The American Council of Engineering Companies of Missouri (ACEC MO) has awarded GeoEngineers an Engineering Excellence Honor Award for the Challenging HDD Pipeline Crossing of the St. Clair River project. Springfield geotechnical group leader Jon Robison, PE and trenchless group leader Mark Miller, PE attended the ACEC MO Awards Banquet in Kansas City on February 16, where Mark accepted the award on behalf of GeoEngineers and our client, Enbridge, Inc.
This 2013 Honor Award recognizes GeoEngineers’ quality engineering achievements and marks the Springfield office’s fifth straight ACEC MO award-winning year since the company’s first Engineering Excellence entry in 2009. Contending projects were judged on design excellence, the degree to which the clients’ needs were met, and benefit to the public welfare and to the private practice of engineering.
Enbridge hired GeoEngineers to provide horizontal directional drill (HDD) design and consulting for its HDD project to replace the 3,195-foot-long, 30-inch-diameter, steel pipeline that crossed 40 feet below the St. Clair River from Michigan to Canada. This highly visible international project would receive heavy scrutiny from US and Canadian regulators, so Enbridge needed everything to go right. GeoEngineers provided preliminary HDD design, a construction cost estimate, geotechnical investigation, final HDD design, construction observation and consultation for the project.
Project challenges included creating an HDD design that avoided several existing utilities and a loading pier in the river, and providing international coordination for geotechnical exploration and construction. The project team employed geophysical sub-bottom profiling of the St. Clair River to provide better subsurface data, which helped reduce potential construction-related risks, satisfy regulators and assure Enbridge that the project would go smoothly. The pipeline was safely and successfully replaced.
