ATC Associates celebrates 30th anniversary

ATC Associates, an engineering and environmental consulting firm specializing in geotechnical engineering, construction materials testing, special inspections, industrial hygiene, and environmental engineering services, is celebrating its 30^th anniversary this year.

Over the last three decades, ATC has worked behind the scenes for hundreds of Fortune 500 companies and was on the scene within hours of several national disasters. From working with the WTC recovery and redevelopment efforts to environmental testing in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as well as providing geotechnical services and construction materials testing on hundreds of major capital improvement projects across the country, ATC has served as a resource for organizations in petroleum, real estate, retail, manufacturing, financial services, insurance, construction, telecommunications, education, government, and hospitality.

ATC was founded in 1982 in Sioux Falls, SD as an analytical laboratory. The company’s initial services included water quality, lake restoration, and general analytical testing. As demand for ATC’s services grew, it added drug screening for the dog and horse racing industries as well as agricultural consulting and informational research. Adapting to an evolving market, ATC began conducting asbestos analyses and air monitoring services in the same decade, birthing a new direction for the growing company.

“Asbestos management was a hot topic in the early 1980s,” said Don Beck, one of ATC’s first employees, now a senior VP overseeing the North Region’s 30 offices. “In response to EPA regulations, asbestos abatement gained momentum, changing the face of our company from an analytical lab to environmental consulting firm.”

Driven by contractor and clients requests, ATC continued to expand its reach and opened several offices nationwide including New York City, Denver, Lincoln and Omaha, NE, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City and Los Angeles. During the 1990s, to increase geographic influence and continue to satisfy its diversified client base, ATC acquired more than 10 companies and 50 additional offices nationwide. Today with more than 71 offices in 39 states, ATC generates more than $200 million in services annually and employs over 1,600 professional, technical, and support personnel nationwide. Learn more at www.atcassociates.com.

Atkins goes to Alcatraz

The National Park Service (NPS) has selected Atkins to provide construction management services for structural repairs to the famous federal penitentiary building on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Located approximately one mile north of San Francisco, Alcatraz Island is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and contains numerous structures. The most notorious—Building #68, the cellhouse—served as a U.S. penitentiary for a concentration of “difficult-to-manage prisoners” from 1934 to 1963. Popularly known as “The Rock,” Alcatraz has been featured and creatively imagined in many movies, TV shows, books, and games. The cellhouse improvements are part of the ongoing Alcatraz Historic Structures Stabilization project and will involve repairs to failing beams in the citadel and shower room areas that support the cellblock structures. This will include replacing beams that support the cellhouse floor to stop and repair structural damage, repairing the cellhouse structural floor and associated non-structural patching, and repairing/restoring salvageable beams to protect them from further deterioration. “Atkins has had the great opportunity to work on many of America’s National Historic Landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, Hoover Dam, Faneuil Hall, and now Alcatraz,” says senior group manager Gary Self, PE. “We look forward to addressing the unique challenges of this project, such as working on an island that is only accessible by boat, with no land lines for telephone or data services. Not to mention we’re facing the cold, strong, hazardous currents of the San Francisco Bay and the penitentiary’s chilling past.” Atkins’ services will include on-site inspections, construction contract administration, office services, and site visits.

KS Associates offers 3D laser scanning services

KS Associates, a multi-disciplined civil engineering and surveying firm, has announced that it now offers 3D laser scanning services. This next-generation technology provides architects, engineers, real estate professionals, facility managers, and design professionals an unprecedented level of precision and detail at a fraction of the time.

KS Associates has procured a Leica ScanStation C10, which collects thousands of points per second at the push of a button. The ScanStation C10 can scan an entire room in less than two minutes and can generate richly detailed computer models of the scanned environment. The ScanStation C10 generates “point clouds,” or three-dimensional, photo-realistic datasets representing the external surface of objects. The result is a reliable, robust, and detailed basis for design of the built environment.

According to Mark Skellenger, P.E., vice president of KS Associates, “3D laser scanning allows our clients to virtually revisit the project site throughout the entire design process, which can save time and enhance the design process. Clients appreciate the ability to extract datasets at any time. They have access to information that might not have been considered critical at the time of field data capture, data that would be time-consuming and costly to re-capture.”

3D laser scanning offers additional benefits, such as the ability to non-intrusively capture data for areas that were otherwise inaccessible, such as high-level bridges and overpasses; intricate, hard-to-reach piping systems; or historically preserved off-limit areas, which can now be scanned remotely. Applications ideal for laser scanning include building design and construction, interior design, civil/site modeling, transportation engineering, historical renovation, process engineering, and as-builts.

According to Skellenger, “Not only will 3D laser scanning enhance our surveying capabilities, it will allow us to serve clients for new, interesting applications, such as industrial refineries and plants, mining and exploration, and possibly forensics.”

Based in Elyria, OH, KS Associates is a civil engineering and land surveying firm founded in 1987. The firm provides land survey and mapping services; design, bidding and construction administration of public infrastructure and transportation projects; and site development engineering services for residential, commercial and institutional projects. For more information visit: www.ksassociates.com.

Michelle Halle Stern joins HDR as director of sustainable design services

Michelle Halle Stern, AIA, P.E. and LEED Fellow recently joined HDR Architecture as director of sustainable design services out of the firm’s Chicago office. Formerly an associate at Perkins + Will, Halle Stern is well known for her work in sustainable design for private and public sector organizations, including healthcare, government, and academic projects. She is a registered architect and engineer with over 20 years of diversified experience in the industry. A frequent guest speaker, author, and educator on green design, LEED, and the integrative design process, Halle Stern will serve as a leader and mentor for HDR designers. A strategic thinker with a record of building consensus and developing strong team relationships, Halle Stern will implement new sustainable design strategies and provide assistance on projects and other key initiatives.

Halle Stern is committed to Chicago and sustainable design, having started Chicago’s local U.S. Green Building Council Chapter. She is a Core Member of the USGBC Environmental Quality Technical Advisory Group as well as a member of the USGBC Project Based Learning Working Group. She also serves on the USGBC LEED Faculty and is an adjunct faculty member at Robert Morris University. Halle Stern holds a Master of Science in Public Health from the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as a Bachelors of Science in Architectural Studies and Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

GZA GeoEnvironmental wins ACEC Engineering Excellence Award

GZA GeoEnvironmental, a geotechnical and environmental consulting firm, has received the 2012 Engineering Excellence Special Recognition Award from the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) of Maine for their embankment preload program as part of the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge Replacement Project in Portland and South Portland, Maine.

The South Portland Approach for the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge Replacement faced difficult constraints, including waterfront construction over the mudflats, permit-based limits on the allowable disturbance area, and a subsurface profile including up to 90 feet of moderate-strength, compressible marine clay. The preliminary and final design and construction of a preload program for the South Portland Approach was executed by the design-build team to provide a cost-effective, safe solution that met the project performance and safety criteria. GZA was the engineer-of-record for the South Portland Preload portion of the project, responsible for design and construction documents and a member of the Reed & Reed / T.Y. Lin International design-build team.

GZA envisioned a 25-foot high earthfill preload embankment supported by temporary, anchored, sheet pile cofferdam to limit the environmental impact on the mudflats and developed this concept for preliminary design. During final design, GZA developed a subsurface model for geotechnical engineering evaluations and evaluated short-term and long-term global stability, long-term settlement adjacent to proposed piles, and general approach embankment areas and designed and installed wick drains to promote consolidation. The design met the constraints imposed by the Design-Build RFP, allowed for efficient foundation design, and was constructible for the contractor. The South Portland embankment concept saved over $1 million compared to alternative design approaches. The design incorporated Maine DOT, highway and bridge designer, and constructor collaboration through detailed design reviews at the 50 and 80 percent submittal stages.

Geotechnical instrumentation was designed, installed, and monitored to assess the performance of the preload, including settlement plates, piezometers, and inclinometers. The instrumentation confirmed that the preload goals had been achieved, and GZA recommended removal of the preload in winter of 2011, approximately five months ahead of schedule.

Founded in 1964, GZA GeoEnvironmental is a multi-disciplined firm providing environmental consulting, geotechnical and geo-civil engineering, environmental remediation, regulatory compliance, litigation support, air quality, solid waste services, specialty construction, occupational health and safety, and site development services. GZA maintains corporate offices in Norwood and has 550 employees and operates 24 offices in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes regions. For additional information, visit www.gza.com.

Virginia Tech professor's research questions urban development planning relating to flooding

Extreme weather can result in a violent act of nature, and in the past year, much attention has been paid to the disastrous impacts of flooding during the spring and summer. For example, residents of cities and agricultural farmland found themselves at odds when the Army Corps of Engineers wrestled with opening floodgates to channel water away from the metropolitan areas of New Orleans and Baton Rouge in May 2011 and directing the floodwaters to small Louisiana towns and farms.

Water became the enemy, but it might have been an unnecessary role. "The relationship between flood conditions and the spatial distribution of urban development has been poorly studied, often because of limitations on available data about stream flow or the common use of generic watershed models in urban hydrologic modeling," says Glenn Moglen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. Moglen holds a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and works in the university's National Capital Region.

Moglen has spent years studying the issue of limiting impervious surfaces such as pavements that act as impenetrable materials to water. He has called for planners "to allow a safety margin when regulating land based on imperviousness, to steer development to already urbanized locations and away from relatively undisturbed locations, and to take advantage of situations that mitigate the deleterious effects of imperviousness on stream ecology." His expertise garnered him an appointment as a special guest editor of an issue of the American Society of Civil Engineers' Journal of Hydrologic Engineering. And he has current funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to calculate flood magnitudes as part of the agency's efforts to modernize its maps.

In addition, Moglen and his former Ph.D. student Alfonso Mejia of Washington, D.C., who has now graduated from the University of Maryland, have developed a number of distinct models of urbanization that show patterns of impact from both sprawl and clustered development that reduce impacts to water resources. Their work was published in the April 2009 Journal of Hydrologic Engineering. Moglen says their approach differed from previous studies because they looked at distributed effects within a watershed and not the aggregate results at the watershed outlet. They also focused on impacts generated by the spatial forms of urban patterns. In the article, they cast doubt on land management policies promoting a fixed threshold of impervious surfaces. They show that this can result in the unintended consequence of favoring sprawl-type development. "Those within the planning community who espouse threshold-based controls on land development" should be concerned, they wrote.

In another study for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Moglen and Dorianne Shivers of Takoma Park, MD, who also worked with Moglen when she was a student, used data from 78 urbanized stream gages across the United States for a study on urban flood frequency. They compared their models to previous results, and a key finding was a new method for estimating floods at ungaged sites using common, easily obtained data. This method eliminated the need to perform costly site visits to make urban flood estimates.

Their USGS study also indicated which mathematical models on peak discharges of water performed best: an imperviousness distribution model and a population density distribution model. "These models depend on three predictors each: rural discharge, imperviousness or population density, and imperviousness or population density uniformity. The imperviousness or population density predictor serves to scale up the rural discharge, and the imperviousness or population density uniformity predictor scales down the discharge. This uniformity predictor quantifies the homogeneity of the development in a watershed," they concluded.

Mike Frischmann of Michaels Energy to present at IEPEC in Rome

Michaels Energy announces that Mike Frischmann, an energy engineer at Michaels, was selected as a presenter for the 2012 International Energy Program Evaluation Conference (IEPEC) in Rome, Italy.

Mike submitted a paper to the IEPEC conference planning committee on the subject of "On-site Measurement and Verification Versus Project File Review." This paper will demonstrate the quantitative and qualitative differences between file reviews and on-site evaluations. Over 210 abstracts were submitted, and his paper was among those accepted for publication and presentation at IEPEC in Rome on June 12-14, 2012. A CD will also be produced with presentation papers and made available to all attendees of IEPEC. IEPEC is an annual professional conference for energy program implementers; evaluators of those programs; local, state, national and international representatives; and academic researchers actively working in the field of evaluation. The purpose of the conference is to provide a forum for the presentation, critique, and discussion of objective evaluations of energy programs. For more information, visit www.iepec.org. Michaels Energy, a division of Michaels Engineering, specializes in energy efficiency consulting and provides technical, program management, and administrative support for utility demand-side management (DSM) programs. Michaels also provides services to end-users including investment grade feasibility studies, retrocommissioning studies, and LEED consulting. Michaels provides a wide range of energy and engineering support services to utilities, government agencies, and non-profit corporations that administer energy efficiency programs for end users.