Engineering Students Weigh In With Bridges : Design: Small spans made of Popsicle sticks are tested for strength as part of a regional competition held at Cal State Fullerton.

Rene Olivo’s head fell into his hands after his Popsicle-stick suspension bridge went creak- crack under the mounting force of the hydraulic “truss buster.”

But as it turned out, the San Diego State University student’s 2-foot-long bridge temporarily held first place after its turn under the hydraulic press, which splintered bridge after bridge Friday at Cal State Fullerton.

The destruction was part of a regional competition that brought civil engineering students from California, Arizona and Nevada to compete in events ranging from mini-bridge building to the construction and racing of canoes.

The annual Pacific Southwest Conference competition encourages students to put classroom knowledge to real-world tests and bestows bragging rights on the champion school. Friday’s events also included contests in surveying and in the oral presentation of engineering reports.

Olivo, 22, a senior, was one of about a dozen students whose goal was to build the strongest bridge using only Popsicle sticks, white Elmer’s glue, engineering formulas and ingenuity. Bridges were judged on a strength-to-weight ratio, since lighter bridges aren’t expected to support as much weight.

Olivo said he built his bridge with simplicity in mind, striving for a lightweight design.

“I did a computer analysis of several designs,” he said, holding his bridge and examining where the glue gave away. “This was one of the simplest designs. It’s as strong as its weakest member.”

Champion of the bridge contest, using a slightly heavier design than Olivo’s, was Cal State Los Angeles student Giles Coon, 37. As his bridge bore ever-increasing force from the overhead press, the civil engineering students from Cal State Los Angeles circled their fists in the air and chanted “Go! Go! Go! Go!” before the bridge finally snapped.

Coon, who took the morning off from work to attend the competition, said he spent about 50 hours designing and building his bridge.

“You start drawing lines and analyzing forces,” he said of the design process. “You use a little intuition of what you think would work, and you run it through the equations.”

Besides designing bridges for strength, civil engineering students also submitted bridges designed to bend the least when placed under a moderate amount of stress. Building a bridge for minimum bending, or deflection, is a more delicate process, said Randy Holter, a Cal State Fullerton student whose design won first place.

“You can’t make as many mistakes, like with a bridge built for strength,” Holter said. “Those can be big and ugly.”

Holter, who, as a student at the host school, helped organize the competition, said the two days of events are meant not only to foster competition but to promote engineering.

“When I was in high school, I looked at engineers and thought, ‘What a bunch of nerds!’ ” he said. “It’s events like this that bring people in and shows them we’re not a bunch of hibernating math whizzes.”

To promote fun as well as good engineering, the competition concludes today with a canoe race and a Frisbee toss, each with a civil engineering twist: The Frisbees and canoes are made of concrete. The canoe finals will be held at 2 p.m. at Newport Dunes Aquatic Park in Newport Beach.