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Archive for the ‘Frederick Ward’ Category
« Older EntriesFrederick Ward Associates Welcomes Lloyd Davis
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
Lloyd Davis is a Project Engineer with over 15 years of civil engineering experience in design, record research and GIS mapping, contract document preparation and site investigation for Roadways, Storm Drain Systems, Utility, Right-of-way Plats, Stormwater Management, Erosion and Sediment Control, Site Grading/layout and Pump Stations.
He has worked with several civil engineering consulting companies including: EBA Engineering, Inc., Bowman Consulting Group, Benchmark Engineering, D.S. Thaler & Associates, W. Duvall & Associates, and KCW Technologies. He also has experience as a CAD instructor at the Community College of Baltimore and has used several CAD software for design, construction document preparation, rendering and 3D modeling. Welcome, Lloyd!
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Frederick Ward
Staff
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Frederick Ward Welcomes Kristen Young
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
Kristen is an Intern Architect. She has worked summers at Rubeling Assoc in Towson, University of Maryland Medical Center in the Planning Dept, and at Burt Hill Associates in Washington DC. She went straight from High School through graduate school and got her BS in Architecture from University of Maryland, and a Masters in Architecture as well as a Masters in Architecture Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. She graduated in May. She plans on becoming a registered architect and a LEED AP in the near future. Welcome to FWA, Kristen.
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Frederick Ward
Staff
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Frederick Ward Welcomes Christina Mainolfi
Friday, October 28th, 2011
Christina Mainolfi is our new Receptionist / Administrative Assistant. She brings a wealth of knowledge to FWA with over 30 years of experience in project management, administration and customer service support. She is recently retired from the State of Maryland, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Welcome, Christina! We look forward to working with you.
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Frederick Ward
Staff
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Congratulations Dan Himmer, Registered Architect
Friday, October 28th, 2011
The whole registered architect process starts with an intern development program (IDP). Candidates must complete a certain number of hours in various aspects of the profession, under the guidance and mentorship of a registered architect. It typically takes about 3 years. Dan Himmer started the IDP while he was interning at Frederick Ward Associates in college, and he was able to complete IDP in only a couple years because of the time he spent working with us through college.
The Architect Registration Examination (ARE) is a 7 part exam which tests candidates on various aspects of the profession, from contracts to construction documents to structural systems to MEP building systems. The exams consist of a multiple choice section and a graphical vignette which candidates must draw up a solution to. He started studying for and taking his exams concurrent with finishing IDP, in May of last year. He took his first exam at the end of June 2010 and the last exam Aug 3 2011. The MD Board of Architects issued his license at the end of August 2011. Congratulations, Dan!
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Frederick Ward
Staff
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Frederick Ward Associates Celebrates National Surveyor’s Week
Saturday, March 19th, 2011
National Surveyor’s Week will be celebrated between March 20th and 26th this year. NCEES (National Council of Examiners for Engineers & Surveyors) states that National Surveyor’s Week is “an occasion for professional surveyors throughout the US to bring attention to their profession.” This certainly is needed, as the roles of surveyors are so misunderstood in today’s society. When the word surveyor is mentioned, many might simply think of someone standing in a mall with a clipboard annoying customers with questions. Others think of someone standing on the roadside standing behind a tripod looking equipment taking pictures. So what is the role of a surveyor and what makes a good surveyor?
Yes, a surveyor works outdoors, but there is much that is done in the office as well and sometimes leads to the courthouse where he becomes an expert witness in a dispute. A surveyor at times is a mathematician, an investigator, and a historian as he attempts to resolve boundary lines of property. Land disputes have almost existed in society since the beginning of time. He deals with land law, works with computers and technology, and solves puzzles as he pieces different property boundaries together. A surveyor makes maps and drawings that many times are recorded in the Land Records Office.
Two famous surveyors by the name of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon delineated the famous “Mason-Dixon” line between 1763 and 1767. They were charged with the resolution of the border dispute between British colonies in colonial America. This demarcation line involved four states: PA, DE, WV, and MD. This line also symbolized a cultural boundary between the northeast US with that of the southern US (Dixie).
Two of the most famous surveyors in American history were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Between 1804 and 1806, their commission by President Thomas Jefferson was an expedition mission to explore the Louisiana Purchase ascending the Missouri River, crossing the highlands, and following the best water communication to the Pacific Ocean.
What do Lewis and Clark have to do with Maryland? Well, as a way to kick the National Surveyor’s Week, NSPS (National Society of Professional Surveyors) created a surveying event that is expected to eclipse the work of Lewis & Clark by its size. Surveyors across America will occupy and collect GPS data simultaneously (on Saturday, March 19, 2011 between 1 and 5 pm) on survey monuments. This data will be submitted to NGS (National Geodetic Surveys) through its OPUS portal (Online Positioning User Service) and a map of all the surveyed locations will be visible across the US. Now that’s the biggest survey ever!
We can’t discuss famous surveyors without including the Presidents of our nation that contributed to the tradition of surveying, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Many surveyors, like our Presidents, were bi-vocational, such as the famous author, poet and surveyor Henry David Thoreau. Even the founder of Frederick Ward Associates, the late Frederick Y. Ward, left behind a legacy of giving back to the community in addition to his profession. In most cases, our lives will be summed up in one sentence. So I leave you this challenge, what will be your “life’s sentence?”
jmettee
Frederick Ward, Surveying
Surveying
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Precycling: Stopping Waste Before It Happens
Friday, February 25th, 2011
By now everyone is familiar with the three “R’s”: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. How about the two “P’s”? Prevent & Precycle? Precycling is the practice of reducing waste by not purchasing items which will generate waste. It may not be quite as easy for the public to embrace as recycling was, though. To precycle, one must make a conscious effort to not accumulate junk mail, heavily packaged goods, use disposable products, water bottles, Styrofoam, and many other items. Precycling stresses an overall reduction of waste by asking people to rethink they way they acquire products as well as the products themselves.
Recycling (or downcycling) may be very popular, but it takes a lot of energy to transport the materials – from when someone purchases them at a store or online, to their home or office, to the curb and ultimately the recycling facility, where more energy is used to break them down into a raw product. Oh yeah, and then more energy is expended making them back into something else again. If something must be purchased and used, why not have it be a durable, long lasting product that has little or no packaging and is not going to end up in a landfill or be melted down?
Examples of using precycled products are easy to find: metal water bottle or thermoses instead of a plastic disposable water bottles or cans, recycled content shopping bags (can be used over and over again instead of paper or plastic and are much sturdier anyway), silverware in lieu of plastic ware, cloth napkins in lieu of paper, bulk and concentrated products (use much less packaging compared to same amount of non-concentrated product), and digital media instead of print media. Also, don’t forget that some items can be “re-purposed” to give them another life. My favorite personal example is the claw foot bathtub my mom repurposed into planter on our back deck when I was growing up in Virginia. It went from potential landfill fodder to the back deck where it lived a long life as a container for many spices and small plants. Young House Love and Terracycle have some great ideas on how to re-purpose things creatively. Some other good information on PreCycling can be found here.
CCooper
Frederick Ward, Sustainability
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Frederick Ward Associates Use Greenroads Checklist
Monday, January 10th, 2011
Last year, FWA blogged about the introduction of “Greenroads,” a program developed to improve the sustainability and lessen the environmental impact of highway projects. We were eager to see a new rating system developed for building sustainable roadways similar to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED system. The Frederick Ward Associates team of surveyors, planners, architects and engineers can use the Greenroads to measure the sustainability of the roadways we help build.
In September 2010, Civil Engineering magazine ran an article highlighting the big changes that are in store for road design and construction with the implementation of Greenroads. There’s no question highway construction is destructive to the environment. From the construction debris running off and poisoning groundwater, to serious fossil-fuel burning from the heavy machinery, author Laurie Shuster says, “For Mother Nature, it’s a losing battle.”
Greenroads hopes to help Mother Nature win the battle by implementing a scoring system that evaluates sustainability by seven key principles: ecology, economy, extent, expectations, experience and exposure. To satisfy these goals, a Greenroads project must meet 11 requirements and earn up to 108 “points” within 37 different voluntary credit categories as up to 10 points within the category that encompasses customer-designed voluntary credits. Read more about the seven principles and see the table of requirements and voluntary credits in Civil Engineering’s article.
Notably different from the LEED system is that activities that contribute to sustainability are weighed differently based on their potential to lead to greater sustainability. For example, using a pavement with an unusually long service life is weighed more heavily than fueling the construction vehicles with biodiesel. That’s because using biodiesel only has a one-time benefit while the pavement provides long-term benefit.
While Greenroads is still in development, some are already finding it helpful for roadway design. Frederick Ward Associates already implements many of Greenroads’ criteria and uses it as a checklist to evaluate current practices and to see what can be incorporated into future projects.
Learn more about Greenroads at their website.
EVanArsdale
Frederick Ward, Sustainability
Frederick Ward Associates, greenroads
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Frederick Ward Associates Applauds New Miss Utility Law
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010
A new Maryland law went into effect October 1, 2010 that deals with how Miss Utility operates. Gov. Martin O’Malley actually signed Senate Bill 911 on May 20, 2010, which updated the Maryland Underground Facilities Damage Prevention Law. This new law is significant for design professionals such as Frederick Ward Associates.
Throughout the history of our industry, Miss Utility would not mark underground utilities for design purposes. The previous law focused on marking of utilities for excavation purposes only. The design profession needed to know where the location and depths are for underground utilities to provide for adequate designs that minimize the impacts to these existing utilities. This information is critical to the design process. And yet, the Miss Utility law previously did not permit markings for design purposes. As a way around this, many design professionals would conveniently arrange for soil borings to be conducted early in the process in order to show an attempt at excavation in order to have these markings take place. This circumvention of the approved processes was frustrating for Miss Utility.
Coupled with this was a federal evaluation on how individual states were performing in “locating and marking underground utilities”. It was reported that Maryland did not score very well in this evaluation. Hence, our state government set out to improve the program in Maryland.
So what does this mean for our design profession? The new law permits markings for the design industry. Now design professionals can contact Miss Utility to obtain a “design ticket” that is valid for 15 days and various utilities will be marked. Better yet, all of this can be tracked via online. This will make the design process much easier and more transparent for professionals like Frederick Ward Associates.
jmettee
Frederick Ward, Surveying
Frederick Ward Associates, land surveying
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What to Know Before You Commit To A Rooftop Solar Array
Monday, October 25th, 2010
If you’ve been thinking about renewable energy systems and want to take advantage of tax incentives, grants, and current pricing available for rooftop-mounted PV (photovoltaic) systems, there are several factors to consider before you act.
Have a comprehensive strategy that considers the roof membrane, type of Solar panel system, electricity generation, maintenance, and provisions for downtime.
Carefully review existing roof and future maintenance needs. The roof may possibly only last half as long as the PV system you’re about to install. Also, to maintain the PV system efficiently, the roof will be accessed more than a standard roof – it will have different heat patterns, drainage runoff, expansion and contraction, and racking system concerns.
Know your PV Financing agreement. Most require a constant power feed from the PV Panels, and contain penalties if the power is interrupted for maintenance, roof repair or equipment failure. Penalties, lost incentive payments and replacement costs can be extremely high, and need to be factored into the analysis for any rooftop PV system.
Have the right team. It is advisable to hire the right team to work with before, during, and after the PV system installation. Qualified solar professionals, architects familiar with renewable energy systems, and roofing industry professionals are just some of the consultants who could be on a building owner’s team for a large rooftop PV project. There could also be financial and legal professionals involved for many projects.
Keep in mind that some technical factors could affect the PV system’s performance, such as the module orientation, including solar declination and panel tilt angle (which should equal latitude), the site’s solar insolation level, and the potential degrading of the particular PV panels selected.
Make your choices carefully. While it can be a lucrative business decision to place a solar array on an existing empty roof, it is critical to make sure your roof and PV array are compatible for the long term. Getting knowledgeable architects such as those at Frederick Ward Associates and/or roofing professionals involved could be wise considering the nuances involved. Racking system options (including weight on the existing building’s structure), potential roof membrane failure, and roof maintenance and replacement all need to be considered prior to beginning a rooftop solar power generation project.
Frederick Ward Associates is currently working on four photovoltaic projects in Maryland – three rooftop arrays and one ground-mount array.
CCooper
Architecture, Frederick Ward, Sustainability
Frederick Ward Associates, Sustainability
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It’s Time to Update Java
Thursday, October 21st, 2010
If you have Java installed on your PC, don’t ignore those prompts to update it. According to a recent analysis by the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, they have found a twelvefold increase in malware exploits targeting Java in the last six months. In fact, the number of PCs infected by Java exploits now far exceed those infected by Adobe Reader exploits, another favorite target. Vendors of anti-virus & anti-malware software have a difficult time parsing Java code without seriously impacting the performance of your PC. Therefore, Java has become a target of choice for malware attacks.
Download the latest Java updates, or consider using a tool such as Secunia Personal Software Inspector to keep your patches up to date.
SKohler
Frederick Ward
Frederick Ward Associates, java update
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