Celebrating 250 Years of "US"

As our nation prepares to celebrate its 250^th birthday this July, I am struck by the emotion I have been feeling this year about the American Experiment.

Just the history that I personally have lived through and witnessed in the last seven decades humbles me and inspires me about our collective ability to surmount unprecedented challenges. It also underscores the inescapable duty we still have to engineer a better future for our children.

And our industry is rising to this historic moment.

For what it’s worth, I have always been a history buff, and I can remember watching the Moon landing on black-and-white television when I was just seven years old. For the Bicentennial, my family went to see ‘1776’ on Broadway, and my oldest brother took me out of school on my birthday for a field trip to Gettysburg. Like him, I later attended the University of Virginia and ever since, have felt a kinship with Thomas Jefferson. Arguably, the most important thing I learned there was the concept of trust and personal responsibility, embodied by the student honor code.

Even after I started writing about engineering, I continued to cross paths with history. In 1995, I reported from Oklahoma City on engineering efforts to keep the stricken remains of the Murrah Federal Building from collapsing on search and rescue workers. Six years later, I was in Washington DC on 9/11, and a month after that, at Ground Zero in NYC to write on the structural wreckage of the World Trade Center. In the years since, as a citizen, I attended the frigid Presidential Inauguration on the National Mall in 2009, and like everyone else reading this, I experienced the world-shaking Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, as well as the domestic political upheaval of the uncivil years that have followed.

Yet, through it all, I have continued to find hope and purpose in this industry’s unshakeable focus on solving urgent problems, and in our fellow citizens who have continued to push us toward what Mr. Lincoln called “our better angels.” Those groups came together again in May at a Congressional briefing on Capitol Hill organized by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) and With Honor, an organization dedicated to fighting political polarization by supporting military veterans from BOTH parties in Congress who have pledged “to serve with integrity, civility, and courage.”

As summarized by IWBI’s Jason Hartke, our recent guest on the April edition of HPAC On The Air, the briefing was entitled Built to Defend: Unlocking the Role of Buildings in America’s Biosecurity Strategy. It focused “on the growing recognition that the indoor environments where people spend most of their time can help protect health, strengthen readiness and improve national resilience in the face of evolving biological threats.”

Among the speakers was HPAC Editorial Advisory Board member Dr. William Bahnfleth, a longtime Penn State engineering professor, former national president of ASHRAE, and chair of the Society’s Epidemic Task Force during the pandemic. “What we learned is that planning is important and preparation is even more important,” he said. As a result, “we are moving into risk-based standards for building design, and ASHRAE Standard 241 is the first standard I know of for buildings that addresses airborne infection transmission based on quantitative risk assessment.”

The opportunity now, Bahnfleth added, is to combine proven interventions like ventilation, filtration, pressurization, ultraviolet germicidal irradiation and other technologies, with real-time sensing and controls. “If we can integrate sensors with real-time building controls to quantitatively reduce risk, that will be a very important change,” he said. (For the rest of Hartke’s excellent summary, click here.)

Indeed, it will. But whether we are aiming to improve biosecurity, cybersecurity, indoor air quality, energy efficiency, or sustainability, etc., all with the emerging assistance of artificial intelligence (wanted or not), the path to success will always require collaboration.

Let us remember as we prepare for America's grand birthday party. E Pluribus Unum. The more knowledgeable and courageous guests we have at the table, the better our chances of celebrating the next 250 years.