Trendsetting engineersWILLIAM C. PAYNE, 39Occupation: City engineer, city of Chattanooga.Accomplishments: Holds civil engineering degree from the University of Tennessee; has worked in engineering for 16 years, has been with the city since 1995 and has been a professional engineer since 1999; earned 2009 Outstanding Engineer of the Year award given by the Tennessee Society of Professional Engineers, the highest honor given by the organization TSPE member. He said: “Volkswagen is the most interesting project I’ve worked on. The great thing about engineering is finding solutions. Each day brings a different set of problems to solve.”MACK McCARLEY, 70 Occupation: Senior principal engineer at Thompson Engineering Inc.Accomplishments: Past president of American Society of Civil Engineers Tennessee Section and that section’s Knoxville branch; twice named Tennessee engineer of the year; received Tennessee Hospital Engineer of the Year Award and Tennessee Section’s Daniel B. Barge, Jr. Distinguished Service Award; was chair of ASCE national committee that developed a variety of approaches to highlight contributions civil engineers make to the well-being of society and to business development; recently received Distinguished Service Award from the Tennessee Society of Professional Engineers.He said: (As an engineer,) “you touch the lives of people all day, every day. You wake up to an alarm clock designed by an engineer. You use a coffee maker designed by an engineer. You drive to work on roads and over bridges designed by engineers. All my life, engineering has fascinated me.”LARRY AKENS, 62Occupation: Manager of compliance and emergency preparedness, Tennessee Valley Authority.Accomplishments: Employed by TVA for 39 years; provided engineering support during the construction of TVA’s Franklin 500-kV Substation; currently represents TVA in working with national committees to develop and revise standards which ensure utilities like TVA operate in a reliable manner; recently received Jo Conn Guild Engineer of the Year award from Chattanooga Engineers Club.He said: “I find engineering to be very challenging and rewarding. I enjoy the challenge to use engineering principles along with other skills to solve problems. I also receive a feeling of accomplishment following the completion of a project.”
By the time he finished high school, Benjamin Berry knew civil engineering would offer the diversity and flexibility he sought.
His parents, he said, were the first to suggest it because they knew his interests and abilities and thought he would enjoy it.
“When I was in high school,” said Mr. Berry, 28, now a project manager at Miller-McCoy Consulting Engineers, “my dad (Cleveland, Tenn., residential contractor Kent Berry) started developing residential subdivisions and worked with civil engineers to plan the layout and infrastructure.”
By the time he graduated high school, Mr. Berry said he knew what a civil engineer did and that he wanted to be involved in site development.
Earlier this year, the Cleveland resident was named the Gen. Robert Neyland Young Engineer of the Year by the Chattanooga Engineers Club.
Mr. Berry, who has worked at Miller-McCoy since he graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2004, said the relatively small size of his firm allows him to be involved in every aspect of a project.
“I enjoy every step in the process from planning the layout of the site (buildings, parking areas, roads, sidewalks, ponds, etc.) to meeting with city officials, developing construction plans, and visiting the site periodically during construction until everything is complete,” he said.
His largest and most complex site development project to date, The Pavilion at Port Orange, Fla., allowed such multilayered involvement, Mr. Berry said.
The Pavilion, which is owned and operated by Chattanooga’s CBL & Ass ociates, is a 73- acre, open-air lifestyle center designed for up to 550,000 square feet of commercial and office space.
The site work budget for the project was about $14.3 million, Mr. Berry said, and the cost for the accompanying four-lane divided highway was $2.9 million.
To date, he said, the project includes a movie theater, LEED-certified Belk department store, four junior retail anchor stores, five restaurant pads, small shops, two-story office space and nearly seven acres of outparcels.
The development, according to Mr. Berry, is intended to be pedestrian friendly, so it incorporates large pedestrian corridors throughout the parking area, a central park area, and a half-mile walking trail around a central 6.5-acre lake.
“This project,” he said, “is a great example of how many of the different aspects of civil engineering” — such as road design, sewer and water distribution systems for the buildings, and stormwater system to capture and treat runoff from parking lots and buildings — “are incorporated into site development.”