State of The Nation

Dole, Hawaii's Most Precarious Dam, and a Crisis Years in the Making For nearly five decades, the multinational fruit conglomerate Dole — and its publicly traded Irish parent, Dole plc — received state notices of deficiency, accumulated fines, and watched rivals pay dividends upward while North Shore Oahu residents lived downstream of a 120-year-old earthen dam that engineers said could not handle a major storm. This week, that storm arrived. Compiled from Associated Press, NPR, Civil Beat, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hawaii News Now, KITV, The Watchers, DLNR Records, SEC Filings, and Hawaii Legislative Archives Oahu, Hawaii — March 21, 2026 ■  Bottom Line Up Front The Wahiawa Dam on Oahu's North Shore — a 120-year-old, 660-foot earthen structure owned by Dole Food Company Hawaii, a subsidiary of NYSE-listed Dole plc — came within feet of catastrophic failure on March 20, 2026, during the worst flooding event on Oahu in 20 years. The...

Journal of Systems Engineering Practice Vol. 12  ·  No. 1  ·  March 2026 ISSN 2835-4108  ·  DOI: 10.XXXX/JSEP.2026.03.001 Review Article  ·  Space Transportation Systems Engineering Systems Engineering for Reusable Orbital Launch Vehicles: Lifecycle Architecture, Subsystem Interactions, and Key Performance Parameters Operational reuse has transformed launch vehicle systems engineering from a single-flight verification problem into a multi-flight lifecycle management discipline. Organized around the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook lifecycle framework, this article traces how reusability requirements propagate — from conceptual trade-space definition through operational sustainment — across propulsion, thermal protection, ground infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and cost architecture. The Space Shuttle's failure to establish refurbishment cost and cycle time as first-class key performance parameters is ...