Peter Moore, P.E., F.ASCE, FACEC
President, Chen Moore and Associates
As published by the Sun Sentinel on September 30, 2022
Last week: For Floridians, the story of the week was Hurricane Ian. For those of us that grew up on 1990s end-of-world disaster movies, though, the story of the week was NASA’s successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission relating to altering the trajectory of asteroid Dimorphos. While It will take days to weeks for astronomers to confirm whether DART accomplished its primary goal, which is to speed up the time Dimorphos takes to orbit its partner asteroid, Didymos, by perhaps 10 or more minutes, the mission to make contact with an object 11 million kilometers from Earth was achieved.
Looking ahead: Hurricane Ian is heading to Tampa … Tallahassee … Tampa … And then it ends up in Fort Myers. In the time following recovery and rebuilding, there will be much learned from the data collected and how it impacts the models used to predict the path and intensity of hurricanes. Similarly, engineers use past information to calculate the duration and intensity of rainfall to prevent loss of life from hurricanes and random December rainstorms. Collaboration between cities, counties, water management districts and other stakeholders helps put the big in “big data,” which continues to make predictions better — but not perfect.
