Engineering Firm of the Year: Merrick & Co. Multidisciplinary firm thriving through strategic market focus
... the late 1970s. By the late 1980s, it expanded its mapping services to include geographic information systems and put itself at the forefront of the growing geospatial services industry.
Today, geospatial solutions remain the cornerstone of Merrick’s business, representing about one-fifth of its current projects.
The firm’s specialty is the use of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to collect high-resolution geospatial data for contour mapping and 3-D perspective analysis. The firm owns three fixed-wing aircraft equipped with the latest technologies used to map coastlines, flood plains, transmission corridors, environmentally endangered areas and transportation routes.
This focus on high-end digital imagery and analytical data has brought Merrick major business from the federal arena, with contracts servicing the Dept. of Homeland Security and other governmental agencies. Since Sept. 11, Merrick has taken on a number of Homeland Security projects, including the design for the U.S. Northern Command headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
Currently, it is providing the architectural and engineering design of border-control facilities for the DHS, as well as geospatial services for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The firm also is working with the Southwest Florida Water Management District, providing geospatial data collection and analysis services for 16 counties covering an area of approximately 10,000 sq miles.
Project Diversity
Along the Front Range, Merrick is best known for its recent work at RidgeGate, a 3,500-acre, master-planned community near the Interstate 25 interchange in Lone Tree. The firm provided drainage engineering, planning, design and construction management services for the development’s stormwater quality system.
While the firm remains true to its roots as a civil engineering and surveying business, Merrick has become known for continuously evolving with the changing marketplace and diversifying its services.
Forecasting the growing demand for alternative fuels, the company made its move into nuclear market in the 1990s. Today, the firm is a recognized leader in non-reactor nuclear facility design and construction.
One of the firm’s more high-profile projects is the ongoing, 14-year renovation of systems and facility features at Technical Area 55 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Dept. of Energy facility used in plutonium research and weapons development. Merrick is providing architecture, engineering and construction services for the $105-million project.
The company also pursued biofuels commercialization and hydrocarbon processing long before such technologies became fashionable. Its expertise led to its current role as design engineer for the Integrated Bio Refinery Facility at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, as well as the firm’s work with refining companies Conoco, Suncor and Valero.
For its more recent venture in laboratory planning and design for life sciences institutions, the firm...
