The College of Engineering granted 784 baccalaureate degrees in 13 programs during its spring commencement ceremony on May 12 at the Bryce Jordan Center, University Park. Penn State ranks as one of the top institutions nationwide in the number of engineering degrees granted annually.
Systemwide, Penn State graduated a total of 10,355 students -- approximately 594 with associate degrees, 8,154 baccalaureate degrees, 1,284 graduate degrees, 123 medical degrees and 200 juris doctorate degrees, between May 6 and 14. To see pictures from many of the commencement exercises held at University Park and many campuses throughout the Penn State system, visit http://live.psu.edu/still_life/2006_05_15_commencement2006/index.html online.
This year's commencement address was delivered by Arthur C. Miller, distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State. Miller's address, titled "Engineering Response to Catastrophes: Katrina," described how catastrophic events have changed the way engineers approach problems.
Miller joined Penn State in 1972 as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. In 2002, he was honored with the title of distinguished professor in recognition of his exceptional record of instruction, research and service at Penn State.
Since joining Penn State, Miller has taught a variety of classes, including elementary surveying, highway engineering, strength of materials, wastewater and stormwater management, fluid mechanics, open channel flow, dam-break analysis, and erosion and sedimentation control.
Recognized as an expert in hydrologic and hydraulic engineering, Miller was elected a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1999 and an honorary member of Chi Epsilon in 2003. He holds membership in several professional engineering organizations and is a registered professional engineer and professional land surveyor.
He is currently a member of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force for New Orleans Hurricane Protection Projects.
His commencement remarks are as follows:
"First I would like to congratulate all of the seniors for completing their engineering degrees. This is your last day as a Penn State undergraduate and you are about to embark on a new career, moving from being an engineering student to becoming an engineer. Your parents are probably the most proud of this occasion and I would also like to congratulate them and remind you that this is not a good time to ask for an advancement on your first pay check. It is an honor for me to be here celebrating your graduation with you.
"Before I address the 'Engineering Response to Catastrophes,' and in particular Hurricane Katrina, I would like to talk a bit about other catastrophic events that have occurred in recent times and how they have changed the way we as engineers approach problems. In mid-June 1972, Hurricane Agnes formed over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Initially classified as a Category I Hurricane, by the time Agnes reached Pennsylvania it was a tropical storm. Most of the damage incurred from Agnes was associated with extensive flooding throughout the Susquehanna River valley. The storm caused more than $3 billion of damages mostly in Pennsylvania, where more than 70,000 people were evacuated during the flooding. The results of Hurricane Agnes solidified the country's flood insurance program and also reinforced the concept of the design flood, in this case the mythical 100-year event. It is interesting to note that 93 percent of its municipalities in Pennsylvania are classified as flood-prone.
The catastrophe of Three Mile Island occurred in March 1979 and was the result of a combination of personnel error, design deficiencies and component failure. The consequence of the accident changed the nuclear industry dramatically in that no new nuclear power plant construction has been started in the United States since the event. However, it was not only the accident that caused the demise of nuclear power in this country but also the miscalculation of future energy needs; construction of 40 planned power plants was canceled between 1973 and 1979, before the Three Mile Island incident occurred. As a result of that accident, local opposition to nuclear power grew, regulations increased tremendously and the cost of building nuclear power plants almost doubled.
Three Mile Island was to the nuclear power industry as the Teton Dam Failure was to the dam engineer. Teton Dam failed in 1976 as it was being filled for the first time. The dam, which was 305 feet high and held about 82 billion gallons of water, failed when it was nearly full. The result was the release of that water over a period of five hours, causing a flood wave to move downstream through the Teton River. This failure, like Three Mile Island, also was a result of a combination of personnel error and some design deficiencies. National and state dam safety programs were initiated following the Teton failure.
Catastrophic events occur in all parts of the world. The 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed more than 230,000 people. A tsunami is usually caused by an earthquake on the floor of the ocean and detection is very difficult when the propagated wave is only one or two feet in amplitude. Tsunamis are shallow water waves, which means that the ratio between water depth and wavelength is very small. These shallow water waves can move at the speed equal to the square root of the product of the acceleration of gravity and water depth. The deeper the water, the faster and shorter the wave is, often reaching travel velocities of more than 500 mph, which is about the velocity of a jet airplane. Tsunamis might be the most devastating of all catastrophic events; they travel at high speeds for a long period of time and lose very little energy and can cause massive destruction. It is impossible to prevent tsunamis from occurring, but the countries of the world are developing more sophisticated technology to predict its wake and hopefully establish emergency action plans for evacuation.
This brings me to the topic of my presentation, Hurricane Katrina, its impact on New Orleans, and how we as engineers can learn from this incident.
The French founded New Orleans in 1718. Calling Louisiana a needless drain, French officials negotiated a secret pact with the Spanish King Charles III, ceding the extensive Louisiana territory. Like France, Spanish officials became anxious to jettison the financial burden of Louisiana, so when Napoleon Bonaparte offered in 1800 to retake control of the territory, Spain jumped at the chance. Later when Bonaparte was losing New Orleans to the British and instead of the British taking over the territory, he sold the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States at a price of $15 million in 1803.
The Mississippi River flows from west to east to the south of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain lies to the north of the city. The first inhabitants settled just north of the river where the land was at its highest elevation. The city was surrounded by swampland and the Mississippi River. "The environment was characterized by muddy streets, stagnant water, pathological conditions, frequent flooding and limited room to grow."
However, at the turn of the 20th century, a public consensus was reached in support of a serious drainage system. Pump stations were built with some of the pumps having a capacity of 500,000 gallons per minute. Eleven-foot diameter pipes were used to convey the water from the pump stations. These measures saved lives, improved the quality of life and became a model for the protection of low-lying regions worldwide. These improvements also allowed the city to expand outward from the higher ground close to the river to the lower areas near Lake Pontchartrain further north.
When it would rain, the water would be conveyed not through a river drainage system but through an artificial pumping system. The levees protecting New Orleans were not built to survive the most severe hurricane. It was well known that a severe hurricane would lead to overtopping or breaching of the levee system, which in turn would then flood the city. The majority of the land in the city is below sea level. Over the years, the city has continued to sink, due to drainage, subsidence and compaction of the soils.
The initial levees were constructed along the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. After Hurricane Betsy in 1965 an intensive effort was made to construct much of the system that was in place in 2006. One of the major projects included levees along the Lake Pontchartrain lakefront, the 17th Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal, the Orleans Avenue Canal, the Intercoastal waterway, the Industrial Canal, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and other structures. The levees were designed for a standard hurricane, not the most severe hurricane.
Katrina was the costliest and one of the four or five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States. A hurricane is characterized by its wind velocity, storm surge and precipitation. Katrina started off as a category one hurricane off the Florida coast and reached a category five intensity over the Gulf of Mexico. When it made landfall on the northern Gulf Coast, near the mouth of the Pearl River, it was at a high category three intensity with winds of 135 mph. As determined by the Mississippi Emergency Operations Center, storm surges were as high as 27 feet at Hancock, Miss. The surges traveled as much as six miles inland and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. On the morning of Aug. 29, the surge overtopped large sections of the levees east of New Orleans, in Orleans Parish and St. Bernard Parish, and also pushed water up the Intercoastal Waterway and into the Industrial Canal.
The major damage by Katrina was caused by the storm surges. There are more than 350 miles of levees in the southeast Louisiana area. About 170 miles of this system sustained damage from Hurricane Katrina, including 41 miles that sustained severe damage.
I am a member of the Interagency Performance Assessment Team, IPET, conducting an assessment of Hurricane Katrina, The IPET includes more than 150 team members from all over the country having multi-disciplinary backgrounds. Specifically, IPET is charged with providing credible and objective scientific and engineering answers regarding the performance of the New Orleans hurricane protection system during and after Hurricane Katrina. The American Society of Civil Engineers, ASCE, assembled an independent team of experts to determine why certain sections of the levee system failed and others did not and also to review the work of IPET. And the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council also has assembled a team to review the IPET findings. The goal of all these efforts is to insure an unbiased assessment of the hurricane and the causes of the levee failures.
It is interesting to note that Penn State's College of Engineering has described the characteristics of a world-class engineer, which we hope all of you will become in the future. Our stated characteristics are to be aware of the world, solidly grounded in fundamentals, technically broad, versatile, customer oriented and effective in group operations. The characteristics of the IPET team could certainly be described as world class.
To help answer the questions regarding how the hurricane protection system in New Orleans would perform under various conditions, the IPET task force with which I am associated is focusing on the filling and dewatering of the separate areas protected by the levees and pump stations. New Orleans is divided into a number of parishes, which are isolated from each other by a system of levees around each parish. Therefore, drainage models for St. Charles, Jefferson, Orleans, St. Bernard and Placquemines parishes were developed to simulate water levels for what actually happened during Katrina and what would have happened had all the hurricane protection facilities remained intact, functioned as designed and operated as planned.
Other IPET teams are providing data needed to estimate the flow into and out of the modeled parishes. Data provided includes storm surges and wave heights, levee breach geometry and stormwater pump station operation. The objective of the interior drainage model is to simulate water elevations in areas that flooded based on flow into and out of the specified hurricane protection systems. Hurricane protection systems in the New Orleans area typically include facilities such as pump stations, levees, floodwalls and levee closure structures. Water can enter areas protected by the system from precipitation, levee and floodwall overtopping, levee and floodwall breaches or flanking, pump backflow and pump station basin overflow. Water flows out of the interior through breaches or pump stations.
The pre-Katrina model simulates what would happen during the event had all the protection facilities remained intact, functioned as designed and operated as planned. The Katrina actual performance simulates what happened during the event with the facilities performing as actually occurred. The initial modeling of the actual event is completed.
What do IPET and other organizations studying Katrina's impact on New Orleans want to accomplish through their work in New Orleans? Hopefully, our efforts will result in better systems to handle future natural catastrophes, like hurricanes and cyclones. Although cyclones take an enormous toll in lives and personal property, they may bring much-needed precipitation to otherwise dry regions (i.e., Texas drought in 1980). While the number of storms in the Atlantic has increased since 1995, there seems to be no sign of a global trend, with the annual global number of tropical cyclones remaining at about 90, plus or minus 10. Atlantic storms certainly are becoming more destructive financially, since five of the 10 most expensive storms in U.S. history have occurred since 1990.
The number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes may undergo a 50-70 year cycle. Although more common since 1995, few above-normal hurricane seasons occurred during 1970-1994. Destructive hurricanes struck frequently from 1926-1960, including many major New England hurricanes. A record 21 Atlantic tropical storms formed in 1933 and only recently was this number exceeded in 2005.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stated that "it is highly unlikely that global warming has (or will) contribute to a drastic change in the number or intensity of hurricanes." However, there is a "large increase in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories four and five." That is, while the number of cyclones decreased overall, the number of very strong cyclones increased.
The levee system in New Orleans will be rebuilt to the same protection pre-Katrina by June 1. The construction of those levees is on scheduled and the target date of June 1 will be met. Of the approximate 460,000 populations for New Orleans prior to the Hurricane, 260,000 people have yet to return. The Ninth District which was home to many of the lower-income families is yet to have been rebuilt and probably will never be redeveloped. If the designed standard for the levee system as of this June is the 100-year event, then the risk of failure within the next 30 years is 26 percent (i.e., there is a 26 percent chance that the levees would be over topped within the next 30 years). What can we afford and how much protection is enough? In our own backyard the levee system for Lock Haven, Pa., protects the town of Lock Haven to what level of risk?
The potential for future damaging storms is obvious. What we as engineers learn from our work in New Orleans will be applied throughout this country in places such as the Sacramento Valley, and overseas in places such as the Netherlands. Risk and reliability models are being developed to allow a systemwide assessment of the risk inherent in hurricane protection systems, like New Orleans.
In closing I would like to congratulate you again on your graduation.