Re: Being Outspoken

Dear Avi: I am sorry that I can't understand what your post is trying to say. Dr. zzzzz has sent me the nice short e-mail complementing my speaking out about this unbelievable corruption in Seismic Advisory Board of Caltrans which , in my opinion is the root cause of all these problems with the Bay Bridge and now a fatality. Why are you asking Dr. zzzz to "Maintain a decorum" ? And why are you asking me to "reveal his name to Seaint for some kind of action"?. What are you talking about? He has written a nice letter to me. Why "some kind of action should be taken against him? Besides, if he wanted to have his name revealed he would have posted the note on Seaint instead of sending me privately. How can I violate his privacy and reveal his name? I think you may have misunderstood the hate mail case in my post. The hate mail I received was from someone else and that e-mail was turned over to Berkeley police (I had typed in my post "Campus mail" instead of "Campus police". Please let us focus on preventing a few in our community such as members of the Seismic Advisory Board of Caltrans from destroying fine reputation of so many structural engineers , who are doing their jobs honorably and with public safety in mind.

It is very simple: Seismic Advisory Board(SAB) of Caltrans was created after Loma Prieta quake to be an "independent " watch dog overseeing and approving Caltrans seismic designs. For first four years and under Chairmanship of the late Professor Housner, the SAB did exactly that. But after that the former Chair Dr. Penzien and the current Chair Dr. Frieder Seible , who is the Dean of School of Engineering at San Diego and almost all members of SAB started receiving multi-million dollar contracts from Caltrans for research and consulting in a non-competitive basis. In essence, The Chair and members of SAB were getting money from Caltrans to do consulting, then presenting their work to Caltrans only to be presented to themselves for approval. Believe me such a corrupt system , in our professions results in someone getting killed and the someone may have been the truck driver killed on the S-curve of Bay Bridge.

Let us keep the focus on eradicating this corruption and saving lives.

Best wishes.

A. Astaneh

Subject: Re: Being Outspoken
From: Avi Sharma <leisuresoul.avi@gmail.com>
To: seaint@seaint.org

Dr zzzzz
I am really feeling bad about this one now. You can say
to this extent is something that is out of limit. I think you should
have read something about the prof you are saying this. He is a real
Civilian !! If you had guts then you would have come a general message
through seaint. I am not against you but the point I am trying to make
is about a decorm of place you are in. This is not orkut/fb, this is
something serious and something of our branch's concern.
Just one message, Maintain a decorm !!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Prof Astaneh,
Please reveal his name to admins atleast
for some kind of Action.

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