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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

City firms get national engineering awards

By: Murray McNeill

5/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Tower Engineering's (from left), Jack Abiusi, Greg Jorgensen, Mike Houvardas.

A local engineering firm fought fire with fire when cleaning up a rural contamination site, and has won a national award for its efforts.

The Winnipeg office of AMEC was one of two local engineering firms to walk away with one of the top two prizes at the 2009 Canadian Consulting Engineering Awards dinner held Tuesday in Ottawa.

Enlarge Image

Patrick Campbell, Harley Pankratz of AMEC. (TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS)

AMEC won the Tree For Life Award for outstanding stewardship for using one contaminant -- nitrogen -- to eliminate a second contaminant -- hydrocarbons -- at a Federated Co-operatives Ltd. bulk fuel and fertilizer storage site in Gladstone.

Not to be outdone, Winnipeg's Tower Engineering Group Limited Partnership snagged the Schreyer Award for having the most technically innovative project. Tower designed a new ice arena/recreational centre for the town of Warren that uses less than half the energy of a conventional arena by capturing and reusing waste energy created in the operation of the facility.

"We didn't expect to win one of the top awards," Tower principal Michael Houvardas admitted after arriving back in Winnipeg Wednesday.

"There were some pretty glamorous, high-profile projects there," he said of the 59 other projects from across the country that were vying for one of the 12 awards that were handed out by the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies and Canadian Consulting Engineers magazine.

This is the first time either firm has won a national engineering-design award, and company officials said the achievement should help boost their profile and help attract new clients.

Tower Engineering has used its energy-recycling technology in half a dozen other arena projects over the last four years, but its energy engineer said some other clients have been hesitant to use it because it's still relatively new. "Now the hesitancy won't be there anymore," Greg Jorgensen predicted.

The Gladstone remediation project, conducted between 2005 and 2008, was the first time AMEC has used one contaminant to clean up another contaminant on the same site.

Harley Pankratz, the firm's vice-president for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, said the contaminated soil is usually dug up and hauled away to a special facility to be decontaminated, and clean soil is trucked in to replace it.

But instead of doing that, the seven-member AMEC team came up with a plan to extract the nitrates that had leaked into the ground from the bulk fertilizer tanks on one side of the property, and use them to feed microbes in the soil that could eat up the hydrocarbons that had leaked from the bulk fuel tanks on the other side of the property.

Any nitrates that were left in the ground after the process was completed were neutralized with a combination of molasses and diluted canola oil.

"We didn't have to take anything out of the ground," Pankratz said, which reduced the soil remediation costs by more than 50 per cent.

He said Federated Co-op was so pleased with the results that it plans to use the same method to remediate the soil at other locations in the Canada where it has fertilizer and fuel tanks on the same property.

In the Warren arena project, Tower Engineering installed a specially designed heating and cooling system that captures waste energy and stores it in energy storage buffers installed under the floor of the arena. That energy is then reused to heat or cool the building.

"The building actually functions like a machine and moves heating and cooling energy around as it's needed," Houvardas said. "So basically, the energy is being recycled."

The 25,000-square-foot complex uses electricity to heat and cool the building, but uses less than half what a conventional arena of that size would use.

He said the reason they submitted this project in the competition is because its the first one where their firm managed the entire project from start to finish.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 5, 2009 B5

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