The Engineering EcoWarrior

What it means for Infrastructure Climate Resilience Six years ago, on the morning of 12 August 2020, a ScotRail passenger train derailed near Carmont, south of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire. The derailment was caused by the train striking debris washed onto the track following an intense rain storm. The accident claimed three lives, injured six others and became the deadliest railway accident in Britain for almost two decades. Yet the tragedy was more than an isolated engineering failure. The investigation conducted by the independent Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) concluded that it exposed wider weaknesses in the way Britain's railway understood and managed the risks posed by increasingly severe weather[1]. As climate change alters rainfall patterns and increases the potential for more frequent episodes of intense rainfall, Carmont has become a defining case study in the importance of building climate resilience into ageing infrastructure. Before considering the technical...

Just quietly slipping into your feed again after a short break. No fanfare. No big announcements. No grand plans. Just this, after an extended hiatus, followed by a planned "grand" return that fizzled out before beginning.  It's just like another corporation quietly dropping their net zero ambitions, expecting nobody to notice.  Why now? If you haven't been living under a rock the last few months (and I'd be slightly envious if you have) you will be well aware of the climate related news.  We have seen tumbling temperature records already this summer. Highest May and June temperatures in the UK, record temperatures across much of Europe and parts of North America.  Events for the US semiquincentennial celebrations were cancelled in DC due to extreme heat and New York City had established cooling centres for vulnerable people. The UK has had three heatwaves already by mid-July. Wildfires are widespread with multiple fatalities in Spain and hundreds of thousands eva...

After last week's post , I would like to say how easy it was for me to get back in the saddle but it wasn’t. It was hard.  I don't want to be misleading. Like breaking most habits it required effort, a bloody minded determination to gain traction. That and a plan. This wasn't my first attempt at cycle commuting. In last week’s post, I mentioned the time I did cycle to work but was put off repeating it by a combination of my physical condition, the riding conditions and doom-laden predictions from my colleagues. On a few other occasions I have tried with slightly better success, but still not enough to fully make the transition to cycling as my main mode of transport. Previous plans involved breaking myself in gently, cycling once a week for a few weeks then steadily increasing the frequency as I got fitter and more used to the traffic. Three weeks in a row was my record, cycling to work on two days in the last week. It wasn't frequently enough to build fitness or, more ...

Not literally, but how I got out of the habit of cycling. This is the first of a series of three posts on my personal journey away from regular cycling then back into it over many years. This post talks of how I used my bike to get around and some of the barriers to me getting back into it. In the next post I will talk about how I got back into it, in a manner, and the final post brings us up to date. This is only my perspective but I'm sure it is not unique and you may have similar experiences. It happens to so many of us, that we regularly cycle as children and adolescents then “grow” out of it as adults. Until I left school I cycled everywhere: to school, to the shops, to my Saturday job, to the swimming baths and any other activities that were farther than a five minute walk. During the holidays I would make 30 mile (50km) round trips to visit my grandparents or 70 mile (110km) round trips to the beach and, a couple of times, longer trips over several days, such as the tri...

Please join me in celebrating fifty years of this iconic image.   Taken from the Apollo 17 mission on December 7th 1972, this famous image changed the way we view the world.  All of humanity is captured in the field of view (except for the crew of Schmitt, Evans and Cernan). It shows ourselves as others would see us, from the outside looking inwards.   It is the only world we will ever know, our home. We must look after it. Respect it. There is no doubt that this image acted as a catalyst to the environmental movement.  It lays bare how fragile and vulnerable we are in the vast emptiness. . We have filled all the hospitable corners of the planet and it is clear that there is nowhere else to go.   The image was captured while travelling between Earth orbit and the moon, where Scmitt and Cernan walked a few days later. They were the last humans to stand on an extraterrestrial body.  In the time since it was taken, there have been huge advances ...