DFI ACTIVITIES Boston Breaks a Record With 702 attendees and 104 exhibitors, the DFI 36th Annual Conference in October edged out the record set in New York City in 2008. The Boston chairs, Christopher C. Basile, Rinkus Consulting Group, and Drew Floyd of Moretrench, deserve high praise, as do the program co-chairs, Mayra Corczya, Haley & Aldrich, and John Roma of Raito. of Cape Wind, was the lecturer for the Boston conference and he described the major off-shore wind energy project his firm is working on. Olmsted estimated that wind energy is a $700 million market, including construction. He reeled off facts, figures and requirements regarding this energy source, and the site his firm has Program Co-chairs Mayra Corczya and John Roma Program co-chair John Roma, and DFI President Jim Morrison with Conference Chairs Christopher Basile and Drew Floyd As always, the conference included the presentation of DFI’s principal awards. Dan Brown was the 2011 recipient of the Dis- tinguished Service Award. The Outstand- ing Project award was Traylor-Massman- Weeks’s Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, a post-Katrina emergency engineering feat. Five other OPA finalists were also recog- nized at the Banquet, as were the recipients of the Young Professor and Student Paper Awards, who also spoke at conference sessions. The awards banquet ended with the thrilling story of the rescue of the miners trapped in Chile last year. Principal actors in that drama, Brandon Fisher and Dan Soppe of Center Rock, Inc. told the story of the firm’s dramatic intervention with assistance from other DFI member firms, Layne Geoconstruction and Manitowoc Cranes, in the crisis and successful rescue. Another highlight of the annual conference is the Hal Hunt Lecture, named for DFI founder Hal Hunt. Craig Olmsted, chosen after performing seven environ- mental studies. That site is in Nantucket Sound; a choice that has been contro- versial. Olmsted made a compelling case for wind energy and on the technical side, described the three main types of foundations for wind turbines. The Keynote address was given by David Thompson, former CEO of Haley & Aldrich. He took on the long and contentious Big Dig project in Boston, and spoke about an often overlooked aspect of that work, the foundation innovations that were incorporated in the mammoth project. (See sidebar on innovation). All 15 of DFI’s technical committees met during the conference, and two, Testing and Evaluation and Deep Foundations for Landslides/Slope Stabilization, offered pre-conference short courses. Both featured recent research results and case histories. One slope stabilization project presented by Dan Dick Short presents DSA to Dan Brown Dan Soppe and Brandon Fisher of Center Rock with Student Paper Winner, Fawad S. Niazi (center) Uranowski of Brayman was literally a cliff- hanger, the installation of battered micro- piles from a narrow bench for a steep site near Pittsburgh. The heavy equipment had to sit on the narrow bench at the base of a 60-80 ft (18-24 m) high slope. Vibration DEEP FOUNDATIONS • JAN/FEB 2012 • 15
