The UCA Division of SME presented these awards during the 2014 NAT conference this year in June.
The Lifetime Achievement Award is given to recognize outstanding lifetime contributions to the United States Underground Construction Industry. Ron Heuer is an independent geotechnical consultant who works almost exclusively on underground projects. Ron has been in the construction business his entire life. He grew up in the small farm town of Chenoa in Central Illinois, where his father had a small construction business, usually with only 3 or 4 employees, building houses and farm buildings. Ron started working with the crew around age 10 during summers and weekends, carrying supplies, driving nails, and batching concrete.
Ron received a BS degree in civil engineering, MS in geology, and PhD in civil geotechnical from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Ron has worked on over 1,000 underground projects, ranging from one day prebid studies on small jobs such as a sewer crossing under a railroad, to involvement for several years during construction of large projects. He has worked on tunnels throughout the USA and Canada, and in a number of foreign countries on all continents. Ron has witnessed the transition from conventional drill/blast excavation in rock, and compressed air hand mined shields in soft ground; to today’s hard rock TBMs and pressurized face soft ground machines. He has seen the introduction into the USA of precast concrete segments, shotcrete, and SEM methods.
Some special projects Ron has worked on include
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Colorado’s Straight Creek Tunnel
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the Point Lepreau Cooling Water Intake Shaft in New Brunswick, Canada
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the Crosstown Tunnel in Milwaukee,
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Mt. Baker Ridge Tunnel in Seattle;
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BWARI Tunnel in Columbus Ohio
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the Arrowhead Tunnels near Los Angeles
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and the recently completed Queens soft ground tunnels
On some of these projects, Ron was actively involved in design or construction, on others his contribution was to review proposed methods and express confirmation that “yes, you can do that.”
Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Ronald Heuer.
The Outstanding Individual Award was established to recognize exceptional service and dedication to the United States Underground Construction Industry. The 2014 recipient of the UCA Outstanding Individual Award is Lok Home, President of The Robbins Company. Lok Home began his more than 45-year career in the tunneling and mining industry after graduating with a degree in mining technology from the Haileybury School of Mines in Ontario, Canada. Between 1965 and 1968, Lok worked as a project manager at several Canadian mines, before joining The Robbins Company as a Field Service Manager. Lok served as president of Atlas Copco Jarva from 1980 to 1985, then founded Boretec, Inc. Boretec later acquired Robbins in 1998 and unified the two companies under the Robbins name. Today, The Robbins Company is a worldwide manufacturer of tunnel boring machines and underground equipment, with 12 international subsidiaries and representation in over 35 countries.
Outstanding Individual Award recipient Lok Home.
The Outstanding Educator Award was established to recognize outstanding contribution and dedication to the United States Underground Construction Industry. The 2014 recipient of the UCA Outstanding Educator Award is Herbert H. Einstein, Professor Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Professor Einstein received his Dipl. Ing. and Sc. D. in Civil Engineering from ETH-Zürich. His teaching and research areas are underground construction, rock mechanics and engineering geology. Professor Einstein has been involved as an advisor, consultant and researcher in issues related to underground construction, rock mechanics and rock engineering and natural hazards, notably landslides, and in waste repository problems. He has been and is a member of a number of national and international technical/scientific committees and advisory boards; he is also co-editor of the journal, Rock Mechanics and Rock Engineering and member of the editorial boards of Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology and of Engineering Geology. Professor Einstein is author or co-author of over 240 publications in his area of expertise. He was the recipient of the prestigious Müller lecture award of the International Society for Rock Mechanics and of the “Outstanding Contributions to Rock Mechanics” award of the American Rock Mechanics Association. He also received several teaching awards from his Department and from the School of Engineering.
In underground construction, Herbert Einstein developed several analysis and design approaches both regarding tunneling in general and tunnels in swelling rock, specifically. In addition, he and his co-workers developed the Decision Aids for Tunnels, with which cost, time and resources subject to uncertainties can be estimated. These analysis, - design - and construction management tools have been applied to a number of tunnels, worldwide, with applications ranging from transportation tunnels to underground waste storage facilities.
Outstanding Educator Award recipeint Herbert Einstein.
The Project of the Year Award recognizes an individual or a group that has shown insight and understanding of underground construction in a significant project, which may include a practice, developing concepts, theories or technologies to overcome unusual problems within a project. The 2014 UCA of SME Project of the Year is the Tom Lantos Tunnel Project, also referred to as the Devil’s Slide tunnel, a highway tunnel on Rt. 1 located in San Mateo County, California.
For more than 30 years, land slippages and rockslides plagued the narrow, cliff-side stretch of U.S. Highway 1, aptly named as Devil's Slide. After a heavy winter rain, residents of Pacifica and Half Moon Bay, California, would wake up wondering if the highway they depended on would still be there, or if it had slid once again into the Pacific Ocean. Notorious for rock slides and collapse, a section of scenic State Route Highway 1 was closed nine times in the past 28 years, with the longest closure lasting 158 days.
After years of public input and careful evaluation, the California Department of Transportation moved forward with the design and construction of a tunnel which would bypass the unstable slopes. HNTB was chosen as lead designer, URS provided the construction management team, and Kiewit Infrastructure was contracted to do the construction. Constructed using the New Austrian Tunneling Method, the project lies along the active San Andreas Fault, with four inactive faults crossing the tunnels. The tunnels themselves feature an innovative lining system to meet some of the toughest seismic specifications in the world.
The twin tunnels are 9 m (30 ft) wide by 6.8 m (22.3 ft) high and 1.3 k (4,200 ft) long. The $430 million project includes the two tunnels, a 305-m (1,000-ft) bridge that spans the valley at Shamrock Ranch at the North approach and an intelligent transportation system that carefully monitors and reports road conditions and environmental changes in the region. The Tom Lantos Tunnels are named after late Congressman Tom Lantos, who was instrumental in securing funding for the project. The twin tunnels opened in March 2013. The county plans to open the old highway to hikers and bicycles in 2014.
Project of the Year – Tom Lantos Tunnel Project.