One of the most anticipated events at St. Thomas’ three-day-long civil engineering symposium was cancelled after over a year of planning. As students were preparing to carry their concrete canoe to Lake Hiawatha on April 17, the canoe race was canceled due to hail and thunder.
Moments after the race was officially called off, senior Megan Lampe told The Crest that the cancellation was “devastating.”
“We were at our high bay at six. We have 12 people on the team — more than 10 extras who are doing work on this — and we don’t even get to know if it passed the first test,” Lampe said.
The symposium was sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineering and included competitions, presentations, meetings and games. The Tommie Civil Club collaborated with the University of Minnesota to host seventeen other universities, according to the symposium’s website.
The cancelled event was a challenge where students use concrete to build a canoe and race it against competing schools. The St. Thomas team had been preparing since J-term by making different concrete mixes, which they then demolded, painted and sanded, according to senior Zach Burton.
“We did a lot of work. We got a lot of kudos from other teams,” Lampe said. “But we did want to test our canoe in some way. And the fun of it is really the racing too, so the fact that that’s called off is disappointing.”
Participants also expressed frustration with the race’s judging process.
Before the races, canoes undergo aesthetics judging, which involves judges evaluating them based on appearance and verifying that they meet the presentation requirements, according to senior Rebecca Bishop.
The process was supposed to take an hour, Lampe said, but it ended up taking four hours. Senior Nate Brandhorst said that the delay caused resentment among students.
“The aesthetics judging for this particular competition took four hours despite the protests of students and the other judges. The person who was in charge of judging the concrete canoe competition — the head judge — did not listen to any of these complaints,” Brandhorst said.
Lampe said the slow judging was the reason the teams ultimately weren’t able to compete in the canoe race.
“It was not supposed to take that long, so we should have been able to get the canoe at least in the water to see if it floated, but we weren’t able to,” Bishop said.
Lampe told The Crest that the judge said the reason the aesthetics process took so long was because the canoes were too close together and the race schedule was unorganized.
The engineering department declined to provide The Crest with a way to contact the judge for comment.
Despite the canoe race cancellation and underwhelming results from the Tommies — they placed No. 13 in the steel bridge competition — many students said they were proud of the event overall.
“Being unable to do the actual races was a huge blow to the overall symposium. But I think, in spite of that, every other competition went well enough that overall it was a good symposium,” Brandhorst said.
Emily Kratz can be reached at krat1542@stthomas.edu.
