News Detail

It Really is a Small World

11/1/2005

It's time to realize we are a part of an international community. We can no longer afford to have a protectionist attitude and attempt to shut out the rest of the world. Your automobile, for example, undoubtedly has parts from numerous other countries. For instance, many "foreign" cars are now assembled in the U.S. An aircraft such as the Boeing 777 is considered to be made in the U.S., but many parts come from other countries. Interestingly, no two 777 orders from different countries are made the same. If the Chinese buy 777s, those planes will have some parts specified by the Chinese to be from China or elsewhere.

In my career, I have been fortunate enough to work on projects in at least two dozen different countries. I started out working on a major project in Saudi Arabia in 1966. It has been my experience that design professionals are similar the world round. An engineer in Kyrgyzstan looks at the design of a concrete structure in the same way an engineer in North America would.

At a typical ACI convention, we have a chance to interface with professionals from many other countries. They serve on our committees, present papers at the sessions, and publish papers in our journals. Talk with them and you will learn.

Because of these types of activities and the close relationship with the participants in the concrete industry in Latin America, ACI organized a "Structural Concrete in the Americas" International Workshop that was held in October 2002 in conjunction with the ACI convention in Phoenix, AZ. A second workshop took place before the ACI convention in Washington, DC, in March 2004. The third International Workshop is being held prior to the ACI convention in Kansas City, MO, this month.

These workshops provide an excellent opportunity for folks from all of Latin America to interact with each other as well as professionals from the U.S. and Canada. One of the major products of this relationship is an "official" Spanish translation of ACI 318. This was a direct result of the first workshop and was developed using a Chilean translation as a basis. A task group led by Ken Bondy, with participants from a number of Latin American countries, accomplished the task in record time. A final draft was given to each of the participants at the second workshop in Washington. That translation was for ACI 318-02. The Spanish translation of ACI 318-05 is already available. For the U.S., ACI will have a limited printing of this document. The bulk of the printing will be done by five countries in Latin America. This will make the code available to virtually everyone in Latin America at a very reasonable cost.

In another international effort, a university in China is translating ACI 318 into Chinese and will publish the document in China. As with the Latin American agreements, the Chinese university will pay a small royalty to publish the code. This also allows us to pursue our goal of spreading information on concrete to the industry worldwide.

In a future President's Memo, I will discuss ACI's activities with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) TC 71, the technical committee on Concrete, Reinforced Concrete, and Prestressed Concrete. ACI has the role of Secretariat of the committee and was involved in the creation and production of a new ISO standard on the criteria that a design standard for structural concrete must meet.

We are fortunate that we live in a very exciting time. With the development of the Internet as a communication tool, we can stay in touch with anyone virtually anywhere in the world. I recently had an opportunity to sit at my computer at our farm in West Virginia while writing a report in conjunction with an engineer in Turkey and an engineer in Australia. We were all there and in instantaneous contact. That's a big deal to a boy from a relatively small town in Iowa.

My advice to all of you is to accept the idea that we live in a world community. The professionals of the world get along just fine. Maybe we should try to teach our governments to do the same.

James R. Cagley, President
American Concrete Institute
jim@cagley.com

Back to Past-Presidents' Memo List