1939: Civil Engineering

New Records.

Construction volume, the dollar measure of civil engineering activity, was 8 per cent greater in 1939 than in the previous year. Including about $1,600,000,000 of residential building, the year's total was $6,974,000,000. Excluding the residential work, the remainder was divided about two-thirds for public construction and one-third for private.

New all-time records were made in the fields of roads (by 1 per cent); sewage disposal (by 17 per cent); waterworks (by 24 per cent); and public buildings (by 18 per cent). Bridge construction, at the second highest volume ever reported, was 12 per cent above a year ago. Industrial building after a poor showing in the first half of the year picked up to top the 1938 figure by 86 per cent. Commercial building and large-scale housing were the only classes of work that failed to exceed last year's totals.

Predicting what volume 1940 will produce is more precarious than usual, considering war abroad and a presidential election on the home front. All indications are for a considerable letdown in public works construction as Federal purse strings are pulled together. National defense needs may, however, be reflected in enough construction to cushion the drop. Substantial improvement in private construction — industrial plants, utilities and housing — is possible, so that 1940 can be expected to produce about the same amount of construction work as did 1939. Along such a trend, from a predominance of public works to an excess of private over public, is the road to normalcy as it existed before the depression.

Civil engineering activity is most easily considered if divided into the various types of work involved, namely, bridges, dams, irrigation, buildings, highways, sewage disposal, water supply, and flood control.

Building Construction.

The year in building construction was marked by a substantial increase in housing and a great rise in factory construction during the last half of the year. Technically, advance was marked by a wider use of structural welding for steel frame buildings. New York City approved this type of construction, permitting an apartment house and several schools with arc-welded frames to be built. Other large arc-welded buildings were 16- and 23-story structures for the Jersey City Medical Center, a 14-story office building for the State of Kentucky, at Frankfort, and a 14-story addition to the 13-story Chamber of Commerce Building in Houston, Tex.

The public housing program of the USHA made large strides during the year, as 19 low-rent projects in 13 cities were opened to tenants. A total of 145 projects, designed to provide over 58,000 dwellings, have gone into construction. By late spring all of the USHA's $800,000,000 appropriation will have been expended on 90 per cent loans to local housing authorities. A bill asking an additional $800,000,000 is pending in Congress. An important achievement has been the reduction of construction costs of the dwelling units in the program, the average now being $2,831; the average total development cost, including land and non-dwelling facilities such as stores, is $4,867. Cracked walls found in some of the housing projects called attention to the difficulty of combining brick bearing walls with concrete slab floors and roofs, and has resulted in much discussion and a test program that should benefit the entire building industry.

The privately owned and financed Parkchester housing development in the Bronx, N. Y., in a class by itself as to size and completeness, was brought to a stage of about 75 per cent completion. It is estimated to have cost the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. $35,000,000 and will house over 12,000 families on its 129-acre site.

One of the fastest building jobs on record was chalked up by the Glenn L. Martin Co. at Baltimore, in constructing a two-story $1,800,000 assembly building for airplanes in a period of eleven weeks from the time the design contract was let; foreign and United States military orders were the incentive. About the most striking and unusual industrial building of the year was that built by Church & Dwight, Inc., manufacturers of baking soda, at Syracuse, N. Y. The equivalent of about 8 stories in height, the building is inclosed in solid walls of brick and glass block and presents striking effects in both mass and façade. Its steel framework is entirely welded and some of the connections are among the largest ever attempted by this method of joining steel together, carrying in several instances as much as 250,000 lb. each.

Another notable industrial plant was that of the E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. at Seaport, Del., where a one-story building 270 ft. wide and over 1,000 ft. long was completed for the manufacture of Nylon yarn and similar products destined for use in women's hose and toothbrushes, among other articles. Large-scale food terminal facilities were built in both Denver and Kansas City, Kan. Involving cold storage warehouses, grain elevators, farmers' markets and large railway trackage, these terminals represented some of the outstanding construction operations in the building field of the year. The thin-shell concrete barrel roof construction, previously used in this country on large skating arenas, made its appearance in the industrial field in a new factory for the Armstrong Tire Co. at Natchez, Miss. Another significant development was the use of enameled steel sheets for the exterior walls of a high school at Girardsville, Pa.

Highways.

More money was spent for roads in 1939 than in any other year in history. Tax revenues from gasoline sales and license fees mounted at an even faster pace, indicating increasing use of the highways. The year marked the beginning of a planned development of a national super-highway grid, with a master plan of an interregional system of 30,000 miles being drawn up by the Public Roads Administration. The year also recorded official recognition by the Federal Government of the problem presented by the high cost of rights-of-way for express highways into and through our cities. Such facilities are major needs of our highway program, and a bill was introduced into Congress providing for Federal loans for rights-of-way purchase, thus leaving existing highway money for actual construction work.

During the year the 48 states spent $735,000,000 to improve 28,000 miles of highway, of which 12 per cent was hard pavement, 53 per cent bituminous types of surfacing, and 35 per cent was graded and drained and given a low type surfacing. Increasing use of bituminous types of surfacing and a larger proportion of highway money assigned to maintenance were the principal trends of the year. On the basis of the $735,000,000 expenditure each American in 1939 spent through the various state highway departments an average of $5.98; the maximum expenditure was $8.18 in the Far West and the minimum expenditure $4.52 in the Middle West. In New England 46 per cent of the highway money is spent for maintenance, while the Middle West spends 36 per cent, the Far West 31 per cent and the South 25 per cent.

Most notable development of the year was the increasing use of divided highways, largely dictated by their safety values. Most of the other highway improvements were also allied with safety such as the use of accelerating and decelerating lanes at entrances to express highways, a continued high tempo of grade-separation construction work, the use of white reflecting curbs and the extension of highway lighting.

The smoldering subject of toll highways versus free highways was touched off when Connecticut placed tolls on its Merritt Parkway beginning in June. In retaliation, Westchester County, N. Y., placed tolls on its Hutchison River Parkway, which connects with the Merritt Parkway. Motorists paid the ten cent tolls with apparent willingness but opponents of the idea maintained that the motorist is already taxed far beyond the service that he gets and that until all highway tax money is used to build highways, toll roads can be justified only under very exceptional circumstances. In the meantime there is rapidly nearing completion a 200-mile road between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh that was planned and financed as a toll highway. Cost will be in the neighborhood of $70,000,000. Involving heavy grading and the reconstruction of a half dozen old tunnels, driven 50 years ago for the proposed South Penn Railway, the job represents one of the largest and fastest road building operations ever undertaken. It is without question the greatest road construction job of the whole year.

Running it a close second is the 31-mile Belt Parkway being built around the southern and eastern borders of New York City, a lane-separated express highway with 77 grade separation structures and costing a total of about $28,000,000. At its eastern end it connects with the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge across the entrance to Long Island Sound and leading to the Westchester County parkways, while at its western end it is proposed to connect it with a crossing of the upper bay from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan at the Battery. Such a crossing, now planned as a tunnel because the War Department refused to issue a permit for a suspension bridge, would provide direct connection with New York City's West Side elevated highway, which runs as an express road to a connection with the Westchester County parkway system. Except for the Brooklyn-Battery link, 1940 will see this road live up to its name of Belt Parkway.

Sewage Disposal.

The urge to clean up streams and the demands of governmental authorities are the principal factors behind two years of record-breaking activity in the sewage disposal field. Mechanization of sewage treatment processes continues. More and more cities are installing facilities for utilizing the by-product sludge gas to produce electric power. The subject of a Federal stream pollution abatement bill is still in Congress. Outstanding plants opened during the year were the Tallmans Island plant in New York City and the Southwest plant at Chicago. New York has two other large plants under way — at Bowery Bay, west of the Tallmans Island project, and a 65,000,000 gal.-daily activated sludge plant in Jamaica.

An inventory of sewage disposal facilities made by Engineering News-Record at the beginning of the year showed that more than half of the urban population in the United States is served by treatment plants; this is a gain of 52 per cent since a similar survey was made in 1938.

Water Supply.

At opposite ends of the country, the world's two largest supply developments continued in construction. The first water flowed through the 231-mile Colorado River Aqueduct to the distributing reservoir near Los Angeles during the year, and the distribution system which will carry the water to 13 nearby communities is rapidly nearing completion. Work also started on a mammoth softening plant to condition the water for the convenience of the consumer. In New York the Delaware Aqueduct, tapping new sources of water in the Delaware River watershed, celebrated the holing-through of the first section of the 85-mile tunnel. Work also began on Merriman Dam, to create a storage reservoir on this system. Chicago, last of our large cities to undertake filtration, began work on its 225,000,000-gallon-daily plant in south Chicago. The job involves, in addition to the plant, 115 acres of land filling along the shore of Lake Michigan, some 11,000 ft. of 16-ft. rock tunnels, a breakwater, bulkheads and the installation of 50,000 meters, first to be used in Chicago.

Boston continued improvements to its water supply system by substituting an 18-mile concrete pressure aqueduct for the existing open channels and grade-line aqueducts from the Wachusett Reservoir. The new aqueduct will carry the Quabbin Aqueduct supply of Swift and Ware River water together with Wachusett Reservoir water directly to the city distribution system without danger of contamination. The capacity of the line is 200,000,000 gallons daily. Precast pipes in sizes up to 12½ ft. in diameter are a notable feature of the work.

According to a nationwide survey made by Engineering News-Record, two-thirds of the total population of the United States is served by community water systems, of which there are 12,750. Three-quarters of the water systems are publicly owned and, on a population-served basis, private water utilities deal with only 11 per cent of the business. Some 85 per cent of the 81,000,000 people served by public and private systems receive water that has been given treatment for health protection, quality improvement or both. It is interesting to note that chlorination is practiced at only 4,000 of the plants, and filtration facilities are found in only 2,188. The only similar survey of recent years was made by Engineering News-Record in 1928 and much of the data then had to be based on estimates. These showed 10,679 waterworks systems. In 11 years, therefore, waterworks systems have increased about 20 per cent in number.

Typhoid fever fatalities as a result of contaminated water supply, once very common, have seldom been heard of in recent years. The 500 cases of typhoid fever and 53 deaths at the Marteno (Ill.) State Insane Hospital during the year were therefore an exceptional tragedy. The cause was traced to sewage seeping into wells.