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ACEC-MS honors project achievement.

Article Excerpt
The American Council of Engineering Companies of Mississippi (ACEC-MS) presented its members with Engineering Excellence Awards for outstanding engineering projects in the State of Mississippi. The awards are the ACEC's premier event of the year, and a great way to showcase the work of Mississippi engineers.

"Nothing significant happens without an engineer," said Judy Adams, Mississippi's ACEC executive director.

But many people don't realize the work engineers do before a project goes into construction. Most people have no idea, for example, what is under the Trustmark Park in Pearl, this year's top project. The winner, Burns Cooley Dennis, designed a trench underneath the baseball stadium because of the area's floodplain status.

"That's what engineers do--design and discovery," said Adams. "The Engineering Excellence Awards (EEAs) ,are a great way for engineers to showcase their complex, innovative ideas."

The projects are judged on originality, technical value to the profession, social and economic considerations, complexity of the project and meeting and exceeding owners' or clients' needs.

This year's judges were Paul McPhail with Key Constructors; Mike Parker, public works director for Canton; Lt. Col. Marty Bryant, base engineer for the Mississippi Air National Guard; and Rep. Dirk Dedeaux, this year's non-technical judge.

The projects advanced to the national competition, and Allen & Hoshall was a finalist for its Dixie Electric Power Restoration on the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina.

The 2006 award winners are:

Grand Conceptor Award

Burns Cooley Dennis Inc.

PEARL -- Trustmark Park, home of the Mississippi Braves located in Pearl, contains one of the most unique features of any sports facility in the region, a huge underground wall constructed to regulate the level of groundwater and to protect the playing surface of the baseball field from flooding during high water levels on the Pearl River.

Burns Cooley Dennis Inc. (BCD), a Mississippi-based geotechnical and materials consulting firm provided geotechnical engineering and construction observation and testing services for the stadium and recommended the construction of the approximate 35-foot deep, 2000-foot-long underground wall around the perimeter of Trustmark Park.

"The Soil-Bentonite Slurry Trench Cutoff Wall encircles the stadium site, fully penetrating through the alluvium and keyed into the unweathered Yazoo clays," said BCD principal David Dennis, P.E. "The cutoff wall provides a semi-impervious barrier that resists the flow of groundwater through the alluvial sands to the stadium site."

The slurry trench method of constructing a cutoff consists of excavating a vertically walled trench while keeping the trench filled with a bentonite mud slurry to a level that will support the wall, and then displacing the slurry with backfill soils.

The...