Building a better bridge — UMaine’s latest big idea can fit in a backpack
When the conversation around business expansion comes up, Maine’s location at the end of I-95 is often seen as a challenge.
How many times have you heard that it’s an eight-hour drive from Kittery to Fort Kent? Actually, 5 hours and 48 minutes, if you believe Google Maps. By air or by automobile, it’s still 300-plus miles, which is considerable.
The state’s network of infrastructure and transportation is extensive, with three deep-water ports, a network of rail lines and a vast highway system, as laid out in the introduction to the Transportation & Logistics focus (see Page 15).
For our cover story, Senior Writer Laurie Schreiber talks to Habib Dagher, a civil engineer by training and director of the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center. Dagher thinks big. Many are familiar with his efforts to develop a system of offshore, floating wind turbines tethered to anchors. Or the giant indoor wave pool at UMaine where engineers can do hydrodynamics testing. UMaine engineers have a lab set up in the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, the highest bridge observatory in the world. Most recently, UMaine developed the world’s largest 3D printer. Laurie’s story does look at some of the outsized projects in the works at UMaine, but it also focuses on one of the most compact developments: “Bridge in a Backpack,” a mobile bridge system that can literally be transported like a rucksack and set up on-site. See Page 16 for details.
Electric vehicle charging stations, an upgrade to the freight rail system and the return of the transportation bond effort are part of a roundup of industry news. Stories start on Page 19.
Elsewhere in the issue, Maine’s lobster industry has grown weary of shipping live lobster to Canada and Massachusetts to be processed, only to be sold back to Maine in a packaged form. So a number of companies burned by tariffs and international trade issues are investing in lobster processing as a way to take more control of the final product and market price. Correspondent Catherine Berce gets the lowdown from Greenhead Lobster, Luke’s Lobster and Ready Seafood about their efforts to build a network of processing plants. See Page 12.
The list in this issue is the top Miane-based transportation projects. See Page 26.
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