PEOPLE, PROJECTS AND EQUIPMENT D. Michael Holloway: Strong Mind, Strong Personality That formidable combination of terms is used by colleagues to describe Mike H o l l o w a y , senior founda- tion engineer with Dan Brown and Associates, PC. Mike “is not one to shy away from potentially controversial positions, and he has a strongly independent viewpoint that makes him invaluable in solving unique and complex foundation questions.” This assessment from Casey Jones, president of Foundation Testing and Consulting/PileTrac, is echoed in similar words by many. Yoshi Moriwaki, of GeoPentech, has known Holloway since 1974 and says that he has a “strong mind and strong personality, and is an excellent problem solver not only with deep foundations, but also geotechnical earthquake engineering.” Holloway is “living proof that being a Ph.D. is not a handicap in being an excellent geotech- nical engineer in practice.” This rare combination of engineering expertise and outspoken demeanor was developed over many years. Holloway, an only child, grew up in Long Island, N.Y. and was a talented math and science student. Holloway was also an accom- plished athlete, playing everything from ice hockey to baseball. His athletic focus forged a number of his character traits, among them an outrageous streak. In his senior year in high school at the traditional student/faculty basketball game, he and his teammates shaved their heads at half time. The following day he was off to Duke and Georgia Tech for entrance interviews. Colleague Donald Treadwell, former president of Treadwell and Rollo, invokes the athletic metaphor, saying Holloway was a “really good” baseball player at Duke, and describes other attributes that apply to his professional practice. Holloway was and is a “team player, a star and a good teammate,” he says, adding that he is “really smart, and very good analytically, he sees what’s impor- tant in solving a problem.” Other observers have telling remarks. George Goble, PDL, says that Holloway has an “interesting personality—he tells you what he thinks.” He Knew What He Wanted Holloway attributes most of his career path to serendipity, to being in the right place at the right time to grasp some unusual opportunities. What is notable is that he seems to have known which opportunities to “grasp.” After graduating from Duke, he returned to pursue an M.S. specializing in engineering mechanics. He spent the summer of 1969 at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., helping with geotechnical experiments the Apollo 11 astronauts were conducting on the moon. The next year he returned to work on a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, specializing in geotechnology when both Wayne Clough and Alex Vesic were building the geotechnical program at Duke. Holloway was drafted into the U.S. Army that next summer. During zero week in basic training he told his company commander that he wanted to be stationed at the Waterways Experiment Station (WES) in Vicksburg, Miss., working in the group where he could pursue research on his chosen dissertation topic—the behavior of piles in sands—for the benefit of the Corps of Engineers. In spite of the lieutenant’s “utter disbelief,” eight weeks later he was headed to the WES cam- pus as one of the 20-some enlisted men. At WES he worked on numerical modeling methods that were calibrated with USACE test data. Holloway presented some of the findings of his research at the benchmark Symposium on Applications of the Finite Element Method in Geotechnical Engineering, held at WES in 1972. His disser- tation was published simultaneously at Duke and as a Contract Report to WES in 1975. In late 1974, Holloway joined the earthquake engineering group at Woodward-Lundgren and Associates (later Woodward-Clyde Consultants, known as WCC). A challenging first assignment involved modeling of the seismic response of a nuclear plant and required innovative applications of the analytical methods to a very deep, soft-site. That assignment afforded him the opportunity to “audit” earthquake engineering courses at UC Berkeley, taught by H.B. Seed and others, to better grasp the unique pioneering tech- niques. In addition to long work days and essential class time, Holloway was writing his dissertation in-absentia. Holloway next switched to the WCC foundation engineering group and led the exploration and pile testing efforts for a sewer treatment plant expansion involving 10,000 precast-prestressed concrete piles. More than 100 indicator piles were tested in the first major West Coast application of the Pile Driving Analyzer. Holloway was the project earthquake engineer for the San Francisco Ocean Outfall Project, involving pipelines crossing the San Andreas Fault more than a mile offshore. The seismic issues paled, he says, in comparison to the wave-induced liquefaction concerns in one of the most hostile coastal environments on the planet. Professor Seed helped develop the numerical modeling methods that were needed to address the formidable geotechnical issues for the buried pipelines. Lock & Dam 26: Career High Point In 1977, WCC tackled a major assignment with the USACE and U.S. Department of Transportation, for a major field test program to investigate potential schemes for rehabilitating Lock and Dam No. 26 on the Mississippi River, near Alton Ill. Holloway was the Pile Driving Effects task leader (one of four separate testing tasks). His work focused on addressing the key concerns related to using driven piles to buttress the existing dam and lock foundations, and he led the team of colleagues and consultants to devise the scheme to model the existing structures. They developed and implemented the instrumentation program to monitor the response of the test systems under load as DEEP FOUNDATIONS • JULY/AUG 2012 • 35
