Watch for the bridge to appear in the north quad in January
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Engineering student mission teams have built four other bridges in Guatemala over the past few years.
Students to build prototype of bridge designed to help students get to school facilities on either side of a highway in Honduras
Not long after arriving back on campus in 2015, students, employees and passers-by on Belmont Boulevard may notice what looks like a “bridge to nowhere” going up in the quad in front of the James D. Hughes Center.
While it may not connect to anything in America, the 104-foot long bridge is destined to connect to success and safety for middle and elementary students in Olancho, Honduras.
By mid-January, students in the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering hope to begin building a prototype of a steel bridge they plan to ship to Honduras and re-build this spring to allow students at an elementary and middle school to safely cross a highway bisecting their school campus.
The bridge is the fifth bridge the engineering college has built as part of its missions program coordinated by the Richard S. and Mary Ann Brown Peugeot Center for Engineering Service to Developing Communities. But this time, they are trying to solve on-site programs that have delayed past projects by building a prototype of the bridge before ever leaving campus, said Kerry Patterson, associate professor of engineering and director of the Peugeot Center.
For past projects, all built in Guatemala, the bridge parts have been manufactured in Guatemala, and the mission teams didn’t see or work with them until arriving at the bridge site. This caused problems due to unforeseen design issues and errors in manufacturing.
This time, the student team, co-led by civil engineering alumnus Luke Burris (’12), now at local engineering firm Barge Waggoner Sumner & Cannon, is going to have the parts manufactured in America and build the prototype this January. Alumni Ethan Johnson is the co-leader of the bridge team.
The voluntary extra-curricular project provides students with real-world experience before they graduate and brings home the knowledge that they can use their job skills to improve people’s lives, said Burris, who was the student team leader for other bridges Lipscomb has built in Central America.
The team hopes to build the bridge over the course of two to three days. They are targeting the long weekend during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday on Jan. 17-19, but the schedule is dependent on approvals needed from the Honduran government, Burris said.
The bridge will be 104 feet long, 7 ½ feet tall and 4 feet wide. It will sit just a foot or two off the ground on campus, but when constructed in Honduras, it will be high enough for highway traffic to go underneath.
The college plans to leave it constructed in the north quad until the end of February, when it will be featured as part of the annual Engineering Week activities.
Between 15 and 20 students will travel south to the real bridge site in Honduras and reconstruct the bridge. The project is being carried out in partnership with Honduras Outreach Inc., a faith-based, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for the people of Honduras. HOI founded the school, which has academic and athletics facilities on both sides of a busy highway. The road is expected to become even busier in the future as it will become the main access to a new port facility, so the bridge is sorely needed, said Patterson.
The bridges built previously by Lipscomb engineering students were all built in Guatemala and served to provide access over a river for remote villages in the mountains.