After catastrophic flooding in New Orleans destroyed two hospitals, the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System is planning a replacement facility that will incorporate resilience against future extreme events.

Building Maintenance & Construction: Tools and Maintenance Tasks introduces and develops knowledge of basic building maintenance tools and materials, applied skills and techniques, industry health and safety standards, and preventive maintenance and troubleshooting practices required by employers for entry-level positions in the building trades and facilities maintenance fields.

Contains a PDF version of lecture slides for a construction course on mechanical and plumbing systems. Also contains in-class exercises used in the course.

This case study is an examination of the chemical and sensory impacts of a variety of environmental issues including sand mining, leaking underground gasoline storage tanks (LUSTs), and a railroad.

Wedron is a small, unincorporated town of approximately 100 residents in north central Illinois. A large sand mine has been in operation on the south and west sides of the town for many decades, and the mine property includes several abandoned and active pits, a processing plant, and a train car loading facility. Railroad tracks are located along the east side of town as is a grain elevator (storage and loading facility).

The following information was obtained from the US EPA web site about Wedron, personal visits to the town, and published news articles.

This case study includes discussion questions and data sources for further information.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Student groups are given captioned photographs of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant facility and surrounding towns taken before and 28 years after the 1986 disaster. Based on the captions and clues in the images, they arrange them in sequential order. While viewing the completed sequence of images, students reflect on what it might have been like to be there, and ask themselves: what were people thinking, doing and saying at each point? This activity assists students in gaining an understanding of how devastating nuclear meltdowns can be, which underscores the importance of responsible engineering. It is recommended that this activity be conducted before the associated lesson, Nuclear Energy through a Virtual Field Trip.

During Hurricane Sandy, as the storm surge incapacitated buildings all along the New York and New Jersey coasts, Seagate Seagate Rehabilitation & Nursing Center functioned precisely as planned. At the peak of the storm, floodwaters filled the parking area and reached the lobby door, but did not enter the building. Emergency power generators remained safe and supplied backup power for four days despite an area-wide power outage. The nursing home’s emergency plans for food and medical supplies enabled staff and patients to shelter in place despite limited transportation for incoming supplies. Seagate not only provided continuous care to its residents during and after Sandy, it also assisted local community members seeking food and shelter.

An in-class jigsaw activity, in which students play the role of investigators consulting on behalf of an industrial client seeking an appropriate location to site a new facility to handle environmentally-damaging materials, allows students to interactively tie together key aspects of decision-making (e.g. hazardous Earth processes, prevention/mitigation strategies, sustainability, and the incorporation of multiple types of data to solve complex problems). This activity was designed to be completed within one ~75 minute class meeting, although aspects of this activity can easily be modified to accommodate shorter class periods. In small groups, students examine one of five possible proposed sites for the facility, evaluating it based on its described geologic, economic, and/or social criteria. Students are then scrambled into new, larger groups, in which representatives of all five proposed sites report their findings, and then the sites are collectively ranked in order of preference. Rankings between the larger groups are compared and discussed as a class, including topics such as a comparison of criteria and overall rankings, descriptions of most beneficial and most needed data, and comparison of the activity to "real-life" scenarios.

When smoke from wildfires swirls around health care facilities, prepared hospitals in California and Colorado use air quality tools to keep the indoor environment safe for patients and staff.

Students are given an engineering challenge: A nearby hospital has just installed a new magnetic resonance imaging facility that has the capacity to make 3D images of the brain and other body parts by exposing patients to a strong magnetic field. The hospital wishes for its entire staff to have a clear understanding of the risks involved in working near a strong magnetic field and a basic understanding of why those risks occur. Your task is to develop a presentation or pamphlet explaining the risks, the physics behind those risks, and the safety precautions to be taken by all staff members. This 10-lesson/4-activity unit was designed to provide hands-on activities to teach end-of-year electricity and magnetism topics to a first-year accelerated or AP physics class. Students learn about and then apply the following science concepts to solve the challenge: magnetic force, magnetic moments and torque, the Biot-Savart law, Ampere's law and Faraday's law. This module is built around the Legacy Cycle, a format that incorporates findings from educational research on how people best learn.

Water conservation teams will perform a school water audit to determine how much water the school uses (indoors and outdoors), what activities and behaviors contribute to water loss and waste, and what changes could be enacted to conserve water at their school.

In this service learning project, students will collaborate in teams and with community partners to:

Collect data from existing sources such as past water bills, campus census data, and school facility maps
Measure school water use (indoors/outdoor) and make "field" observations by performing the 7-Step School Water Audit
Analyze data, formulate problem statements, and make recommendations for action plans to improve water efficiency
Create an extended abstract or poster for the project
Present the project to an authentic audience of students, teachers, school administrators, water supply entities and other community partners
Make real-world changes to conserve water

In this activity, students play the role of energy consultants to a CEO, assessing and documenting the feasibility, cost, and environmental impact of installing solar power on 4 company facilities with the same design but in different geographical locations.

The SFTool is a robust, practical and engaging resource for facility managers, purchasing agents, designers, tenants, and the general public to understand why sustainability matters and how to take practical steps to create healthier, more comfortable, high-performance workplaces. SFTool explains sustainable options and enables informed decision-making by making it easy to learn about sustainability topics, view planning strategies, explore virtual spaces, identify federal sustainability requirements, practice managing a building, read case studies and share knowledge.

This document presents a system for the classification of the Uses of BIM. This classification system provides a common language for the Uses of Building Information Modeling (or BIM Uses) that can be leveraged to communicate the precise purpose and context of implementing BIM on a capital facility project. A BIM Use is defined as a method of applying Building Information Modeling during a facility’s lifecycle to achieve one or more specific objectives. The BIM Project Execution Planning Guide provides a structured method to plan the implementation of Building Information Modeling on a project.

An extreme precipitation event in 2008 cost one town more than a million dollars in infrastructure repairs. Now, other municipalities can simulate how their homes, businesses, and facilities might fare if they experienced a similar event.

In this lesson, students will apply what they know about how to separate a mixture by designing a wastewater treatment facility that effectively removes contaminants.

Before this activity the students will have heard about groundwater and water resources through lecture to give them a background on where our drinking water comes from. The activity involves a tour of the local wastewater treatment plant where the students told about the treatment processes and shown the treatment facility. They are also introduced to the water quality testing done at the plans and they learn about the energy usage/management at the plant. As part of the activity they write up a paper on the processes in the treatment process from the time water enters the plant until it exits. The students are encouraged before hand to ask questions to ensure that they gather the needed information. This always means that each tour has a slightly different content based on these questions.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

After most of the city was flattened by a tornado, Joplin, Missouri’s Mercy Hospital built a new facility, incorporating features to reinforce its resistance to wind.

This activity focuses on getting students to think about bacteria, water quality and water treatment processes. Students develop and test their hypotheses about the "cleanliness" of three water samples prepared by the teacher. Then they grow bacteria in Petri dishes from the water samples. They learn how private septic systems and community sewage and wastewater treatment plants work, the consequences to the surrounding environment and wildlife from human wastewater, and what measurements of the released "clean" water are monitored to minimize harm to receiving rivers and lakes.