HISTORY OF SUBSURFACE UTILITY ENGINEERING Post-46 – Utility Coordination (Part 4)
Post-46 – Utility Coordination (Part 4)
In the previous three LinkedIn Posts, Jim Anspach provided a history of Subsurface Utility Engineering (SUE) firms coordinating utilities for State Departments of Transportation (DOTs). This service came to be called Utility Coordination (UC).
The next few LinkedIn Posts will include some thoughts from practitioners that were involved in Utility Coordination in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
JONATHAN TAN:
“Geotrack conducted utility coordination services across the country, as well as providing other new services related to SUE, such as civil and structural engineering inspections and GIS mapping of utilities for large scale facilities like airports, water reclamation facilities, and industrial facilities. We also designed evolved utility data management services by providing SUE data to customers using regional data bases (before the age of the Internet).”
[Jonathan Tan was the Owner and CEO of Geotrack, which was a highly-respected SUE firm in the early 1990s. After the Geotrack days ended in 2012, Jonathan Tan went on to become a consultant to many companies on real time analytics, GIS, CPO, and C-Level Technical digital product management.]
BOB CLEMENS:
“I left the Florida DOT in October 1994 after 12 years. The reason I resigned and joined TBE was I saw that SUE was a future growth for plan development and Nick Zembillas offered me an opportunity to come to TBE. When I first started, I managed 30 Utility Coordination projects for the Florida DOT’s District 7. I felt that was great groundwork for learning the proper use of SUE. From the Utility Coordination I started managing SUE projects with the breakthrough being winning the pilot SUE project in 1996 for the Indiana DOT on US41 in Maryville. Then the FHWA’s pilot SUE project in Wyoming in the downtown streets of Cheyenne. Both projects were successful and met the client’s scope/budget, primarily due to having four constant team members: Nick Zembillas, Bob Clemens, Vince Reger, and Rick Torrens.”
[Bob Clemens is now Semi-Retired after managing UC and SUE projects for more than 40 years for the Florida DOT, TBE Group, and KCI Technologies.]
Send your Utility Coordination story to me in the Comments or by email at cpscott532@aol.com.
More stories about Utility Coordination from long-time practitioners next week.
