Student Winners The winner of the year’s Student Paper Competition is Hessam Yazdani, a Ph.D. candidate in geotechnical engineering at the University of Oklahoma. He received both his bachelor’s and master’s in civil engineering from University of Kerman, Iran and moved to the U.S. for his Ph.D. in 2011. His paper, “Optimization of Piled- Raft Foundations Considering Soil-Pile- Raft Interaction,” compares conventional piled foundations with piled-raft foundations, and finds that the latter provide a more economical solution to suppor t high- r i se bui ldings on compressible soils. The runner-up Student Paper award recipient was Fawad S. Niazi, graduate research assistant, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Ga., also winner of the competition’s 2011 award. His paper this year, “A Review of the Design Formulations for Static Axial Response of Deep Foundations from CPT Data,” discusses axial capacity of deep foundations in regard to soil-structure interaction problems. The awards are funded by the DFI Educational Trust and winners receive an honorarium to cover travel expenses to attend the Annual Conference and a library of DFI publications. The two winners presented their papers as part of the technical program, and their papers will be published in the DFI Journal. Major Awards and Honors The annual banquet also honored DFI’s principal award winners, beginning with the Outstanding Project Award, the Wolf Creek Restoration. The winners were the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the joint venture of Treviicos/Soletanche. Michael F. Zoccola, accepted the award for the Corps, making a presentation on the winning project . Fol lowing the presentation, Ricardo Petrocelli, chairman of the board and president of the executive committee of Treviicos, thanked DFI for the recognition on behalf of the JV and spoke about the complexities of the project and its great success; as did Johnny Wilmore, the Corps’ chief of construction. Board of Trustees, with Executive Director Theresa Rappaport Arturo Ressi di Cervia, DSA Recipient This DSA recipient not only served DFI, he served society, the construction industry and on 9/11, he may have saved part of New York City. On 9/11/13, the New York Times included a tribute to Arturo Ressi di Cervia, saying that “some heroes of the September 11, 2001 attack performed life saving work years before the attack.” The reporter, David W. Dunlap, singled out the slurry wall built around the WTC foundation. “When the towers collapsed, the wall began to strain under unthinkable pressures from the surrounding water table. Because the 70-ft wall held, the foundation did not fill with water, the subway tunnels and the PATH tubes below were not inundated. The once lowly wall became a symbol of resilience in the months and years after the attack and a portion was deliberately left exposed.” George J. Tamaro, a colleague who worked for the owner, the NYC Port Authority, and then worked with Ressi, and later, with Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers, remembers Ressi. “I first met Arturo Ressi at the WTC slurry wall construction site in 1967. He was the ICOS site engineer and I was the Port Authority site engineer. Arturo was to do the work, and I was to make sure he did it right.” After a few years, Tamaro joined ICOS, and the pair worked together: “He ran the company and I did the engineering. He pushed the pedal to the floor and I applied the emergency brake! Ressi was always an optimist, (you had to be an enthusiastic optimist to sell slurry walls). Nothing fazed Arturo, once while on the phone, in selling mode, he fell over backwards in his chair and continued his sales spiel, spread-eagled on the floor. He got the contract. Ressi was larger than life in mind and spirit, he was a bundle of adjectives, he was gregarious, an inventor, a raconteur, a teller of prolonged jokes, he was a bon vivant and always optimistic, he was a world traveler. I knew him for over half a century, five decades, 50 years, which is a long time.” DFI members can read Arturo Ressi’s article, “Lessons Learned” in the May/June 2013 issue of the magazine. DEEP FOUNDATIONS • NOV/DEC 2013 • 23
