We Built This

Austin Water, the city’s water and wastewater utility, serves 1.17 million retail and wholesale customers across a 538-square-mile service area. More than 4,000 miles of water distribution pipes run beneath city streets, and a trio of treatment plants purifies more than 150 million gallons of water per day.

Texas Engineer Shay Ralls Roalson is in charge of all this critical infrastructure. The civil engineering alumna became the first woman to lead the utility in 2023 after serving as assistant director of engineering services for three years.

This wasn’t her first go-round with Austin Water. She interned there while in graduate school, studying under professor Desmond Lawler. She conducted her thesis experiments on water softening—the process of removing minerals like calcium and magnesium from water—using water from its treatment plants.

UT faculty and students have partnered with Austin Water for years. Roalson recalls a time when Lawler visited the plant and launched into an on-the-fly training course for process engineers. Following major flooding in 2018 that overwhelmed the treatment plants, teams from UT and engineering firms replete with Texas Exes collaborated with Austin Water to refine treatment processes, helping the plants rebound from the disaster.

But Roalson has faith that advanced planning, combined with the knowledge and passion of Austin Water staff will allow them to mitigate these challenges.

Roalson’s confidence in her team and its plans may not have materialized without her time at UT. In addition to the technical knowledge and problem-solving skills she gained, she also developed the confidence to become an expert.

A presentation she gave as a graduate student at the annual conference of the American Water Works Association provides a perfect example of coming into her own as an expert. As she prepared to present a paper on advanced water softening, she sat on stage between two experts in the field, with the authors she cited in her paper littered throughout the audience.

“In the middle of my presentation, I had a light bulb moment,” she said. “These were incredible experts, all of them renowned in their field, but nobody knew my work better than I did. I learned to trust my ability to identify a problem, quantify the problem and then systematically take it apart to figure out each piece and come to a solution.”

Growing up in St. Louis, Brian Falconer used to look out the window of his high school classroom and see the Gateway Arch. Little did he know that just a few years later, he’d get a job at the company that engineered that iconic structure.

In his 35 years at that company, Severud Associates, where Falconer is now a principal, he’s had the opportunity to engineer many more iconic structures. Falconer led the engineering of celebrated projects in his firm’s New York City home base, including the redevelopment of the original Penn Station, now known as the Moynihan Train Hall, and ongoing work with the American Museum of Natural History and Museum of Modern Art. He’s also worked on higher education facilities at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and more.

Falconer is the guy architects call on to solve impossible challenges. That’s a big reason why he was the engineer of record on the eye-catching Las Vegas Sphere.

The brain-child of Madison Square Garden and New York Knicks owner James Dolan, the Sphere was built on a foundation of challenges. How can a big sphere serve as an entertainment venue? How can the outside function as a giant video board? And, most importantly, what does it take to construct the world’s largest spherical structure?

Falconer compared the construction to a giant erector set, with large pipes linked by cast connections in a series of hexagons. The team built the bottom from the ground up, until they reached the hemisphere, where a tall shoring tower was installed in the center.

One of the largest roller cranes on the planet erected the keystone at the crown. The rest of the structure was then built from the crown down.

There was little margin for error in this challenging project.

“In a typical building, you make everything square and it fits together in a very simple way,” Falconer said. “There’s a lot of play in the joints, so if they’re not perfect, they can be fixed. In this case, everything had to go perfectly together like a very complex machine to keep that geometry together.”

Falconer relishes being the ultimate problem-solver. But he doesn’t do it alone. In fact, he still relies on friends he made at UT, where he got his master’s in civil engineering.

He recalled a time he investigated why an acrylic case for squids at the American Museum of Natural History cracked. Everything seemed fine structurally, so he called up Paul Tikalsky, a former dean of Oklahoma State University’s College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology who Falconer sat next to when they were both students at UT.

Together, they discovered the culprit: mismatched materials. The acrylic case was bent at too low of a temperature, creating a prestress. The alcohol preservative for the squid attacked the prestress and caused the cracks.

This case exemplifies Falconer’s approach to engineering. It centers around tenacity, collaboration and trying new things.

“You’re not going to change the world just doing what’s been done for the last 100 years and never doing anything different. As engineers, we’re not always the ones to branch out and discover something completely new, but we take all these things that other people have figured out and assemble them into something new and unique.”

— Brian Falconer