As many of you know, the 2004 ASCE Mid-Continent Conference was held at UNL April 22-24. The conference was a great success. Old and young alike were able to enjoy themselves throughout the event.

The conference began on Thursday, April 22 with the steel bridge competition. Eleven schools participated. Each school designed and fabricated a unique scale model steel bridge throughout the year and transported it here to UNL to compete against the other schools in the region.

After nine hours of construction, loading and grinding Oklahoma State University finished on top followed by Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and the University of Missouri-Rolla. In case you’re wondering, UNL finished just behind Rolla in fourth place.

About a block away at the same time, the participants in the concrete canoe were giving their academic presentations. The presentations discussed the design of their canoe, how they fabricated it, the materials used and just about every other detail you can imagine.

When the competitions for the day were over, it was time for a break and some fun. On Thursday evening everyone headed down to PO Pears for some good food, drinks and KARAOKE! Although it took a while to get going, the karaoke machine proved to be a hit. Even Bob Thorn, the Vice-President of District III, took a turn. We’ve never seen and old man singing "I’m Too Sexy." It was definitely a moment to remember!

The next morning, bright and early, our competitions began once again. Outside of Othmer Hall, the canoe teams were busy testing their boats in our "dunk" tank. Although several teams’ boats sunk, they were all repaired and modified before the end of the day so they would be ready for the races on Saturday.

At the same time, across 16th street, concrete bowling was taking place for the public and the conference participants. With concrete bowling balls ranging from 14 to 24 pounds, a 30 foot grass lane and 10 standard pins, it was quite a fun time. If you didn’t get a chance to stop by, you missed out. Finishing in the top three were Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Arkansas.

Meanwhile, in the structures lab, Dr. David Admiraal was busy running his infamous Mystery Competition. Kept top secret until Friday, the mystery competition proved to be one of the best ever. The idea was to design and build a boat or car that would be able to travel down a flume. That seems simple enough, but the catch is this. At the beginning of the flume there was a dam. When the boat or car was in position in front of the dam, the water would be released and rush down the flume, pushing the car or the boat to the end of the flume where a pool of water waited. Teams were to design their car so it would stop before it fell into the pool. Oh and the last catch, one of the participants had to ride it!

There is still one thing we haven’t mentioned about the competition. Each team had to write and sing their own song. After hearing those we decided engineers should stick to the calculators. Winning the mystery competition was Kansas State University, followed by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Arkansas.

The final competition of the day was the K’Nex competition. In this competition, design teams created plans for a tower using K’Nex toys. The plans were passed to the construction teams and an hour later there were many three foot towers filling the third floor of Nebraska Hall. When the towers were complete, weights were placed on the top of the towers until they collapsed. The scoring was simple. The most weight on the tallest tower wins. After numerous topples and a couple of amazing balancing acts, the winner was the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Second place went to the University of Arkansas-B Team and third place went to the University of Arkansas-A team.

On Friday evening, all the participants and judges joined together for a nice meal and the long awaited awards banquet. The meal was held at the Holiday Inn downtown. We were pleased to have Joe Burns from Chicago to give a presentation about the recent renovation of Soldier Field, a project that, in our opinion, should be considered a structural engineering marvel. Seeing the engineers bring a modern structure into an old shell was pretty impressive.

The final event of the conference was the concrete canoe races. On the blustery and rainy Saturday morning, the canoes arrived at Oak Lake for their last challenge.

The morning was kicked off with the endurance race, a combination of a slalom run and a distance run. Fighting the rain and the wind, teams struggled to maneuver around the seven milk jug buoys constantly eying the straight away section which was soon to come. The wind and the waves pounded against the sides of the boats turning them every which way. Soon the slalom course was finished, but the paddlers still had to fight to reach the far end of lake where they could turn around and ride the wind to the finish.

With the endurance race complete, paddlers lined up head-to-head for the sprint heats. Racers began at the sound of the air horn, raced to the far line of buoys and returned. After three heats, one boat was down. The University of Missouri-Columbia had sunk. Pieces of the canoe filled the water and two shivering paddlers floated in the lake at the scene. With the wind, the rain and the temperature continuing to get worse, the remaining races were called off for safety concerns. Lunch was moved to a much drier and warmer Nebraska Hall along with the awards ceremony, which took place immediately following the meal.

In first place was the University of Oklahoma. Coming in second was Oklahoma State University. And in third was the University of Missouri-Rolla.

Once again, we’d like to thank the professional chapter of Nebraska ASCE, all the conference sponsors and all of our judges. We could not have hosted such a fantastic event without all the support we received. We are truly lucky to have such a willing and enthusiastic group of professionals in our state.

THANK YOU!

--2004 MCRC Planning Committee