Committees can be interesting

I got to spend this couple days involved with the Steel Structures committee for AREMA. It was actually interesting. Before this week, I had only gotten involved with the Education & Training committee, also lots of fun. I got to meet quite a few guys and a couple other women who love bridges as much as I do. It was great, yesterday we took a field trip to the University of Texas - Austin to look at their structures lab. That in itself was fascinating, but after that we took a bus tour of interesting bridges in the area, including a long precast segmented bridges that were basically viaducts they were so long. And, they took us to Austin's signature bridge, the Pennybacker bridge, apparently it's a great nesting place for the local cliff swallows, their nests looked like oversized wasp nests. It's also creating a maintenance hassle for the crews, they are not allowed to work on the bridge when the swallows are nesting in the spring.

Yesterday evening we had a reception with a presentation on the bats under the Congress Ave bridge... followed not suprisingly by watching the bats emerge later. I found out alot of info about bats I didn't know before... like they account for 1/4 of the species of mammals in the world. Or, a colony of 150 brown bats can protect famers crops for almost 33 million or more rootworms each summer, reducing our reliance on pesticides which is great for everyone. Unfortuantly, on this trip I completely forgot my camera so I won't have any new pictures to post, but those bat emerging pics would have been really neat. I may contact someone else and see if I can get copies of their pictures from this week.

Update: I was able to get photos from another member.