Geotechnical Engineering

• Geotech definition
o Virtually every structure is supported by the earth.
o How the earth interacts with the built environment, and how the built
environment interacts with the earth
o Application of technology to solve problems in, on, or with earth materials
§ IN
• Tunnels
• Large excavations (basements/parking garages for
skyscrapers, etc.)
• Landslides
§ ON
• Foundation system (bridge, building, or some other structure’s
foundation)
o Drill shaft foundation
o Driven piles (deep foundations)
§ WITH
• Embankments and retaining walls
• Earthen and rock filled dams
• Geotech in his opinion is the most challenging branch of civil engineering
o Geology at every site is diMerent—can be complicated even at one site

This this this sand and this deposit was formed by glacial action and it's a variety of
stratified you can see the layering in here the layering isn't always going to be as distinct as
you as it looks in a textbook it's not going to be horizontal and with straight lines but you can
clearly see the layering here at diMerent phases of course and material and what that is is
diMerent pulses of melt water coming oM of a glacier everybody know that glaciers grow
over this area a few thousand years ago how thick were those glaciers yeah some of you
guys did you guys have a geology in high school no I think really glaciers here like a mile
thick ish it's pretty close yeah yeah about about four to 5000 feet thick right so his model is
about right do you think of a mile upwards of ice sitting right here where you guys are sitting
here today so that ice did more than just compress all the ground underneath it as it
progressed across the landscape it picked up a lot of material picked up a lot of soil all the
way from the Canadian shield all the way down here to the Puget Sound basin and all that
material in spite of the fact that it was very cold and the glacier was was prograding across
the landscape extending S the sun was still glacier and so there was still melt water coming
oM of the front lobe of that glacier there were rivers coming oM the glaciers here and those
rivers just like they do today were depositing material that have been picked up by the
glacier in Canada or wherever else and so it got laid down across the landscape in front of
the glacier outwash and then the glacier continued to extend over that material it had just
deposited on the ground and compressed it all beneath it so that's the outwash material
that we're looking at here glacial till people will mistake a photo like this for concrete so this
is not concrete it's not shotcrete but that is a steep cut in glacial till so glacial till is the
material that is right out in front of the glacier and as the glacier is plowing over plowing
over the ground it's it's jumbling things up right in front of it and then running over it and
smashing it so it's not the outwash that's out that's forming these rivers vastly out in front of
it but the stuM right at the top of the glacier that's getting all jumbled together everything
from clay to Volkswagen sized boulders is getting jumbled together and then smashed by a
mile thick of ice so that's what we see and and that's why it looks like concrete because it's
been compressed so much a typical bluM in Seattle you guys have probably if you've been
down to one of the beaches you've probably seen BluMs like this contain sequences of a lot
of these diMerent glacial materials geologists give them this notation the notation in the 1st
letter there stands for the epoch so Q means the quaternary box so that's the queue V is
the stead of the Xbox so the subset of that large sequence in time that's probably that block
V stands for fashion the same person that islands named after and then the last letter is
what type of material that was so going from top to bottom where's where's the oldest
material at the top bottom between the bottom right so the old generally speaking without
earthquakes and faulting the oldest geological material is at the bottom the youngest stuM
is at the top so up there at the top very very steep right so that material QVT anybody have
what stands for tilt as the glacial till that we just talked about that's like concrete that's the
stuM that was plowed up and smashed the a the VA advance auto wash so that's the sand
and gravel that was deposited by those rivers way out in front of the glacier OK it's less feet
because it's all sand and gravel and so it doesn't hang together once the weather starts
hitting it the GL I haven't talked about yet the GL is glacial accustrike so way out of these
rivers that are depositing the sand and gravel in that advanced outwash were lakes glacial
lakes and the water that's coming oM the glacier it carries the smaller particles that clays
and silts much further than it can carry big things like pieces of gravel or boulders so those
lakes way out in front of the glaciers had clay in them that was deposited by those glaciers
that's this QGL layer that's why it stands more vertically because it's got a lot of claim and
then down here way below that is this QPNFQ PNL so you notice that there's a P here
instead of a V so the P means this is from the quaternary. But it precedes the glacial action
there's a landscape here in this area of long before the glaciers ever came across it right it
wasn't just a void so all this material down here that's cute pee something or other and that
stands for flu deal so like rivers and and L stands for the kustrin this is all materials whether
it was streams rivers or lake deposit materials that was run over by the glaciers but was
there before they got so just at one site very complex geology soils themselves can have
interesting and challenging nuances to them this is a clay a local clay and it's what we call
a slicken sided glacial clay so you can see the striations in this clay here that look they're
shiny right but they're also oriented in One Direction those aren't little stripes that
somebody made with a knife or some cutting tool or anything like that by dragging it across
it does anybody have an idea or know what this is or where those those came from yeah
you didn't have geology no OK I didn't have a job the glacier literally just scraped across it
kind of yeah you will see that and you probably saw that like you see sometimes photos of
rocks where you'll see that like on the ground surface where you can see the striations
across the rocks so that's what you're thinking of here if the glacier actually kind of ran
across this clay you would just grab it and carry it along but you're you're almost right so
this clay was deposited in front of the glacier either by the glacier or prior to the glacier
being there so you think about this stick deposit of clay modeling play let's say and as this
really thick really heavy glacier a mile thick rise across the land on top of this stick to
positive clay that clay doesn't like that right there there's a stress applied to the top surface
of that clay as the glacier is moving along not just like a down under pressure there's
actually a shear stress right pulling on that play deposit as it moves across it and as that
shear stress propagates down into the ground surface it actually fractures that played
opposite down inside the ground and shears it and makes these slick surfaces inside of it in
the direction that the glacier is moving right so the same sort of concept why do we care
what we care because if we cut into say we make one of those large excavations like that's
kind of scraper I showed you when you cut into that and we try to cut vertically into this clay
and if we have these slick surfaces that are oriented into the excavation that we're building I
think we have a problem yeah right because these are these are like wax and so it's gonna
that whole clay deposit is just going to fail into our excavation so identifying features like
that is really important and then there's oils that we deal with that have nothing to do with
glaciers or rivers or lakes or any other sort of natural action they have to do with us as
humans we call those generally speaking fill this anybody anybody recognize what's in the
background is anybody yeah that's the viaduct yeah you remember the viaduct you guys OK
so this is the viaduct in the background and this excavation that you're looking at is actually
the start of the Sr. 99 tunnel project so they had to be facilities built before the tunneling
could even be built or begin and this is one of those facilities being constructed down in
South Seattle and in South Seattle that landscape most of it was underwater initially and in
the early developing years of Seattle it was all filled in by the early settlers of the area make
additional land and what did they fill that in with what was Seattle famous for before it was
famous for soccer and and the and and the Mariners and before was famous for Boeing and
before was famous for Microsoft and Amazon coMee and Space Needle it was famous for
timber timber right and so all these timber mills have waste associated with it all of the
stuM that they cut away from the logs when they were making their lumber or whatever and
they needed something to do with it Seattle needed land so it all got sliced out into those
historic bays and backfilled that area so there are areas in South Seattle including where
the stadiums are right now that was all water initially and backfilled either by material like
this so we encountered this a lot of times when we're building things in that area so so far I
mainly talked about soil but rock is another Geo material that geotechnical engineers deal
with oftentimes we have specialists rock mechanics engineers or rock engineers that deal
with the rock because it's a totally diMerent kind of material and behaves totally diMerently
it's controlled in terms of its behavior not by particulate nature of material of the material or
by three-year or less spaces or whatever it's entirely controlled by its jointing and its
fractures not by the solid part of it at all it's going to do as you can again intuitively feel fail
along those defined joints fractures and discontinuities in the material itself and we have to
understand what those look like in 3 dimensions how they're oriented how they did how
they strike as you'll learn it we have to understand how does It's much younger than as you
might imagine structural engineering or environmental or hydraulic engineering you could
argue environmental engineering is younger than geotech geotechnical engineering as old
as it may sound really came into being after World War 2 and at that time there were a
number of academics that were interested in the mechanical and I mean that in a scientific
sense behavior particulate materials and soils prior to that time nobody really understood
in a mathematical mechanical sense why soil behaved the way that it did when you built on
or with it they just they just engineered with this so to speak based on experience this
worked before so we're going to keep doing it this way soils like this we can generally cut at
this angle so we're going to keep doing it that way they generally support loads like this so
we're going to keep doing it that way and not exceed it but nobody really understood the
mechanics of why until the 40s and the 50s so because of that because that you know
we're just a few decades old at this point we're still developing a lot of diMerent things and
those include new technologies some of the technologies here including include things like
new construction methods like the cutter swell mixer basically big rotating saw that goes
down into the ground excavates a panel of a trench you can inject concrete slurry into it in
order to form a wall panel below the ground surface before you ever excavate bio cement
and sand so this is sand that's been cemented in place by the precipitation of minerals by
bacteria in the ground back there are professors locally here that are this week to say it over
at the University of Washington but they're studying how this works and how you can feed
that bacteria to produce certain kinds of cement in the ground and fold it ground together
diMerent types of products these are called Geo tubes so these are used in a variety of
fashions here they're they're being used to make a temporary construction platform to work
on this bridge out of the Bay these are long tubes that are that are constructed of a polymer
fabric that you slurry a water and sand mixture into basically pump water and sand into it
and then the fabric allows the water to all escape and it solidifies into basically a long solid
sandbag like you see here here's the diMerent type of Geo material anybody know what
we're looking at there Styrofoam what's still used as packing material today but was really
common as packing material when I was your age so these this is Styrofoam just like the
little Styrofoam peanuts etcetera but this is big blocks this is a man here there's a crawler
crane you guys have seen these barrels before so you get a sense of how big those blocks
are but in spite of the size blocks they're all person portable keep one human being can lift
those and move them around and put them in place and cut them et cetera and here this is
also the Sr. 99 project this is the tunnel beneath downtown before the tunnel could be built
part of the viaduct needed to be demolished well can't demolish the viaduct before the
tunnel how are people going to use SR99 well the solution was to leave part of the viaduct
in place but build another access up on top of up to it so we could actually dig the portal for
the tunnel so this is building the new on ramp onto the viaduct before the tunnel could be
started in that area said it before there's a lot of man-made sawdust and wood waste fill
there which is very compressible you start building something on top of that it compresses
it a lot it settles there's all sorts of issues associated with that one way to avoid
compression and settlement of the ground is to not apply any load to it or to apply very little
load to it so instead of building this our new embankment with heavy soil soil weighs about
£120 per cubic foot so you think about 1 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot you fill that imaginary box
with with dirt it's going to be about £120 one foot by 1 foot by 1 foot of this Styrofoam any
guesses how much that weighs how many pounds about 20 lbs so a vast decrease in the
amount of pressure that's applied to the ground and so that's why this was constructed out
of what we call expanded polystyrene instead of Styrofoam these blocks so there was a
highway on top of this ultimately we use new measurement methods so this is a rock slope
adjacent to a railroad there were issues with rockfall so the the railroad in this case wanted
a stabilization scheme again in order to do engineering with Rock You need to understand
the fractures and how they're oriented how long they are etcetera that used to be done is
with a team of geologists to go out with basically what we call Brunton compasses to
measure the angles of all those fractures write that all down and then map that all out and
very sophisticated drawings now we do it with the drones that have lighter capability so
either an airborne drone or in this case a terrestrial track bound drone that just roll along
the railroad tracks and scan that slope as it went by and then software now actually does
the interpretation of the discontinuity sets it basically mathematically goes through and
says here's one set of fractures that are all oriented in the same direction as the other
here's the other set etcetera and allows us to proceed with engineering and we always
check it we always do at least one set by hand by a geologist to make sure that we're on the
right path but it vastly simplifies the analysis a typical project that involved a lot of
numerical modeling and advanced mathematics was a project anybody know what this is
we're looking at aerial of you only want to answering I'm pretty sure this is the Bremerton
shipyard you sound naval shipyard in Bremerton you're right so this is Bremerton the
prosecutor sound from here and in addition to its stocks the future Sunday shipyard has 6
dry docks SO1212345 so for scale that's an aircraft carrier in dry dock 6 so between 2023
how much longer do I have OK i'm gonna go fast in 2023 our company was retained by the
navy because the the fleet admiral the navy was concerned about the seismic
performance If you'd like to interact with other disciplines geotech is a good place to be as I
said earlier we interact with all branches of civil engineering but also all branches of
geology whether that's geomorphology petrology paleontology geophysics and cytology
etcetera I tell people I give a similar talk over to you a lot to actually to the the incoming
grad students about why geotechnical engineering in Seattle is the place to be again
Seattle is challenging for the geotechnical engineer it's not simple and the reason is
fundamentally the geology here is very complex you're looking at a map of Seattle probably
recognize the landscape the colors here all represent diMerent types of geology at or near
the ground surface is called surficial geological map so you can see without talking about
what they are all the diMerent types of geology at diMerent locations you have everything
from read down here this is Seward park Lake Washington this red is all bedrock at the
ground surface OK this purple that's glacial till the brown are all soft alluvial deposits this
cross hatched area right here it's down in DeSoto that's all mandate fill right whether it's
sand or or wood waste bill here's a diMerent view of Seattle geology instead of looking down
on it now we're looking through it across from it this is a cut through the ground surface
vertically so we're looking at at deep borings into the ground surface this is actually the
alignment of the Sr. 99 tunnel in red and all of these diMerent colors on here units diMerent
types of geology that the tunnel had to pass through that all behave diMerently you guys
know we're also very seismically active region earthquake engineering in large part is a field
of geotechnical engineering the geotechnical engineers are the ones that provide the
earthquake ground motions to the structural engineers and how the ground is going to
behave in their structure for them to do the structural engineering in the 1st place so it
starts with geotechnical engineers before it goes to the structural engineers as far as
earthquake engineering is concerned we talked about this so you can see here the
progression of how that landscape looked if you didn't believe me here's what the map
looks like here's what it looks like present day here's harbor island West Seattle bridge is
right about there so this is all kind of the sodo area right here Once Upon a time it was not
there it was all the Bay that's all been filled in with that in part leads to is susceptibility to
this phenomenon we call liquefaction you guys are probably all heard of it at this point
because they even talked about it like on The History Channel now liquefaction is a
phenomenon in which strong ground motion shaping elevates the the pressure in the pores
of the soil to the point where the water pressure in the soil equals the pressure with which
the particles are pushing on each other so it separates those particles essentially they're
not touching each other and that soil becomes similar to quicksand and things sink into it
so this whole area is susceptible to liquefaction and obviously we build lots of lots of
infrastructure on that so we engineer around that in order to have our our infrastructure
unsafe like I said we do a lot of landslide work and Seattle is very landslide prone this is a
map of the landslides that occurred in the winter of 1996 and 1997 I know you don't
remember it but all these little yellow dots are the landslides that occurred around the
major landslides that occurred around Seattle a week in 1996 and 1997 due to a variety of
factors including our steep topography geology that's prone to landsliding human activities
like steep cuts but water water water water we get a lot of rainfall here winter 9697 was
particularly bad because it snowed a lot and there was a lot of snow sitting on the ground
and then the temperature increased like that all the snow melted and then it started raining
so the ground became very saturated and landslides occurred everywhere and it was up to
geotechnical engineers to understand why and how do we fix that and prevent it in the
future I'm going to skip the local projects like 5 minutes alright that's fine ohh OK if they if
they start leaving then I'm gonna stop OK but I want to get to you just kind of a typical
project and walk you through a typical project that that geotechnical engineers do that I did
I was the project manager for this project this was a project that huge synergy engaged
Shannon and Wilson to perform to evaluate the stability of an existing earth and rockfill
dam that dam was called W pass it's at the upper Baker dam site anybody meant to Baker
lake for recreation OK some of you guys that have local heard about it it's pretty popular
recreation spot bigger lake and spread over here that's depression lake on the on the left
side and West past that separates those two it's located in the North Cascades and the
overall site looks something like this again here's Baker lake upper Baker dam is kind of
right over here oM the page here's W past **** so W past **** is about 120 foot tall earth
and rockfill dam that was built in order to cut oM this lower line area over here and allow
Baker lake to be filled to the point that it is to generate power through the hydroelectric dam
which is upper Baker dam in cross section it looks something like this it's a zoned earth and
rock metal band which means it wasn't just a bunch of material that was dumped in place
there's a lot of rock filled but in order to keep the water in Baker lake at a higher elevation
and depression lake on the left there's a zoned core made out of compacted clay here
zones of various size particles on either side to keep that clay in place keep it from
migrating through the rock the geology in that area is pretty complicated it's all volcanic in
nature so right up there in the upper left hand corner anybody know what that is Mount
Baker so Mount Baker volcano is right there here's our site W Passaic here's Baker lake
there's bigger dam right down there and auxiliary bike is another **** that was here on this
this location here so pretty interesting at this site at least to me is setting aside the colors
and all this and all this kind of dogs breakfast of of things here generally speaking at the
ground surface in most locations will have either soil or rock and oftentimes the soil
overlies the rock right you guys ever you probably recognize that not so here so at this site
this QA that's all advance outwash adjacent to our site this QSC all this purple that kind of
heads up this way and has this BLOB down here it's all the volcanic flow it's all basalt that
load oM of mountain Baker relatively recently in geologic time it's about 10,000 years old
but that's pretty recent which means that it overran soil units in this area so we actually
have soil that we're dealing with that's on these sites that is trapped beneath this lava rock
that we need to be constant of so how do we go about our work of interpreting the ground
service the first thing that we do other than do our research on on what we know from
existing work at the location is we explore it using a sequence of borings or other
techniques to penetrate the subsurface all of these dots here here's the diet itself here's
Baker leg depression lake all of those dots are locations of diMerent vertical borings that
our team performed through the **** or adjacent to it in order to characterize the
subsurface and so this photo this is one of your alumni probably none of you at this point
knowing Michaela that she graduated from your program in 2018 and she's here rock coring
at West past styke so the drill rig there is in the background the casing that's used to
advance the the boring here shown in the foreground along with Michaela and some of the
material that's coming out of the casing here that she's logging and describing for us to
later do our engineering doesn't always look as pretty in the field as the nice photo of
Michaela that looks like it could be on magazine covers sometimes it looks like this this is
the same size the same project the same Seattle University alumnus is I think somewhere
inside that tent that's the same drill rig in the background all weather all conditions if you
like being outside if you like a little bit of adventure this is kind of a cool gig as a as a civil
engineer so this is the top of the **** in probably December and we're still going drilling and
exploring to characterize the ground surface so we retrieve core whether that soil or rock
core from the from below the ground surface here's the example of the rock core at West
pass **** is being measured and recorded as part of the drilling operation but we also do
tests down the hole this instrument is called a Packer test so this particular device gets
lowered down the bore hole and there are ladders on either side once it's down to a certain
location the bore hole that may inflate and seal oM a certain section of in this case in Iraq
and then we pump water into that sealed oM location and we can measure how quickly and
how much water that formation takes and that tells us something about how fractured the
rock is and how susceptible it is to strength loss etcetera we also installed instruments
down the hole in this case we're installing vibrating wireless sometimes they're small
design devices that measure measure water pressure we leave them in the ground and
then attach them to loggers that actually measure that with that data over time here's the
cable associated with those devices that are already down the hole and the driller here is is
pumping that hole full of growth in order to route them in place soil and rock samples look
something like this on the top you see soil core from the Sonic coloring method being
photographed and described in our laboratory on the bottom is rock core from the same
site and then all told and we take all that information we pull it together and we generate
what we call a boring log so this log describes what we found at certain elevations within
that boring there's a lot of information here and I don't have time to go through it all but you
can see for example there's three-dimensional representations this is not of the rock it
looks like it it's actually a three-dimensional photograph of the inside of the boring wall so
there are cameras that go down the boring and as they go down the camera spins around it
rotates around and takes a photograph all the way down and then this is essentially if you
took that three-dimensional photograph and you cut it vertically and you rolled it out and
looked at it that's what you're seeing here the green and the purple are our interpretations
of where the diMerent fractures are in the rock and how they're oriented and then the
colored bars on the right represent diMerent things about the block including how whether
it is how strong it is and other things we also interpreted using surficial geophysics in this
case this is an electrical resistivity array in between the borings those borings only tell us
what's going on at a certain location but geophysics allows us to look at a wider area and
try to connect the dots between the borings so by passing electrical current through the
ground and receiving it at another location the geophysicist is able to interpret what's going
on but beneath the ground surface here without ever in his case drilling hole he's able to
see what is this showed you the figure earlier inside the **** that's the click core and you
can see that based on how resistive the ground is to electrical current so he helps us
interpret between the board these these disparate points of the borings what's going on
samples in the laboratory just like concrete compression tests which you guys may or may
not have done yet but you will soon so how how strong in compression is the rock this is a
example of that testing and we take all that information together the boring logs lab testing
geophysics etcetera and we produce our interpretation of what's going on beneath the
ground surface and that's what's shown here there's a lot of this in white because we don't
have explorations out there so we only kind of color in what we know for sure and then we
interpret beyond that the engineering itself involves taking that interpretation simplifying it
and making a computer model of it in order to in this case we are charged with how stable
is my earth and Rockville dam under an earthquake so we developed this simplified model
here with the diMerent zones and diMerent geologic layers beneath the ground we model
how the water passes through it because it is permeable and water does pass through it
from Baker lake to depression lake and so the pressure of the water because of that pass
through varies at diMerent locations within the diet and that influences the strength of the
soil we determine actually it's much more rigorous than just a simple table what the
properties and parameters of the soils are and then we perform an analysis of the stability
of of the type system in this case you can see the 1.9 number that's shown there means
that we have 90% more capacity than we need factor of safety of 1.9 so under this scenario
that we're analyzing the data is very stable also look at how the **** will deform in an
earthquake so here you can see some of the deformed mesh so this is largely exaggerated
but it's essentially showing if a larger which occurs this is how the **** is going to deform
it's actually going to deform towards Baker lake in this case because of that clay core it's
going to slide OK so if you're interested in being a genetic engineer there's lots of diMerent
ways to do it lots of diMerent places to do it there's consulting firms like mine which
perform engineering services for companies that hire us to do this environmental agencies
contractors large client of mine is Hewitt construction which you guys may have heard of
the driver the yellow trucks and they have some of their own geotechnical engineers that
kind of oversee our work Geo resource firms gold mines etcetera all that metal
geotechnical engineers the oil industry of course federal and state laws and agencies core
of engineers I work with the core lot they have their own geotechnical engineers that work
there as well with us large utilities again Puget Sound energy they've got a chief
geotechnical engineer that that works with us on their projects what is a career look like
well for about the first couple of years a lot of your work as a geotechnical engineer is
outside because that's where that's where the projects are the the bridges and the
structures don't get built in the laboratory or in an oMice they get they get built in the field so
about 80% of your time is spent outside and that can either be doing explorations drilling
beneath the ground surface taking samples and helping us interpret the geology or
observing construction in this case routing beneath the bridge that connects camano
islands to the mainland the next two to five years gets to be about 5050 with a lot of appeal
time but also doing some laboratory testing helping develop logs and profiles engineering
calculations helping write reports attending some meetings and starting how to learn how
to manage some small projects field time starts reducing you start to become responsible
for design you probably are licensed at this point you're managing small to medium sized
projects but again you still get to spend time outside after 10 years it's a lot of meetings at
this point you might be leading A-Team you're managing and mentoring some younger staM
if you're a consultant like me that means you're selling your services you're forming
marketing services in order to generate more business for your company but the cool news
is these are all photos of Shannon Wilson vice presidents in the field so all of these people
that you're seeing these photos they're billing rate is about $350.00 an hour so that's not
attorney billing rate that's pretty expensive for a client to pay for somebody to go out and
look at stuM in the field on a construction site but the nice thing is that because the work
really happens in the field complicated your technical problems clients and agencies are
still willing to pay to have their most senior people come out and help them solve problems
so at least in our firm all of our senior people all the vice presidents and senior principals
like myself all spend time in the field I was just out at Puget Sound naval shipyard last week
I'm looking at another dry dock stabilization project for example so again if you don't want
to sit behind a desk for your entire career as a civil engineer good place to be there's also a
lifelong learning component to geotechnical engineering things are always changing and so
we this these are all diMerent examples of learning processes and field trips that Shannon
and Wilson does with our staM to continue to learn how junior or senior you are in your
career with the company some of those people OK so you want to do this I don't know did I
convince anybody at least halfway Parkway maybe sort of kinda I'll think about it OK alright
I don't see anybody asleep at least so well so if you want to do this you need a master's
degree it's it's just a given it's probably less of an impediment for you guys these days than
maybe it was 30 years ago for me when I was in undergrad I think geotech was the only
discipline in civil engineering where you probably needed a master's degree in order to
practice everybody else whether there was a structural engineer our resources etcetera
you're pretty set with bachelors degree and I I know now that things have changed and in a
lot of areas a masters degree is encouraged whether it's for structures or other things but if
you want to practice in geotechnical engineering you do need that masters degree you just
can't even take the coursework until you get into grad school you'll you'll finish your degree
here whether you like it or not I understand with at least one course in geotechnical
engineering maybe 2 be quiet at least 2 be quiet OK so you'll you'll have at least two
whether you like it or not but those are pretty basic courses that those geotechnical
courses are the analog to the structural courses you're going to take this year and next year
they are really the precursors to Graduate School and all of the courses you take in
geotechnical engineering for high school as a master's degree student so it's not another
year of education goes by really fast guys so I wouldn't let that be an impediment to you
actually 3 and a related field I always tell people that BSE is preferred BSE is probably the
next on most employers lists there are geotechnical engineers that have undergraduate
degrees in geology or engineering geology that go on to get a masters degree in engineering
and geotech and want to practice and become very good engineers but they're missing
some of the civil engineering background and theories that you guys are going to get in your
program here get a broad background so I encourage people to not specialize as
undergrads since you're gonna go to grad school anyway learn about all the diMerent types
of civil engineering whether it's structural engineering hydraulic engineering pavements
environmental engineering etcetera because you will be using geotechnical engineer
working with all those diMerent disciplines to perform your project work geographic
information systems becoming familiar with that a lot of analytical work and frankly not just
in geotechnical engineering but all branches of civil engineering as you guys may know at
this point is performed in GIS systems take some classes in geology get a background in
geology fundamentally and then wherever you decide to practice learn the geology of that
area pursue licensure so that's your EIT and your PE examinations you will need those to
practice and then last one is kind of ancillary it may seem unimportant but I encourage you
guys even right now get involved in professional societies in this area includes SCE E PWA
public works association and others and I don't mean like your student ASE chapter here
get involved in that right that's important but go to the local society meetings with the
practicing professionals you'll learn something from those meetings and the and the
presentations that are there but more important you're gonna talk to the practicing
professionals and they're going to be able to put later on if you want if you when you're
interviewing for a job with some local company or agency you're going to be able to put a
face with a with a name and with a name with a resume and they're going to say yeah I
remember adriel sorry from coming to a couple meetings you know at the local ASE events
and you're going to have a leg up on everybody else if you do that believe me they want to
talk to you more than you want to talk to them right now there is a shortage of geotechnical
and other engineers in the state of Washington you guys are the hot commodity so please
you know take advantage of that while you can and and attend those meetings and talk to
those folks that's all I have this is I think a nice shot of of geotechnical drilling at night down
at the waterfront of Seattle with the great wheel in the background my contact information
is up there you guys are welcome to e-mail me if you have any other questions as Navy
knows I'm extremely welcoming of anybody that wants to come over and see a
geotechnical lab in practice or see what the geotechnical company looks like on the inside
hit me up and we'll make an appointment you guys have any questions what's the most
Jewish technically challenging project you've had in your yeah it's unfortunately I already
mentioned it it's probably the Dr. stabilization project it was challenging just from a design
and analysis standpoint but the most challenging part of it but honestly was the schedule
associated with it schedule on that project in 2023 was driven by the fact that that fleet
Admiral so he's one in charge of the entire Navy needed decided he needed three dry docks
stabilized geopolitical purposes those were dry docks 4-5 and the Bangor dry dock at the
submarine base and he needed it done in three months because that's when submarines
were due to arrive back at those dry docks and being doc and they're not going to wait for
us to get out of the way they don't just kind of sit out there in the Bay and and idle so we had
three months to do all of our explorations to do all of our design and to build it and that's a
process that can take years normally what we did in 2023 was we stabilized at PSNS only a
small portion of D4 and D5 we stabilized what we call the protected zone which is the
portion of the walls that are adjacent to where the nuclear reactor will be when a
submarine is parked there that's all we could get done construction wise in three months
but what that allowed them to do was to feel assured that they had on the nuclear
submarine in dry dock at the time of the subduction zone event that they wouldn't be
cleaning up the nuclear spill at least because of the damaged reactor so and all that
analysis and work in three months in 2023 years between February and June 2023 24 hours
a day seven days a week including the design alert Mother's Day and Easter oM which were
both mandated by the Navy they wouldn't allow anybody to work on Mother's Day God
bless their hearts And to put that in perspective the Navy has a contract with the
consultant and other geotechnical consultant like us another company though that has
now been working on the design to finish that for the rest of the dry dock over the last
almost three years and they're not done with the design and the analysis and in fact the
Navy got frustrated and gave it back to us which is why it was out there the other week but
it's I mean it's project that we're extremely proud of but I probably lost some hair from that
one anybody else OK it's really early in your guys's educational career as a civil engineers
but hopefully maybe I've planted some kind of seed for a few of you out there and again the
oMer stands if you have any questions please send me an e-mail thank you guys thank you
guys for allowing me to come here so let's take a 5 minute break after you come back from
announcements about some of the projects that you're going to work on.