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My first encounter with David Fischetti came when he gave a presentation in a breakout session at ASCE's annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina a few years ago. He spoke passionately about his work in preserving covered bridges and his admiration for Herman Haupt, a noted engineer who lived in the 1800s. Soon after, I read in Civil Engineering magazine about how Fischetti spearheaded efforts to get the National Park Service to move the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina inland to save it. The epic project turned out famously successful.

With Fischetti's name showing up in these disparate arenas, I detected a pattern: this guy has made a mark preserving valued structures. Indeed, as president of DCF Engineering in Cary, North Carolina and a structural engineer with a bent for history, he has become internationally known in the field of historic preservation and conservation engineering.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, the 56-year-old Fischetti came by his knack for engineering historic structures honestly. His grandfather worked as a bricklayer, his father a civil engineer, and he attended the same structural course at Brooklyn Technical High School his father did. "I was exposed to drafting, tools, and all that sort of stuff early on," he recalls. "I have a real love of history, probably because of my Dad." To further that, he took an elective graduate-level course on American history from 1609 to 1776 while going for his B.S. degree in civil engineering from Clemson University. "I think that influenced me."

After college, Fischetti delved into structural engineering right away designing glue-laminated timber structures for the Koppers Company, with facilities in Morrisville, North Carolina and Pittsburgh. He later worked for Lasater-Hopkins Engineers in Raleigh, North Carolina handling jobs such as the structural design of schools and a lab for the state's Department of Agriculture.

At Lasater-Hopkins, Fischetti noticed that engineers in the back room weren't deemed as important as drafters and bookkeepers, creating a high turnover among engineers. He also saw a lack of opportunities to learn new skills at companies like this because they pigeonholed engineers into specialized jobs they were good at.

This spurred Fischetti to go into business for himself in 1975, when he started DCF Engineering. Perhaps unknowingly, it also set him down the path of historic preservation. "Rapidly, I ended up in a certain niche. The first job I did was St. Andrews United Methodist Church in Garner, North Carolina," he recalls. This was a glue-laminated timber A-frame with severe termite damage. While still at Lasater-Hopkins, he got a call from Wm. C. Vick Construction Co. in Raleigh about the job, as he had been introduced to William Vick at a past job. Fischetti asked about doing it on his own after hours because he was thinking about leaving the company. Vick has been a client ever since, and Fischetti says he has learned a lot from them, as they do extensive renovation and restoration of buildings.

Fischetti's work involves new and old structures alike and ranges from feasibility studies and structural evaluations to comprehensive design and construction administration. His designs include buildings of all types from structural steel, heavy timber, and reinforced concrete. Buildings he has designed include medical, educational, religious, recreational, and commercial projects.

But the historic preservation is the fun stuff. "I had an interest in history, my grandfather was a brick mason, and I did a lot of timber design, so when you consider that most historic buildings are masonry boxes with timber lids, it's a perfect fit," he says, putting it all in perspective. In looking at a historic structure, "It's fun to put it on the computer and look at the member forces and realize that the guys got it right. You see very few defects in anything built in this part of the country after the Civil War, because the ability to analyze trusses was developed in the 1840s and 50s by guys like Squire Whipple, Herman Haupt, and Colonel Stephen Long. So knowing a little bit about how things evolved and what the date is on the building, you have an idea what the roof structure might look like. It all ties in. It gives you a different perspective."

Fischetti mixes modern structures into the work load to pay the bills, as historic jobs don't pay well. "They wear you out, and then you might get a 140,000-square-foot warehouse, and that would make the money for the year." Preservation projects often serve as fill-ins when they involve only small segments of work such as reports, evaluations, and second opinions.

Working on the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, however, involved a full spectrum of work. Describing it as "once in a lifetime," Fischetti says it made him marvel at construction methods of yesteryear. "The real interesting thing was the fact they built such a building in total isolation, with no roads, no railroads, anything. They shipped in about a million bricks from Baltimore and lots of pink Vermont granite for the base. They did a wonderful job. Every brick in that lighthouse, as far as we could tell, was fully mortared. They didn't cheat on anything. They just did a magnificent job. Everybody came away from that project having a great appreciation for what they could do in the middle of the 19th century -- technology we can't duplicate today."

Located on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the National Historic Landmark teetered on the brink of destruction, as the barrier islands move with beach erosion at a rate of about ten feet a year. When built in 1870, the lighthouse stood about 1600 feet from shore, and by 1987, only 160 feet separated it from the pounding ocean.

The National Park Service (NPS), the agency responsible for maintaining the lighthouse, began studying the erosion problem in 1980. Besides relocation of the structure, they looked at building a seawall around it and continuously replenishing the beach. After consulting with engineers, scientists, preservationists, and other experts, NPS scientists deemed it impossible to move the lighthouse because it was too heavy, and they embraced the seawall concept, with construction slated to begin in 1986.

Fischetti met Duke University geology professor Orrin Pilkey, widely respected for his expertise on beachfront erosion, at a meeting where he gave a talk on beach erosion. In talking afterwards, they agreed the lighthouse should be moved. As Fischetti puts it, "It made more sense for man to move out of the way and let nature move on." Building a seawall would only aggravate the situation because wave energy would bounce off it and erode the beach in front of it. Water would eventually get over and underneath it and undermine its structure. "So it's really a temporary solution."

Barrett Wilson, a contractor involved with the lighthouse, learned Fischetti supported moving the lighthouse and encouraged him to do something about it. Fischetti got Pilkey involved, and he in turn solicited David Bush, a graduate geology student at Duke at the time. Fischetti, Wilson, Pilkey, and Bush formed the Move the Lighthouse Committee.

They started an aggressive letter-writing campaign and presented an independent report to the NPS based on work Fischetti had done as a structural engineering consultant for the 1980 study. The report got the attention of Robert Baker, then-southeastern director of the NPS, who recommended NPS seek further analysis of the options and approach the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). In 1988, NAS's National Research Council Committee on Options for Preserving Cape Hatteras Lighthouse released a report saying moving the lighthouse was the only technically feasible option. In 1989, NPS reversed its decision to construct a seawall and announced the lighthouse would be moved. By 1991, a team of engineering consultants had been assembled to prepare plans to relocate the Cape Hatteras Light Station. After a delay, in 1997, Congress appropriated the funding necessary to get the project underway.

Law Engineering and Testing in Atlanta worked with Fischetti in forming a design-build team to bid the project. Fischetti recommended finding out who was moving a lighthouse on Block Island in North Carolina and contacting them. It turned out to be International Chimney of Buffalo, New York and Expert House Movers in Maryland. Law and Fischetti selected a civil engineering firm and invited International Chimney and an architecture team in Chicago, among other companies, to join the group. In 1998, NPS awarded the design/build contract to the seven-member team. "I produced the structural drawings, but International Chimney and their engineers and the mover decided how they wanted to do it. And then I designed the new foundation," Fischetti recalls. In 1999, the team moved the lighthouse successfully 2900 feet in dramatic fashion. "It was certainly the highlight of my career."

While the lighthouses on Fischetti's resume may number only one or two, he has had a hand in preserving several covered bridges. He says the work poses unique challenges: "Number one, you have to balance the preservation principles of trying to maintain the structure. If it's a timber-covered bridge, you want to try to keep it as a timber-covered bridge and not put some big steel trusses in it or a bunch of steel beams. By the same token, you need to meet the needs of highway bridge safety." He starts by taking photos and measurements and drawing the structure to assess its condition. "You look at stability. You look at its load-carrying capacity. You look at the chords of the trusses to see what condition they're in. There's a lot of judgment involved, but the number one thing is you really have to do some rigorous analysis. You have to come up with a computer model that makes sense and apply reasonable highway loading."

Often, transportation crews today repair a covered bridge by replacing wooden beams with steel ones without analyzing it, essentially creating a modern bridge covered by a superficial wooden roof. This can result in stability problems, Fischetti states, as the trusses must support their own weight and that of the bridge cover, rather than work as an integral structure because the steel floor members act independently of the wood structure. "In the old bridge, the whole thing acted like a tube. The oldtimers, I think, knew a lot more than what we give them credit for."

In doing preservation work on covered bridges, Fischetti likes to cite engineers from the past, like Herman Haupt, whom he labels a great engineer. Born in 1817 in Philadelphia, Haupt graduated from West Point and served as the chief of military railroads during the Civil War. As a noted bridge and railroad engineer, he pioneered experimental stress analysis and materials testing and was one of the first civil engineers to develop a rational method for truss analysis in the 1940s.

As an example of Haupt's work, Fischetti points to the Bunker Hill Covered Bridge in Claremont, North Carolina. Completed in 1895, this is the only remaining example of Haupt's 1839 patent for the improved lattice truss, which consists of web members positioned only at locations which require support. With Fischetti as the consulting structural engineer, crews began rehabilitation of it in 1987 by removing sideboarding and roofing to gain access to chord members requiring repair. Deteriorated bottom chord members at the four bearing corners of the bridge were replaced.

Having gained such in-depth experience with timber structures from a historical perspective, Fischetti speaks of sustainability when he describes timber as a renewable resource. He thinks society has dropped the ball in using timber properly as a building material but lauds the efforts of forestry departments to develop it as such. His reason: "With all the effort, money, and energy that go into a building, there's no reason why it can't last a thousand years if a roof is kept on it."

This all comes as part of a big picture Fischetti sees of historical engineering. "You get a chance to communicate with the masons, the timber framers, the contractors, the builders, the designers that came before us." People in the future may also get to see a lighthouse still standing on Cape Hatteras, along with some covered bridges and churches, all because of Fischetti's efforts.

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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©2004 Progressive Engineer