Engineering: The Way I See It

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Background

Chapter 2: Training

Chapter 3: Formal Education

Chapter 4: A Summer Job

Chapter 5: Return to School and More Education

Chapter 6: My First Real Job—What Does a Civil Engineer Do?

Chapter 7: On-the-Job Training

Chapter 8: In-House Training versus Actual Performance

Chapter 9: Handling Field Problems

Chapter 10: Sent to the Field—On My Own

Chapter 11: My Inexperience Shows

Chapter 12: Gaining Experience on Additional Field Assignments

Chapter 13: Promoted to First Line of Supervision

Chapter 14: Additional Duties as CADD Manager

Chapter 15: Transferred to Construction—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Chapter 16: Back to Design

Chapter 17: Owner's Engineering to Contract Engineering

Chapter 18: Additional Experience as a Critical Lift Specialist

Chapter 19: Consulting for the Construction Group

Chapter 20: Modular Design Experience

Chapter 21: Nuclear Design Support Experience

Chapter 22: Management Experience

Chapter 23: Training Experience

Chapter 24: Proper Engineering Projects

Chapter 25: Thoughts on the Engineering Profession

Chapter 26: Postretirement Experience

Chapter 27: A Look Back on My Career

Appendices

Appendix A: Petro-Chemical Plant Design

Appendix B: Engineering Procedures

Appendix C: CSA Department Checking Procedures

Appendix D: First-Time Design

Appendix E: Rule of Thumb Class

Appendix F: Constructability Class

About the Author

Engineering

The Way I See It

Gerald W. Mayes, PE, Retired

Copyright © 2023 Gerald W. Mayes, PE, Retired

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

ISBN 979-8-88731-180-7 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88731-181-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Preface

This is a book about my life experiences related to the field of engineering, specifically civil engineering. It does not include all my experiences but rather gives examples and instances that helped shape my career and directions in life. It is drawn from my recollections and memories that affected me the most and relays both good and bad experiences. The good experiences helped me to build on my knowledge and reinforce good habits and practices. The bad experiences helped me to redirect my efforts and learn good lessons on what not to do. I have been helped and supported along the way by the many people I have worked for, worked with, and those who worked for me. My experiences and skills have been learned and used for the benefit of the various companies where I have worked. It is my hope that everyone reading these pages can take some insight from this account of one engineer's career, whether an experienced engineer, a recently graduated engineer, or a person interested in what an engineer's life might be like. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recalling and writing down these memories.

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the omnipresence of Almighty God and His support for me throughout the writing of this book. I wish to express my gratitude and thanks to my wife for her understanding and tolerance. I also would like to express my thanks to the many people who helped make my career successful and who provided me help and understanding along the way. My success in engineering is a direct result of the people I worked with and especially those who worked for me. I could not have accomplished what I did without their support, hard work, and dedication. Hiring and maintaining a loyal and devoted crew of engineers, designers, and construction coordinators was the key to any success I enjoyed. My appreciation also goes to those who corrected and redirected me when it was needed to point me in the right direction.

Chapter 1

Background

I grew up in a rural part of Newton County, Mississippi, in what would be considered a poor family by today's standards. We did not know we were poor, and so it did not make a difference. I had a loving family, plenty to eat, and enough work to do to keep me out of trouble. Looking back, I consider myself more fortunate than most.

We had a small farm that would not survive in today's world, but it provided us with the necessities of life and then some. I did just about every chore on the farm as expected when growing up. My father and grandfather raised what we called truck crops. These were vegetables that were grown, gathered, and taken by pickup truck into the nearby towns for sale to the local grocery stores. It was hard work, but I was expected to do my share. We raised peas, tomatoes, watermelon, cucumbers, okra, cantaloupes, butter beans, corn, etc., for sale to the grocery stores. Most of the vegetables and fruits had to be planted very early in the year in order to meet the early market demand. This required the seeds to be planted in individual containers (particularly the watermelon and cantaloupe) and protected from the cold until they could be transplanted into the fields. Tomato seeds were planted in large washtubs with soil and covered with glass to keep them warm through the cold nights. On sunny days, the glass would give the plants the sunshine and warmth needed to grow.

Once the plants were transplanted into the fields, they had to be covered with buckets and cans at night to protect from frost, and then the buckets were removed the next morning. This procedure could last for a few days or a few weeks. I helped to cover the plants but missed out on most of the uncovering of the plants because I was in school. When the plants started to grow, they had to be cultivated and hoed to keep down the grass and weeds and to provide aeration for the soil. The tomato plants had to be checked for worms and the worms removed or they would eat the plants and the young tomatoes. The watermelons and cantaloupes had to be cultivated, but since they produce long runners, it was not practical using a tractor.

We plowed them as well as our small garden with a mule, and I learned the difference between gee and haw. The other plants, such as the peas, could be plowed with a tractor and cultivator until they put out runners. Once the tomatoes and cantaloupes were ready to gather, we went to the field with the tractor and trailer and gathered them. I learned to tell if a watermelon was ripe by thumping and looking at the curly part of the stem where it was attached to the melon.

Then came the tomatoes, which had to be gathered every other day. I laugh every time I hear vine-ripened tomatoes because we never let them fully ripen on the vine. If we did, they would be soft and subject to damage while handling. Once tomatoes start turning ripe on the end opposite the stem, they will fully ripen in a few days. This time is needed to transport to the stores and give them a few days to sell before turning too ripe. Today most tomatoes available in the supermarkets are grown on large farms and are pollinated to keep their ripe appearance and last for days or weeks while being transported and kept on store shelves.

After gathering, we had to wash or wipe the tomatoes clean and cull any that were not acceptable to sell. The tomatoes were spread out on newspaper overnight to cool and then put into baskets to carry to town the next day. The watermelons and cantaloupes were treated likewise. The peas had to be picked every other day on Monday morning, Tuesday afternoon, and Thursday afternoon for carrying to the stores on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We did not pick on Sunday afternoon but rather got up and into the field when daylight came. In the early summer, this was usually around five a.m.

After picking the peas, they were spread out on my grandfather's wood porch and water was poured over them to cool them before putting into baskets to carry to town. There were times that the stores could not use the produce and did not buy. That meant that whatever did not sell was either canned or put up in the freezer for our own use. This kept me busy a lot of afternoons in the summer either shelling peas (we did not have a fancy pea sheller but relied on our fingers and thumbs) or peeling tomatoes.

We raised a wide variety of animals on the farm, mostly to eat but some to sell. I remember raising chickens, pigs, turkeys, peasants, quail, and beef cattle. I also learned to milk cows at an early age and got up before breakfast to feed cows and milk a few just for our own use. It took me a long time to get accustomed to milk that was homogenized and pasteurized when I started school. My father and grandfather had a small dairy when I was very young and converted over to a beef herd as I was growing up, but we kept a few milk cows for our use.

Even the beef cows required a lot of work. They had to be fed ground-up feed as well as hay. They required salt blocks to be put out so they could get the right nutrients. Repairs to the barn, stables, fences, and gates were required regularly. In times of extreme cold weather, we often had to go to the creek where the cows got their water and bust up the ice so they could drink. Anytime one of the cows was about to have a baby calf, we had to keep close watch to make sure the mother cow did not hide her calf somewhere in the woods. Some of the time the cows had trouble having the calves and needed help. I did more things to and for animals on the farm than I care to remember, but today someone would probably call a veterinarian for most of these things.

In support of all these things, we had to raise hay for the cows; corn for the cows, pigs, and chickens; and food for us to eat such as peas, corn, okra, cucumbers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, cabbage, butter beans, string beans, tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, squash, turnips, turnip greens, mustard greens, garlic, and strawberries. We took the dried corn, shelled it, and took it to a grist mill to get it ground up for making cornbread. If we wanted chicken, we went out in the yard and caught it. The chickens also provided a continuous supply of eggs. If we wanted pork, we would go to the smokehouse and get ham, bacon, etc.

When I was very young, we did not have a freezer, so everything had to be canned or smoked; but as I was growing up, we could put the pork or beef in our freezer to use whenever. My parents would buy items from a traveling merchant truck that came by about once a week. It provided things we could not produce on our own such as flour, coffee, tea, sugar, kerosene oil, etc. If you did not have the money for your purchase, you could trade the merchant eggs for it, and he would sell the eggs down the road to someone else. Since we raised most of what we ate, we did not need a lot of money to survive.

My parents married in 1939 at a very early age. My father married my mother (who was only fourteen years old) on his eighteenth birthday. I had an older brother born in April of 1942, and I came along later in December of 1948. In between there was World War II where my father served in the Army in the European Theater, was captured, and spent four months in a German POW camp. He had medical issues for the rest of his life due to his time in the service. After coming back home, he took some agricultural vocational training and began farming the land and helping my grandfather with the cows and small dairy. He purchased a new 1952 Ford N tractor with equipment to farm the land.

I recently sold the original tractor, and it still ran good even though it was ready for retirement. I had learned to drive the tractor and use it to bush hog the pasture, disk the land, run a section harrow over the newly plowed ground to smooth it out, or pull a trailer loaded with vegetable or firewood. I helped my father change the settings on the cultivator from planting to cultivating to laying by the corn and the width of the tractor wheels from wide to use as a double-row planter/cultivator to narrow for pulling the trailer or for bush hogging. Soon this was my responsibility, and I did it all myself.

The house I first grew up in was a small wooden house with no indoor plumbing and no water. We had what you would call an outhouse, and we toted buckets of water up the hill from my grandfather's house (about 150 yards) from a bucket-drawn well. When I was about five years old, my father built a new 2BR, 1B house in front of the old house and had a well drilled and we had indoor plumbing. Previous baths were in a number 2 washtub in the backyard, so when we began to take showers in the new bathroom, we were very conscious of water usage. I remember turning on the shower and getting wet then turning it off to lather up with soap and then turning the water on again to rinse off. The house had two bedrooms: one for my parents, and one for me and my older brother. There was a living room complete with a tin wood-burning stove for heat and a kitchen/dining area combination, a bathroom, and a small back porch. It was small, but it was everything we needed.

I started to school in the first grade when I was five years old (there was no kindergarten), and the school bus picked me up in front of my house and dropped me off at my house in the afternoon. There was always work to do when I got home or on the weekends. My father planted grass and established a lawn around our new house, and as soon as I was big enough, it was my job to cut grass. My older brother who was six to seven years older than me had cut the grass, but I soon inherited the task during the summer. There was always work to be done on the barn and fences as well as taking care of the crops we grew during the summer. During the fall and winter, we went down to the creek and cut down hardwood trees and split them for use as stovewood and firewood. The cows had to be fed extra during the winter because there was no grass for them to eat.

This is just a brief introduction of where I came from and how some of my values were set early in life. I consider myself fortunate and am thankful to God for all the blessings I enjoyed while growing up. In the next chapter, I will attempt to show how this introduction to life began my early training as an engineer even though I did not realize it at the time.

Chapter 2

Training

My training as an engineer began at a very early age even though I did not recognize the situations I dealt with as being engineering concepts. Wikipedia defines engineering as the application of mathematics, empirical evidence, and scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to invent, innovate, design, build, maintain, research, and improve structures, machines, tools, systems, components, materials, and processes.

I will have to admit, until formally trained as an engineer, I had to rely on the practical knowledge rather than the application of mathematical or scientific principles. My older brother was practically gone from the house by the time I became a teenager, so a lot of my innovations and experiments were conducted on my own.

There was a ditch between my house and my grandparents' house that was dug around the hill to divert some of the water during heavy rains. It was normally dry and was about eighteen inches deep and about three- to four-feet wide. Whenever it rained, I dammed up the ditch and created a small shallow lake in which I could float boats and play. The boats were typically carved out of large chunks of pine bark from a nearby tree. From this experience, I learned that water will penetrate a levee that has a high percentage of sand and needs clay to be stable.

I also experimented with ditches containing saturated sand after a rain and discovered that when the sand was disturbed, it would go into a temporary quicksand condition and would lose its ability to support whatever was on top of it. This I would learn later on in soils classes and also the effect of earthquakes on certain types of soils. I was fascinated by the flow of water, the levee that held the water back, the composition of the levee material, the effects of rapidly flowing water on erosion, and the quicksand condition in saturated soils. I would learn later in more technical terms what was happening and why, but I was already gaining valuable field experience.

Usually around Christmas time or around the Fourth of July, I had access to fireworks, and I took advantage of them. There was an old roadway ditch bank that was perfect for placing firecrackers in the bank and lighting them to see how much soil could be removed. I found out later on that this is a normal practice for removing rock material on a much larger scale.

I learned early on why cultivated land on hillsides must have terraces to divert the rainwater around the hill rather than letting the water flow down the hill and cause extensive erosion. I guess this was early training in surveying. I learned about corrosion early on also. You do not place fertilizer in metal buckets and leave it there because it will corrode. To keep the terminals on a tractor or car battery from corroding, coat the terminals with lubricating grease. If the terminals do have a small amount of corrosion, it can be removed by pouring Coca-Cola (or any other carbonated drink) over the terminals. I would later learn in chemistry class what happens when you put a base and an acid together.

I learned a lot about the simple machines and tools that are a bases for a lot of engineering. The simple machines are levers, inclined planes, wedges, pulleys, wheel-and-axles, and screws. I used the lever to jack up the tractor. Using a combination of frames and chains, the special tractor jack could be placed under the front and rear axles of the tractor and connected to the hydraulic lift. When the lift was raised, the chain tightened, and with the advantage of the lever, it lifted the entire tractor off the ground so both front and rear tires could be repositioned.

The inclined plane was used to load and unload a fifty-five-gallon drum onto a pickup truck to go to town and get gasoline for the farm tractor. It made it easier to load the empty drum, but it was essential for off-loading the full drum, which would weight over three-hundred lbs. I used the wedge every time I swung the axe while splitting wood and also saw the benefits of using a wedge to adjust and line up things for connecting. The pulley was used to draw water from the well every time I drew a bucket of water.

When I was very young, I also watched the well being dug using large sections of precast concrete pipe and a bucket-and-pulley system for removing the dirt from the well. I observed the wheel and axle in action while watching the planters mounted on the cultivators. There was a chain that ran around several sprockets connecting the fertilize dispenser, the seed dispenser, and the steel wheel that rolled on the ground causing the chain to move. The amount of fertilizer and the spacing of the seeds could be modified by using different-sized sprockets and idle sprockets. I also used the wheel-and-axle concept while using a corn sheller that consisted of a steel plate with tiny fingers to grab the corn ear and rotate it while removing the kernels of dried corn. The plate was connected to an axle and handle for rotating. The screw was used every time I adjusted the cultivators for a different spacing and size of plow. The screw was used to jack up a vehicle, bolt/unbolt wheels, change the spark plugs on the tractor, truck, or car or anything else that needed to be bolted down.

I learned other principles of engineering while on the farm. I helped my father to plant crops such as corn using the planters on the farm tractor. It was my job to keep the seed and fertilizer hopper filled up while he was operating the tractor. It was not difficult to keep the seed hopper filled, but the fertilizer was harder to do. We would usually carry the fertilizer to the edge of the field with the truck or to the ends of the rows with the tractor, but on long rows, the fertilizer had to be replenished whenever needed. I learned very quick that if a full hopper could go two-and-a-half rounds, then it was to my advantage to fill it up after two rounds rather than have to carry the fertilizer to the far end of the rows to fill up before it ran out. Those fertilizer sacks weighted one hundred lbs. And even though I could handle them, I preferred not to. I used a little industrial engineering that I called common sense through observation and application.

I practiced good engineering concepts when constructing things on the farm. I helped build a pole barn using good bracing techniques, used wedges for inside door locks, installed rain gutters over doors to prevent water from entering the door openings, used good drainage practices, and learned a lot about span distances, the proper way to turn sawn lumber for the most strength, and how to brace doors to prevent sagging. I learned how to construct a barbed-wire fence using braced sections of fence posts and wire pullers to stretch the wire. I learned how to make flexible wire gates with chain latches that could be easily opened by someone with two hands but not easy for cattle to open. I helped construct and repair simple timber bridges across drainage ditches in order to access the fields with the tractor.

Work on the farm was hard, but it had rewards. Whenever the work was caught up, we could go fishing in either the creek or the pond, and both had fish good for eating. We would also get to go swimming either in our pond or a neighbor's pond, usually about once a week in the summer. I had a bicycle that I logged many miles on and could explore the surrounding area. We could watch TV after our chores were done. I remember our first TV, which could get three channels if we were lucky. You walked up to the TV, turned it on, set the volume, chose which of the three channels you wanted to watch, and then you set down. When you were through, you walked back to the TV and turned it off. There was no remote, no educational TV, and no cable; but it was all we needed. I had a collie dog to keep me company and the area around me as far as I could walk or ride by bicycle to explore and learn from nature.

My love of the soil, water, and structures, etc. on the farm naturally drew me to engineering. In school I had taken courses like many of my classmates in agriculture, was a member and officer in the school FFA program, and obtained the status of a state farmer. I placed second in a public-speaking contest in regional competition (the first-place winner went on to capture first place in the state competition). My topic was Water, and I demonstrated the importance, the preservation, and the need for good water management for future generations. This speech was appropriate for an agricultural audience as well as a civil engineering audience.

Even though my father and grandfather worked hard and earned their livelihood on the farm, I began to lean more to engineering. I had a very strong background in mathematics and enjoyed science, especially physics and chemistry. Based on my love of soils, water, dams, structures, and buildings, I began looking at different career fields in engineering. By the time I finished high school, I had decided to attend college and work toward a degree in civil engineering. I did, however, have a difficult time explaining to some of the older members of the local church that becoming an engineer did not mean that I would be driving the train.

Chapter 3

Formal Education

I was fortunate that literally across the street from the high school was a two-year college, East Central Junior College, that offered a very good pre-engineering curriculum. Since money was tight, I could enroll in the junior college and stay at home and reduce the cost of my first two years of college. While in my senior year of high school, I secured a part-time job driving a school bus for the high school and continued while attending East Central. This provided me with transportation back and forth and enough spending money while I was there.

College was certainly different from high school. But since I was a day student, I did not get totally immersed in the college life. I traveled to classes every day and stayed home each night. While staying at home, I continued to have chores and responsibilities and continued to develop my practical engineering skills. My classes were usually between eight a.m. and three p.m. And since I could not leave until I drove the school bus home at 3:15 p.m., I used the times between classes to work on homework and studying for classes and tests. The requirements for college classes were much more than in high school, and even though we had less time in class, we had a lot more outside work to do.

After I got home at around 4:15, I started on my chores: feeding cows and pigs, milking cows, gathering firewood, putting out hay, and whatever else needed to be done. Then after eating supper, I would begin again on homework until bedtime. The next morning, I got up, ate breakfast, fed and milked cows, and got ready to drive the school bus into town and start another day at college. I got a little break on the weekends after my homework was done, but for the most part, this was my schedule for the college semester.

The same month I started college, I also enlisted in the local Army National Guard. This break from college would give me the opportunity to develop my military education and discipline. Even though I was only seventeen (my parents had to sign for me to enlist), I wanted to be able to serve my country without having to have a long break in my college classes. By enlisting in the National Guard, I would only have to be gone for about four months for basic training and a military specialist school and then serve a minimum of six years in the Guard. The local Guard had a lot of my friends from school and other people I knew including my older brother. I was ordered to basic training in February, so I did not enroll in the spring semester at East Central. I left around midnight from a local bus stop on a Trailways bus headed for Fort Polk, Louisiana. I did not know what to expect and was greeted by a completely different lifestyle for the next four months.

Since most of my teen years were spent at home with no siblings close to my age, it was strange to be thrown into a group of about fifty people that I would spend the next several months doing everything. Military life was not easy but it was very structured and disciplined, and if you did everything requested of you the way it was expected, you could survive. I often heard the statement There is a right way, a wrong way, and the Army way. There was a scheduled time to go to bed, time to wake up, time to eat, time to exercise, time to train, and a time to do everything.

Lights out was at nine p.m., and lights were turned back on at 4:30 a.m. to get up. The Army guaranteed us seven-and-a-half hours of sleep. We were also required to get up on a rotating shift during the night and look for fires in the building for a thirty-minute period. We were awakened a half hour prior to our shift so we could get fully dressed with pressed fatigues and spit-shined boots. The barracks we were in had been hastily built during World War II and had been documented to burn completely down in about twelve to fifteen minutes, hence the requirement for the fireguards.

This duty came around about every three to four days, so a typical night would go like this: lights out at 9:00, fall asleep at 9:30, wake up at 11:30, fireguard from 12:00 to 12:30, go back to sleep at 1:00, and wake up at 4:30. I think this was more harassment than guarding for fires since no one was watching the barracks when we were gone during the day. We considered ourselves lucky because we were only a couple blocks away from Tigerland, where the troops were training to go directly to Vietnam. They were kept up until one or two a.m. in classes, and most of the time, they woke us up at four a.m. running by our barracks screaming.

Exercise was a way of life, and we were constantly given the opportunity to improve our health. We usually had about an hour of exercise in the mornings to start off that included side-straddle hops, four-count push-ups (two push-ups—up-down, up-down), eight-count push-ups (two regular push-ups starting at the position of attention, then squatting, one push-up, then back to attention, and repeat for the second push-up), and a multitude of other exhausting exercises. Our drill instructors were not very good at math. We were only required to do twenty-five push-ups at a time. As an example, we would do fourteen push-ups, and then the drill instructor would ask, How many push-ups is that trainee? and we would reply Fourteen, drill sergeant.

He would then say, No, I think it is six, and we would start again back at six. This would go on for two or three times, and we would usually do at least fifty before stopping with our maximum of twenty-five push-ups. Sometimes the drill instructor would