LASSETTER Peter Lassetter has joined architect-engineer Thornton Tomasetti, New York City, as senior vice president of its San Francisco-based operation. He had been principal and group leader in that city for Arup. Lassetter also was the lead structural designer for San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences school project, which gained LEED Platinum certification. Bowman Consulting, a Chantilly, Va., civil engineering firm, has named Tom LeBeau, Ken Sisk and Jim Nelm senior project managers, following its acquisition of The Vision Group, a Chesapeake, Va.-based engineer and construction management firm owned by LeBeau, Sisk and Nelm. GRIFFITH Patricia Velasquez Griffith has been
SABBAGH Hassib Sabbagh, co-founder and chairman of Athens-based Consolidated Contractors Group (CCG), one of the largest Middle East building contractors whose past projects include Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, died on Jan. 12 in Cleveland. He was 90. From a small firm founded in 1945 in Haifa, Israel, that built housing for Jewish veterans of the British army in Palestine, CCG became the 44th largest firm on ENR’s list of The Top 225 Global Contractors, with $5.46 billion in 2008 international revenue. More than two-thirds of that is in industrial and petrochemical markets. The firm relocated to Beirut in 1948 but
John B. O�Dowd, a vice president of New York City-based engineering firm STV Corp. and a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who commanded its New York district during the 9/11 terror attack in lower Manhattan, died Jan. 26 at age 54. He suffered a sudden heart attack while in flight on business. O'DOWD O’Dowd joined STV in 2007 as vice president in its construction management division, providing oversight for two projects on which the firm was involved at the former World Trade Center site: the Freedom Tower and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. He
JÖNSSON Robert Jönsson has been elected president of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, the first non-North American to head the Bethesda, Md.-based group, which has 65 international chapters and 5,000 members. Jönsson is chairman of the Dept. of Fire Safety Engineering and Systems Safety at Lund University in Sweden. He has been on its faculty since 1981 and department head since 1985. KBR, Houston, has hired Mark S. Williams as group president of its government and defense, infrastructure and minerals, and power and industrial business units. He was group vice president in northern Europe for Jacobs Engineering Group Inc.,
Peter Green, a U.K.-born engineer who became one of ENR’s most prolific writers of technically detailed journalism on global construction megaprojects, died on Jan. 10 of pneumonia complications in New York City. Green, 81, had been ENR’s senior transportation editor for a decade until he retired in 1996, covering some of the world’s most complex projects and biggest disasters. GREEN ENR’s archives are filled with references to cover stories that Green reported, wrote and edited. He managed ENR’s coverage of noteworthy transportation projects, including the huge English Channel rail tunnel, Boston’s Central Artery network and reconstruction of infrastructure damaged in
JACKSON Tim Jackson has been named Orlando-based managing principal of design and planning at AECOM Technology Corp, Los Angeles. Formerly president and CEO of Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin, an Orlando engineer, he assumes his new position following AECOM’s acquisition of “selected assets and operating liabilities” of his former firm. The transaction, announced Dec. 22, 2009, includes all 90 Glatting Jackson employees. Jackson joined the firm in 1986 and had been CEO since 2007. Mike Logan has joined HBE Corp., a St. Louis design-build firm specializing in health-care facilities, as senior vice president for hospital sales for the mid-Atlantic region. He
GRAF Edward D. Graf , an innovator in grouting and foundation engineering and founder of a successful soil stabilization company in California, died on Dec. 16, 2009, in Honolulu of lung disease. He was 84. Graf pioneered development and application of several grouting techniques, including compaction grouting and controlled fracture grouting, and held or co-held six pressure-grouting patents. He founded in 1957 Pressure Grout Co. in South San Francisco, which has been involved in more than 1,600 grouting projects in the U.S. and globally. It was sold to an investor group several years ago. Graf was honored for his contributions
Thanks to a quick-thinking bridge construction crew, a nearby crane and a brave man in a harness, a woman’s life was saved after the boat she and her husband were in slipped over a dam and left her trapped in a raging boil.
Turning 50 years of talk, stalled projects and storm wreckage into a $15-billion design and construction program that has rapidly built monumental storm-surge defenses around Greater New Orleans can only be achieved with smart, steady, determined and gutsy leadership.