Bellevue native eyeing quake damage to Washington Monument

By BEcky Brooks

Man­ag­ing Editor

news@gazettepublishingco.com

As a bil­lion­aire and politi­cians raise $15 mil­lion dol­lars to make repairs to the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment fol­low­ing an Aug. 23, 2011 earth­quake, a Belle­vue native is one of the pro­fes­sion­als study­ing a 3-D image of the dam­aged national treasure.

Andrew Bishop, a 2003 grad­u­ate of Belle­vue Senior High School, said he had been work­ing for Wiss, Jan­ney, Elst­ner, Asso­ciates Inc. — an engi­neer­ing, archi­tects and mate­r­ial sci­en­tists — about six months in the San Fran­cisco office when the East Coast Earth­quake occurred.

Bishop, the son of Mark and Susan Bishop of Belle­vue, received an under­grad­u­ate degree from the Uni­ver­sity of Cincin­nati and then attended the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon Grad­u­ate School to study architecture.

On Wednes­day, Bishop said he was lucky to be with the WJE when the firm was called for an emer­gency response to scope the dam­ages to national land­marks in Wash­ing­ton D.C. last summer.

“I really landed in the right spot to do these,” he commented.

WJE was called in to check out the Jef­fer­son Memo­r­ial, Lin­coln Mon­u­ment, the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment and the National Cathe­dral, he pointed out.

Bishop said his job was to detail the inte­rior dam­age to the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment as four other team mem­bers repelled down from the point on the exte­rior sides of the monument.

The mon­u­ment has dozens of var­i­ous sized fractures.

“Some of them are pretty big… and some are 4-feet long that they can see through,” he said about the con­di­tion of the mon­u­ment last summer.

“Two of them, you could see day­light,” he said about two frac­tures look­ing from inside out.

Bish­opalso iden­ti­fied fine frac­tures that may not be vis­i­ble on the exterior.

“There are sev­eral on the pyra­mid (top) you can see,” he pointed out.

The Belle­vue native could not give the total num­ber of frac­tures to the mon­u­ment. “I don’t think we’ve added them all of them up,” he said, not­ing there were many pho­tographs of the dam­age to examine.

The mon­u­ment was sur­veyed block by block from the inside and the out.

“Here in the office, I’ve been cre­at­ing a 3D model that we’ve been look­ing at the dam­age,” he shared. “It really helps, because the build­ing is so symmetrical.”

Just using the pho­tographs for ref­er­ences was dif­fi­cult to under­stand, he added.

Wash­ing­ton D.C. also was hit with a dou­ble blow in August 2011. Not only was it hit by an earth­quake, it was also slated to be hit by a hurricane.

“We did an emer­gency weath­er­iza­tion, because Hur­ri­cane Irene was com­ing that week­end,” Bishop commented.

The mon­u­ment, a 555-foot obelisk, has been closed ever since it was dam­aged by the 5.8-magnitude earth­quake last sum­mer, accord­ing to the Asso­ci­ated Press.

Con­gress has alloted $7.5 mil­lion for repairs and bil­lion­aire his­tory buff and phil­an­thropist David Ruben­stein has donated a match­ing $7.5 mil­lion, accord­ing to AP.

The National Park Ser­vice reported it will award a con­tract for work to begin by August 2012, and the mon­u­ment should be repaired within 10 months.

Bishop said the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment is just one of the projects he is work­ing on for WJE; oth­ers include a ther­mal project in Alaska.

The local alum­nus said he knew he wanted to study archi­tec­ture when he was in high school.

“I never imag­ined this when I went to Belle­vue,” he concluded.

Posted by Becky Brooks on Jan 26 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.