ENGINEERING ASCE 2014

Editor’s Note: To coincide with next year’s 100th anniver- sary of the opening of the Panama Canal, the American Soci- ety of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is bringing its 2014 Civil Engineering Confer- ence to Panama City. Over the next year, Convene will present Engineering ASCE 2014, a series of articles about planning the confer- ence — beginning this month, with an introduction to ASCE, the Panama Canal, and the challenges and opportunities involved in bringing the two together.

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ohn Findlay Wallace and John Frank Stevens had two things in common: Both men served as chief engineer of the Panama Canal construction project, and both served a term as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) — Wallace in 1900 and Stevens in 1927. ASCE has since declared the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914, one of the “Seven Wonders of the Modern World” (in 1994) as well as one of the “Monuments of the Millennium” (in 2000). The long, involved history of ASCE and the canal will enter another phase in October 2014, when ASCE brings its 144th Annual Civil Engineering Conference to Panama City in honor of the canal’s 100th birthday. “We just started talking about [the fact] that it is one of the engineering feats,” said Amanda Rushing, CMP, ASCE’s director of conferences and meeting services, discussing why the canal made Panama a natural fit for ASCE’s annual conference. “They’re opening up several new locks. They’re building a bridge. And the Panama Canal contributed to a lot of other historical feats besides just the engineering portion of it. [It was there that the United States] discovered how to cure malaria.” It was July, and Rushing was sitting in her office in ASCE’s Reston,

Va., headquarters, looking simultaneously at the past and the future of the Panama Canal. “That’s why the French failed and that’s why the Americans were able to succeed,” she said, “because they finally found out what was causing the sickness, and how to treat it and prevent it. [The canal] is going to be a big part of the conference.”

58 PCMA CONVENE SEPTEMBER 2013 PCMA.ORG