CV Student’s Streak Spans Two Contests

While watching “Seinfeld” the other night, I built that bridge to the 21st century President Clinton is always droning on and on about.

Enduring a chorus of jeers from my wife and kids, I sliced dozens of skinny balsa wood strips and glued them together to create The Double Doug Pyramid span.

It was all to pit my weenie construction skills against the area’s brightest teen engineers competing in Spokane this weekend at the regional Bridge Building Contest.

Sponsored by the Washington Society of Professional Engineers, students from 20 area high schools gathered inside the Franklin Park Mall for the annual event that last year produced a world champ.

After winning the 1996 regionals, Central Valley’s Aaron Miller - then a 16-year-old sophomore - flew to Miami to clobber the best young bridge builders on the planet.

Miller’s bridge weighed just 24.2 grams, yet held an incredible 187-pound load. His first place won him a two-year college scholarship at either the University of Miami or the Illinois Technical Institute.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” says Aaron, now 17, who figures he spent close to 500 hours perfecting his winning bridge. The contest “really opens up the mind. It requires me to do some reading and thinking. It gives you a total perspective on life and how you look at problems.”

At the regionals Saturday morning, Aaron proved his world win was no fluke.

This year’s contest challenged students to design the lightest bridge that would carry a target load of 110 pounds (50 kilos). All entries used the same materials and complied with certain dimensions.

After spending 45 minutes leveling the loading platform and crunching numbers with a calculator, Aaron hooked his small, curved bridge to a steel hook and began adding weights.

A few grams past the magic 50-kilo mark, his 16.18-gram bridge exploded from the strain. Imagine this: Aaron has created a featherweight structure to hold 3,088 times its own weight.

“If there was a national draft for future engineers, I’d be picking Aaron,” says Ray Stein, a Central Valley math teacher and one of the high school’s bridge-building advisers.

Because of a no-repeat clause in the rules, Shadle’s Lindsay Moon, who placed second, and University’s James Parker, who placed third, will be flying to Chicago later for the international competition.

Aaron is invited back, but lacks the air fare. Any generous science lovers out there with a plane ticket to spare?

Watching and talking to these budding Einsteins made me realize that my bridge-building abilities will not get us to the millennium.

“Kreee-aack!”

The Double Doug Pyramid crumbled faster than a Liz Taylor marriage. Just over 18 pounds brought it down with a clatter during the load test. I could almost imagine the screams of tiny motorists plunging to their doom.

“Don’t quit yer day job,” observed Howard Pettibone, a retired Bureau of Mines engineer helping with the contest. “You don’t even have a bridge to the next five minutes.”

Engineers are a regular riot.

Maybe I can work out a few of the bugs and peddle my Double Doug Pyramid design to the city as a cheaper alternative to the $28 million Lincoln Street bridge being proposed.

That figure seems high unless it includes the universal government boondoggle construction costs: kickbacks, payoffs, bribes, graft and sticking a Teamster or two in a landfill.

Taxpayers already donated $3.2 million just to come up with the Lincoln Street eyesore that, quite frankly, looks like a couple of McDonald’s arches curved over a long, all-cement patty.

Well, Spokane can have my bridge for a cool mil. I’ll even furnish the balsa wood.

Once the Double Doug Pyramid is built, however, there will have to be a guard tower added to keep off any cars weighing more than 18 pounds.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo