Originally published at: Cofferdams are pretty awesome | Boing Boing
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Just get rid of those pesky activists… 
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I first read this as “Coffeedamns” and figured it was a reference to the traffic back-up outside of a Bahstin Dunkin’ drive thru after school drop off at 8 AM.
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I want one. Right Now!
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Yes, yes they are!
All of civil engineering is great, it is one of those fields where a big mouth or fancy story will get you nowhere. Build something huge and impressive with an actual proper use or shut up.
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My favorite cofferdam project has got to be the excavation of La Belle.
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Squeals in Oak Island.
There’s something wrong with your water there. It seems to have a hole in it.
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There is this story; when San Francisco reps went to Washington to ask Abe Lincoln for funding to build a cofferdam along the SF waterfront, Lincoln joked that his old ma had an old donkey who “nearly cofferdam head off…”
Did not go over well with San Franciscans… Apocryphal?
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Mine is the recovery of the Skuldelev ships:
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I’ve always thought it must be terrifying to work in one of those, but I suppose you get used to it?
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I haven’t been in a cofferdam (yet), but I did get to tour Boston’s Big Dig shortly after the bridge was completed. Kinda surreal looking at the storm sewer inlets hanging from the ceiling at the unfinished end of the tunnel. Also got to tour a storm water pump station 24 stories underground while Mr. Kidd was building it. Neither project made me particularly nervous, oddly. 
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Cofferdams.
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I have the great fondness for civil engineering that everyone who enjoys infrastructure ought to have; but that isn’t entirely true. The US Army Corps of Engineers has a fascinating role in the history of the introduction of cost benefit analysis to American public works projects; including some of the…elaboration…of the world of costs and benefits into a variety of less tangible and/or harder to price considerations that give a lot of flexibility to the creative economist in telling a story for or against a given project.
This isn’t to say that an attempt at a principled algorithm for decisionmaking doesn’t beat the hell out of the previous “totally ad-hoc decisions based on some mixture of political pressure and winging it”, since it does; but the rise of cost benefit analysis as a widely accepted, even demanded in a lot of funding contexts, has created a situation where your project doesn’t even get a nod unless it’s got a real pretty story, with studious economist numbers on.
I hope that they don’t do this anymore; or they do it really carefully and with the appropriate dive computers and gas mixes and such; but I’ve always found the fact that understanding and application of caissons as an engineering technique rather preceeded understanding of decompression sickness to be a deeply chilling thought.
With the open-top cofferdams you certainly have to place a lot of faith in the integrity of the walls around you; but after a lifetime that has often taken me several stories above or below ground purely on the strength of someone’s wall implementation it’s somehow easier to be OK with the idea of load bearing walls being life-critical(potentially while holding an optimistic theory about how one could probably float so long as one wasn’t under some sort of entangling structure and the flooding wasn’t too rapid; notably unlike the caisson case.)
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