Golden Beaver Award for Jack Brockway: Major Recognition for Herrenknecht U.S. Manager

"His motto is: American ingenuity combined with German engineering." With these words, Jack Brockway was introduced as one of the four prize winners in Los Angeles on Friday, January 17, 2020. The prestigious Golden Beaver Award is presented annually by "The Beavers", an association founded in 1955, to people who have made outstanding contributions to the U.S. building and civil engineering industry.

Jack Brockway received the award last weekend in the category "Service & Supply" for his commitment to the tunnelling industry over decades. He accepted the award in Los Angeles in front of around 3,000 guests at a festive evening event from the hands of David J. Miles, President of the Beavers.

Jack Brockway can look back on a very successful and challenging career. After completing a bachelor's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics and working for Boeing and in international tunnel construction, he joined Herrenknecht AG in 1997. His task was to establish and manage the Herrenknecht subsidiary for the USA in Seattle.

From there, he would drive forward the development of the North American market. Over the years, he has established a highly effective, 30-person competence team for the U.S. market at the Seattle location. Today, even very complex projects are managed there in close cooperation with the experts from Schwanau in Germany.

Jack Brockway's broad-based know-how and his professional leadership qualities have been of great benefit not only to countless large and small infrastructure projects in mechanized tunnelling. He also played a particularly important role in the technological progress of the industry in the USA.

Together with Werner Burger, Chief Engineer of Herrenknecht at the Schwanau headquarters, he laid the foundation for the introduction of state-of-the-art mechanized tunnelling technology in the USA. This enables safe and economical tunnel construction under the most difficult ground conditions.

Lighthouse projects with Herrenknecht technology such as Lake Mead (convertible Mixshield for up to 15 bar pressure) or the Port of Miami Tunnel (project-specific EPB Shield with innovative "Water Control Process") thus achieved the status of worldwide references.

Tunnelling gets into your blood

"I am quite proud to have been nominated for a Golden Beaver Award. I did not expect that", Jack Brockway stated happily. He took the award ceremony as an opportunity to encourage young professionals to embark on a career in tunnelling: "Tunnelling gets into your blood. Building fascinating infrastructure projects is a first-class career opportunity for young engineers. Especially since it is not only engineering expertise but also a good hands-on feeling that counts".

A Herrenknecht pioneer

Dr.-Ing. E.h. Martin Herrenknecht, founder and Chairman of the Board of Management of Herrenknecht AG, said at the award ceremony in Los Angeles: "Jack Brockway is a fascinating leader. He has carried out real pioneering work for Herrenknecht in the USA. Thanks to him, we have become an important partner for construction companies in mechanized tunnelling in the USA over the past two decades. We are involved in very challenging infrastructure projects with our most innovative machines and services. We can count on a first-class team in the USA that works closely and very successfully with us."

After Dr.-Ing. E.h. Martin Herrenknecht has received the Moles Award in New York in 2009, the company Herrenknecht is now represented with Jack Brockway's Golden Beaver Award at the two most important US construction industry awards on the East and West Coast.

The Golden Beaver Award

The other winners of the Beaver Award 2020 in Los Angeles besides Jack Brockway were: Timothy Barnard (Chairman of Barnard Construction Company, Inc.) in the "Management" category, Clayton Gilliland (Senior Vice President and Area Manager of Stacy and Witbeck, Inc.) in the "Supervision" category, and Daniel N. Adams (President and CEO of McMillen Jacobs Associates) in the "Engineering" category.

Herrenknecht references and current projects in the USA

Over the past two decades, Herrenknecht has delivered project-specific tunnel boring machines, additional equipment and services for more than 50 projects in traffic tunnelling (with a diameter of larger than 4.8 meters) to construction companies in the USA and Canada.

These include modern subway projects in Minneapolis, Seattle and New York, high-capacity sewage tunnels in Washington, D.C. and Portland (Oregon), major road tunnels in Miami and Virginia, and a hydropower and a drinking water project in Canada.

Los Angeles has been relying on tunnel boring technology "Made in Schwanau" for years: At present, for the Purple Line Sections 1, 2 and 3 with six machines, and in earlier years for the Gold Line, the Crenshaw/LAX Transit Project and the Regional Connector. For more than 35 kilometers of subway tunnels, the American construction consortia have placed their trust in the expertise of Herrenknecht. Because of the gases expected in the Los Angeles underground, the machines for the Purple Line are designed to be explosion-proof.

In addition, there is a large number of successful smaller diameter utility tunnelling projects with Herrenknecht machines in North America. Here too, the Herrenknecht team was and is the first point of contact for current technological developments. For example, the Direct Pipe^® method developed by Herrenknecht has now become established in the USA.

With Direct Pipe^®, a prefabricated pipeline is installed trenchlessly in just one step, and at the same time the necessary borehole is made. To further strengthen Herrenknecht's local presence, an additional service location was established in 2018 in Houston, Texas, at the heart of the U.S. oil industry. From this base, customers who are laying pipelines using the HDD (Horizontal Directional Drilling) method are supported.

 

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