna Friedman: It's a beautiful facility.
17:36
Angela Jones: Oh my god.
17:37
Angela Jones: I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous.
17:39
Angela Jones: You see the top level.
17:41
Angela Jones: But once you get down and you see the pipes and what was designed, that was high tech back then, which is still high tech today.
17:51
Angela Jones: I got a chance to design a stop log structure, so where you can split the flow of the filters right, and so it was like, ok, we need you to figure this out.
18:05
Angela Jones: And I'm like me, I need to figure it out.
18:07
Angela Jones: Oh my god.
18:08
Angela Jones: And so I did my research.
18:10
Angela Jones: The guys showed me how to do it and I designed it, they stamped it or whatever, and then they built it.
18:16
Angela Jones: So every time I go out the Baldwin I stand on top of it.
18:19
Angela Jones: I'm like this is my stop log.
18:21
Angela Jones: So I really lean into my nerd side.
18:27
Angela Jones: I get excited about all the projects that I'm a part of.
18:31
Angela Jones: I love working in this space and I love the projects that we work on and everything is just interesting.
18:39
Angela Jones: I had a quick laugh when you were talking about your bridge design and I just always go back to my bridge design project.
18:46
Angela Jones: In school we designed a cable state pedestrian bridge over this lake at Ohio Northern University and I am completely obsessed with cable state bridges.
18:55
Angela Jones: So everywhere I go, I'm looking for this cable state bridge and I'm like, oh, look at that.
19:01
Rick Vincent: I will say that is probably the coolest type of bridge.
19:04
Rick Vincent: Cable state bridges are probably among the.
19:06
Rick Vincent: I was actually.
19:07
Mike Uva: Can you say what that is?
19:08
Mike Uva: Oh sorry.
19:09
Donna Friedman: So that's when?
19:09
Donna Friedman: Yeah, non-engineers over here.
19:12
Rick Vincent: Yeah, so a good example would be the Golden Gate Bridge.
19:15
Rick Vincent: So you've seen that one.
19:17
Rick Vincent: So it's basically the deck is supported by cables and the main supporting elements are cables that go open over a tower of some kind, and that design, bringing it up and over those towers, is actually an efficient design.
19:34
Rick Vincent: The curvature of that cable it's not just pretty, it actually has a purpose.
19:40
Rick Vincent: And I don't remember all the details anymore, it's been too many years for me.
19:45
Angela Jones: It has a great cable state.
19:46
Rick Vincent: Well, I was going to say so.
19:47
Rick Vincent: I get to work on the.
19:48
Rick Vincent: So that was part of the big dig portion that I worked on, but it wasn't the bridge itself.
19:53
Rick Vincent: So this is the largest.
19:54
Rick Vincent: At least back in the late 90s, early 2000s, the largest asymmetric cable state bridge in the world was on the big dig.
20:02
Rick Vincent: I mean, you hear a lot of bad news about the big dig, but there were a lot of firsts on the big dig.
20:07
Rick Vincent: The first use of slurry walls which we use on all our shafts today.
20:10
Rick Vincent: The first use of slurry walls as a permanent support element.
20:13
Rick Vincent: Those are the walls of the tunnel.
20:15
Donna Friedman: Can you say what a slurry wall is?
20:16
Rick Vincent: Slurry wall is a.
20:18
Rick Vincent: It's basically a concrete wall that you build in the ground before you excavate the ground.
20:25
Rick Vincent: So when you go down there the wall is already in place.
20:27
Rick Vincent: So you basically dig a trench and you install concrete and rebar or concrete and steel I-beams in the wall from the surface down and you dig these trenches at nine or 10 feet at a time and you fill the trench with slurry.
20:42
Rick Vincent: Slurry is a heavy water it's like made with bentonite Keeps the trench open.
20:46
Rick Vincent: And then you pump concrete from the bottom to the top of that trench and you just place the slurry and replace it with concrete and then you let it cast in the ground underground and then you go down between these slurry walls that you put one side of the other and you can dig down in between them and support the ground with those walls.
21:06
Rick Vincent: So the big dig did that and, yeah, use that as part of the final tunnel lining.
21:11
Rick Vincent: And I designed a lot of the connections, all the roof connections, all the roof.
21:15
Rick Vincent: So when I drive through the big day I look up and I say I did all these beams, I designed all these beams.
21:19
Rick Vincent: My favorite job, from its pure technical standpoint, is this job I did out in California called Slack Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and it was a tunnel that was built for literally splitting, so cool.
21:38
Rick Vincent: Oh my gosh, and I was working for that same company again.
21:41
Rick Vincent: By then they weren't sweardrip anymore.
21:43
Rick Vincent: Jacobs Engineering had bought them the coolest requirement on that, which I didn't think was cool at the time.
21:49
Rick Vincent: But we found a way around it.
21:50
Rick Vincent: The base slab of that tunnel, because of the atoms, because of the instrumentation they were going to put in there and the laser they were going to shoot, could not move more than one micron, like the slab couldn't move.
22:02
Rick Vincent: And we told them that's impossible.
22:04
Rick Vincent: Basically it is.
22:05
Rick Vincent: I mean the ground from heat, I mean from anything.
22:09
Rick Vincent: It moves more than that.
22:09
Rick Vincent: But we found a way around it.
22:11
Rick Vincent: They found a way to incorporate it into the equipment itself as opposed to our work.
22:15
Donna Friedman: Oh, so that it would adjust as the ground.
22:18
Rick Vincent: Right.
22:18
Rick Vincent: The technology that was going in there was the brightest x-ray beam like a billion times brighter than anything on the planet so they could do these experiments and they could shoot this laser and hit the target for the experiment without destroying the thing they were hitting.
22:33
Rick Vincent: Normally a laser you'd get one shot at it, you shoot the thing it would destroy, but you'd get pictures right before it was destroyed.
22:39
Rick Vincent: This thing created it hit a billion dollar mirror or something which split the laser beam into an x-ray.
22:44
Rick Vincent: Now this is stuff, this is super cool stuff that you hear about when you're building a tunnel yeah, nothing to do with me, but it hit the medium and it wouldn't destroy it so they could take longer pictures.
22:54
Rick Vincent: And somebody won a Nobel Prize because of that facility that we built.
23:00
Donna Friedman: Did you?
23:01
Donna Friedman: When the Nobel Prize guy or woman went up, were they like?
23:04
Donna Friedman: I'd like to thank Rick Vinton.
23:06
Donna Friedman: No, simply, so nobody knows about.
23:09
Donna Friedman: To.
23:09
Rick Vincent: Angela's point earlier.
23:10
Rick Vincent: Nobody knows about engineers and what they do and the stuff that allows people like that to have that You're buying a tiny Nobel heroes?
23:18
Mike Uva: Are there things about working in the water field that you wouldn't experience with, for instance, building a bridge or building a building?
23:27
Angela Jones: Right, I've always.
23:29
Angela Jones: I love the water.
23:30
Angela Jones: You know, my sign is it's an air sign but it's an aquarius, so it's a water carrier, and I've just always been predestined to be in this space.
23:39
Angela Jones: And so when I graduated from Ohio Northern and I took a job up here in Cleveland, my husband was like, well, what are you going to be doing?
23:49
Angela Jones: I'm like I'm working in water, and so that's all he really knew.
23:53
Angela Jones: But it's just so fascinating because you know, water being the, we cannot live without water.
24:00
Angela Jones: And so to be working in the space that's responsible for not only cleaning it for you to drink, but also cleaning it so we can return it back to Mother Nature, so it can continue to be used as it's something.
24:16
Rick Vincent: There are a lot of similarities to other sort of civil engineering disciplines.
24:22
Rick Vincent: In other disciplines you're worried about water outside of things you know you're worried about getting into space.
24:26
Rick Vincent: In our world.
24:28
Rick Vincent: It's water staying in and keeping the groundwater out, but also water, you know, keeping water that we don't want to leak out of our pipes right, unless it's in the spot where we want it to come out.
24:39
Donna Friedman: I talked to one of the engineers one of the city engineers and he's like yeah, you guys have weird jobs because, as a city, as like a developer when he was a developer, he's like all you're concerned about is how do you get the water off the property as quickly as possible?
24:54
Rick Vincent: Which is like what we don't want them to do.
24:55
Rick Vincent: Right, we want them to like hold and maintain and do water quality measures and water?
25:01
Mike Uva: quantity measures.
25:02
Donna Friedman: And so it's funny.
25:03
Donna Friedman: It's totally true.
25:04
Rick Vincent: Yeah, but I mean civil engineering, I'd say in general, the commonality among it, and that's the reason I liked it, because it's that you do touch more people, you know, with a civil engineering degree than you do with maybe a mechanical or chemical, even, or some of these other ones, electrical and I think and that was what was appealing to me when I was deciding which discipline to choose when I was in college is I wanted to do something that you know made the world better and I figured all right, well, that's going to touch more of the world than maybe one you know widget in a machine or something like that I like this question, Mike.
25:38
Donna Friedman: What are some engineering accomplishments around Cleveland that inspire you?
25:42
Rick Vincent: Yeah, things you see around town, you're like oh, okay, well, I mean, I gotta give it to our projects.
25:49
Angela Jones: I mean, I don't know Our tunnel projects absolutely.
25:52
Rick Vincent: Yeah, I mean just the scale.
25:54
Rick Vincent: Well, I think you know it is hard to express like how much goes into those projects, some of the challenges that you face out in the field, and you know just Working around things you know trying to, you know lessen the impact to the surrounding community.
26:11
Rick Vincent: All of that takes a lot of effort and when you get done and you kind of look at, look around, at like what you've built, it is like massive.
26:20
Rick Vincent: You guys also mentioned our 100-year-old bricks, sewers.
26:24
Rick Vincent: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've all seen pictures and you know some of the, especially the bigger ones, like Wallworth.
26:29
Donna Friedman: You know 16-foot dinosaur, and they just you know still look great.
26:33
Rick Vincent: And the hand-built brick by brick 100-gears funneled through, you know, under compressed air probably.
26:38
Rick Vincent: You know, back then they used compressed air where they would just keep the ground from caving in by just pumping air in there.
26:43
Rick Vincent: Oh yeah, workers would get the bends when they come out, and stuff like that.
26:47
Rick Vincent: I mean this is a dangerous dangerous work, so they're just forcing air in there.
26:50
Rick Vincent: Yeah, to keep the ground, water and the ground from coming in, they would use compressed air.
26:54
Rick Vincent: You know it's an ingenious idea, except that you had to like wait to come out and they didn't realize why people were dying.
27:00
Mike Uva: Yeah, I feel like it was just crush your skull.
27:03
Rick Vincent: No, it was not enough to hurt the people in there because they would acclimate to it, but then they had to re-acclimate coming out, oh, okay.
27:09
Donna Friedman: Wasn't that part of the one of the tunnel warring machines had to have like a decompression area?
27:14
Donna Friedman: All of the warring machines in soil have to have that.
27:18
Rick Vincent: The tunnel we're digging right now is Shrulline Storage Tunnel.
27:20
Rick Vincent: It's, you know, going to probably mine out in about a month from now.
27:23
Rick Vincent: That one has at the front of the machine, the chamber behind the cutter head that cuts the soil has a pressurized chamber and that's to counterbalance the pressure that the ground wants to come in through, you know.
27:37
Rick Vincent: So you're trying to keep the soil and the water from coming in, but you're, behind that chamber is free air.
27:42
Rick Vincent: It's like we are sitting here now.
27:46
Rick Vincent: So if we have to go and maintain the head of that machine, we open the door.
27:50
Rick Vincent: It's like a you know what do they call it, like a diver's door or whatever and they go in there and they work on it, but they have to wait to come out and they have to decompress and then wait, you know.
27:59
Rick Vincent: So it takes extra time to go in there and do work and they can only be in there for a certain amount of time under that pressure, because you don't want to lose that pressure and you don't want the soil to start coming in through that chamber and lower the pressure.
28:10
Rick Vincent: So you have to keep it up.
28:11
Rick Vincent: So, yeah, so that technology is still used, but it's much safer.
28:15
Angela Jones: It's not like everywhere, you know.
28:17
Angela Jones: Yeah, that's cool.
28:19
Mike Uva: Part of your job, Angela, especially in somewhat the work you do, the outreach work is to encourage the next generation of engineers.
28:27
Mike Uva: Is there a shortage of engineers?
28:30
Mike Uva: Absolutely.
28:31
Angela Jones: There is a shortage.
28:32
Angela Jones: Wow, I should have had those statistics with me.
28:35
Angela Jones: There's a shortage of engineers.
28:37
Angela Jones: There's a shortage of minority engineers and the shortage of women engineers.
28:42
Angela Jones: A lot of kids don't want to take the time to learn the math and science which is the foundation of being an engineer, or it's not cool, it's not sexy, so they really don't get into it.
28:56
Angela Jones: The National Society of Black Engineers has a campaign to increase the number of minority engineers by 25,000 in a period of time, and so they're being very aggressive to making sure that the exposure is given to the young kids at a young age, because there's research that has shown if a kid does not start advancing, advancing in math by like the sixth grade, they won't be on a path to take advantage of engineering careers.
29:33
Angela Jones: And so it's this big push to make sure you know to share with students, you know the opportunities, and so they'll continue to progress in their math classes at an earlier age.
29:46
Angela Jones: So once they finish high school they're in a position to take advantage of the classes needed to be an engineer.
29:54
Angela Jones: So you got to catch them young so you can get them through that entire pipeline.
29:58
Angela Jones: I'm not saying if you didn't have any of the math when you graduated from high school that you can't do it.
30:05
Angela Jones: You can, it's just a little longer journey to get there.
30:09
Rick Vincent: We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the ACE program that the sewer district is part of right.
30:13
Rick Vincent: So that's the architecture, construction and engineering mentorship program that both Angela and I Angela was the founder of it here at the sewer district.
30:21
Rick Vincent: I got involved when I joined and it's a great program to raise awareness, at the high school level at least, of those fields by going into the schools and serving as volunteer mentors and kind of doing activities and a project that shows the students what it's like to do an engineering and then there's a competition at the end.
30:43
Angela Jones: Yeah.
30:43
Angela Jones: So it's raising that awareness, though, even to those who have had that, because maybe they're choosing, maybe, like you said before, a doctor, a lawyer or whatever that's what we all heard growing up, also engineering, and this is what it's like A teacher in high school that shared with me that, going back to your purpose, find something that you're passionate about and then pair that with being an engineer, and then you know as long as engineers.
31:14
Angela Jones: So, sorry.
31:14
Angela Jones: I wanted to be a smarty right.
31:19
Angela Jones: I said, well, I love to eat, Right, and he said, well, you know what?
31:23
Angela Jones: You should look into?
31:24
Angela Jones: Chemical engineering, Because then you can get involved in the process of making food and making food last longer, or the whole thing.
31:36
Angela Jones: And I was like, oh, I'm going to school to be a chemical engineer, but it's just that simple.
31:42
Angela Jones: We're fortunate here at the sewer district.
31:44
Angela Jones: They have invested over the years and several student programs to share and expose youth to STEM based careers.
31:54
Angela Jones: So we have the Cleveland Step program for sixth through ninth graders that we take on tours around the city to expose them with you know possible careers and we make sure that they see some engineers in the mix of all that so they can get that exposure and kind of begin to see themselves as that person.
32:18
Angela Jones: And then, of course, the ACE program.
32:19
Angela Jones: That's for we're now at Garrett Morgan High School on our team this year's project.
32:25
Angela Jones: They have reimagined Burke Lakefront Airport.
32:30
Angela Jones: Oh fantastic, oh it is the coolest thing.
32:31
Donna Friedman: Are they going to give to the city of Cleveland and be like you don't need your master plan anymore, we did it for you?
32:36
Angela Jones: They scrapped the whole airport notion and they've got all these different components.
32:41
Donna Friedman: I love that but it's so cool.
32:43
Angela Jones: It's so cool.
32:44
Angela Jones: It's good to see the kids kind of get involved and when they understand that you know, being an engineer, you know you get a chance to dream and then kind of take that dream and make it into reality.
32:57
Mike Uva: Right Very cool.
32:58
Donna Friedman: That's very, very cool.
33:00
Mike Uva: Donna, I think we have an opportunity for a trivia question.
33:02
Mike Uva: Oh yeah, I do.
33:10
Rick Vincent: Who is the patron saint of engineers?
33:13
Angela Jones: Oh, you got that one.
33:15
Mike Uva: Yeah, kind of timely I would.
33:18
Donna Friedman: I would say that McDonald's would also agree.
33:22
Rick Vincent: Oh, is there?
33:23
Rick Vincent: Are these hints?
33:24
Rick Vincent: Is it St Patrick or something like that?
33:28
Rick Vincent: Well, I don't know.
33:28
Mike Uva: Based on Mike's hint, that was totally figured out a way to get rid of all those snakes.
33:32
Mike Uva: Isn't that what St Patrick didn't chase?
33:36
Mike Uva: Yeah, with the staff, or something.
33:38
Donna Friedman: Okay.
33:38
Donna Friedman: Next question Pi day is coming up.
33:43
Donna Friedman: How many digits of Pi do you have memorized?
33:47
Angela Jones: Oh, not many.
33:53
Angela Jones: 3.14.
33:54
Angela Jones: Is it five?
33:57
Donna Friedman: No, I've got the next three in my head.
33:59
Rick Vincent: Yeah, it's 3.14159 something.
34:06
Donna Friedman: That's as far as I got to, yeah, so okay, all right, all right.
34:10
Mike Uva: Rick Vincent Angela Jones.
34:11
Mike Uva: Thank you very much for joining us Happy to In our belated engineer week celebration.