Difficult Soils Are No Match for Terracon's ‘Dr. Dirt’, Guoming Lin

After a career spanning three decades and more than 3,000 projects, tackling what he calls “dirt problems” is never tiresome for Guoming Lin, Terracon vice president and senior consultant. “Every project, regardless of size, requires some kind of foundation,” the Savannah, Ga.-based geotechnical expert explains. “To make sure the foundation works, you have to understand the soil mechanics. The more interesting and challenging a soil issue is, the more rewarding it is to solve it.”

Few places would seem better suited to Lin’s problem-solving passion than southeast Georgia’s coastal plain, a region rife with weak, soft clay and sand substrates. His ability to consistently come up with innovative and cost-effective solutions to challenging soils and foundation challenges has earned him the affectionate nickname of “Dr. Dirt.”

Lin’s expertise has been crucial to the growth of Savannah and the coastal Georgia region.
Photo courtesy Terracon

Mark Board, engineering manager at energy infrastructure developer Kinder Morgan Inc., who has worked with Lin for more than 20 years, says that following his geotechnical prescriptions is a long-standing guiding principle for company projects. “I know of others who did not do so and wished later they had,” says Board, who also praises Lin’s ability to “make very complex geotechnical principles and concepts understandable and interesting to those of us untrained in this field. He has a genuineness that makes each client feel as if he or she were his most important one.”

Julie McLean, Savannah city engineer and senior director of development services, adds that Lin’s expertise in geotechnical engineering has been instrumental to the city and to the growing coastal Georgia region.

“Given the persistent challenges posed by weak soils in coastal developments, the trusted partnership between Guoming and the city of Savannah has been invaluable,” she says.

Lin has worked with the Port of Savannah for more than 30 years.
Photo courtesy Terracon

Finding a Career Footing

Born in China’s Fujian province, Lin attended Hohai University in Nanjing, earning an undergraduate degree in hydraulic engineering and a master’s degree in geotechnical engineering. After two years of teaching civil engineering at Nanjing’s Southeast University, nationwide protests in 1989 by students demanding greater freedoms culminated in the Tiananmen Square uprising. The government crackdown, which resulted in hundreds of deaths, spawned widespread concerns about China’s economic and political future.

Lin accepted an opportunity the following year to study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, enabling him to leave China quickly. From there, it was on to the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where he earned a PhD in 1993 with a dissertation on structural damage mechanisms linked to differential ground movements that result from activities such as mining and oil and groundwater extraction.

“He has a genuineness that makes each client feel as if he or she were his most important one.”
—Mark Board, Engineering Manager, Kinder Morgan Inc.

That same year, Lin moved to Savannah to serve as an on-call geotechnical consultant for major projects developed by the Georgia Ports Authority, which was already on its way to becoming one of the largest and fastest-growing U.S. deepwater port and inland terminal facility systems.

Since then, he has managed and supervised geotechnical explorations on hundreds of new construction and improvement projects at ports in Savannah and Brunswick. Lin also has led Terracon’s geotechnical teams in performing many pile load test programs, managing slope stability for dredging projects and devising multiple ground improvement technologies.

Lin’s expertise and engineering philosophy made a powerful first impression on Chris Novak, who joined the authority in 2012 as vice president of engineering and facilities. Rather than continue the arrangement of having Lin and Terracon provide expertise to port contractors, Novak immediately implemented a policy for the expert and his team to work directly with the authority on all projects.

“That was one of the best decisions I made during my initial days at the authority,” Novak says.

Lin applies his expertise to a wide range of project sectors, from energy and manufacturing to hospitality and sports.
Photo courtesy Terracon

Expanding Range of Applications

The Port of Savannah’s growth has spurred development in other sectors around the city and coastal Georgia. This, in turn, has enabled Lin to apply his geotechnical skills to a broader range of projects, including energy, manufacturing, sports facilities, hospitality venues, public works, airports and federal installations.

At Kinder Morgan’s Elba Island, Ga., liquefied natural gas export terminal, Lin has worked on multiple projects since the facility’s 2001 recommissioning, using geotechnical strategies that have helped overcome the island’s highly compressible and weak clays and underlying liquefiable sand layers. Among projects there are three terminal expansions that have added storage tanks, a slip to berth larger tankers, a massive new facility that allows the terminal to export LNG to other countries and a 7,000-ft-long storm surge wall to protect it from hurricane flooding.

Lin also was key in Terracon’s geotechnical and materials testing work for Hyundai Motor Group’s $10-billion Metaplant America, a 2,500-acre, four-building campus for electric vehicle production, and at Savannah Convention Center on Hutchinson Island in the Savannah River. Involved with that facility’s initial construction in 2000 on the island, much of which is dredged fill, Lin was tapped again in 2020 to help develop a deep foundation system to support an 858,400-sq-ft expansion and five-story parking deck.

Lin’s well-regarded expertise is no surprise to Board. “It always makes me smile meeting his other clients who display the same feelings of confidence and appreciation for him as we do,” he says.

Lin has helped Kinder Morgan through difficult soil conditions at its Elba Island, Ga., liquefied natural gas terminal since 2001.
Photo courtesy Terracon

A Sedimentary Journey

For his part, Lin is equally grateful that his passion to solve such a wide variety of “dirt problems” has fostered many professional collaborations and relationships with clients, Terracon team members and industry colleagues. He always has been committed to sharing knowledge gleaned from those efforts through his active involvement with the American Society of Civil Engineers, Deep Foundation Institute and Academy of Geoprofessionals, earning that organization’s Diplomate certification.

Work for ASCE actually enabled Lin's first return to China in 2018, visiting a large land reclamation project in Zhejiang to observe use of vacuum-induced consolidation technology in ground improvement. “This technology has been widely adopted in China, as well as in other parts of Asia and Europe, yet remains largely unused in the U.S,” he says. “To bridge this gap, we published papers, case histories, and design guidelines to promote its application.”

Lin also has published more than 20 papers in professional journals and proceedings. One recent project will be the topic of a spring presentation at the Geoprofessional Business Association annual conference—the June 18, 2022, bulkhead collapse of the ferry landing between the Hutchinson Island convention center and hotel, where the gathering is being held.

Born in China, Lin studied in Switzerland and Tennessee before moving to Georgia.
Photo courtesy Guoming Lin

Lin’s investigation found that the primary cause of the bulkhead movement was not a nearby magnitude 3.9 earthquake earlier that day, as originally thought, but rather the result of fill settlement that caused the structure’s helical tieback system to fail. Terracon’s repair strategy of pile-supported deadman tiebacks and relieving flatform is intended to be more suitable to the island’s geotechnical characteristics.

A licensed drone pilot, Lin combines personal and professional travel with a landscape photography passion. He also supports community needs in fundraising for Habitat for Humanity and other charities. Lin and his wife, Mingming, have a son, Leon, who is founder and CEO of a Silicon Valley tech start-up firm.For someone with a reputation as an expert in finding innovative solutions, the elder Lin wishes he knew more. “I’m not very good with chemistry because it wasn’t emphasized during my education,” he says. “There are times when that knowledge could have helped with a broader solution." That may well explain Lin’s eagerness to dive into any geotechnical challenge that comes his way. “I enjoy every project, whether it’s big or small,” he says. “Each one allows me to learn.”