It's long and sleek and elegant, but it's not a piece of artwork up there in the lobby of Holmes Hall at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. It has a busy crop of algae flourishing in the stagnant rainwater in its belly, but it's not an agriculture project. Concrete canoe
provides solid lessonsThe canoe is made of some stout material that reacts dully to knuckle-rapping. It's beneath a kind of canoe-moving gurney and next to a gigantic shipping box that warns on its stencils that the contents are fragile. Yet the canoe is abandoned, and the weight of rainwater is making it crack. It's forlorn.
The clue is the building itself. Holmes Hall is home to the engineering department. The canoe is an engineering project, one of many, as it turns out.
Every year the American Society of Civil Engineers holds a "concrete canoe" race in various cities around the United States.
"We try to compete every year," said Sheryl Nojima, a dean in the engineering department. "And we've doing better every year. We've begun to place in the top 10."
Hawaii has yet to crack the top three places, according to ASCE's online history of the event, and Hawaii did not enter this year's event in South Dakota.
There are actually several generations of University of Hawaii concrete canoes, said Nojima. Every year the students learn a bit more and apply refined expertise to the project. "It's a terrific competition because it gets the kids motivated, and they learn a lot about the physical properties of concrete."
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Burl Burlingame, Star-Bulletin
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