Schultz and Summers Engineering Receives 2012 Best of Kenner Award

Schultz and Summers Engineering has been selected for the 2012 Best of Kenner Award in the Civil Engineers category by the Kenner Award Program committee. Each year, the Kenner Award Program identifies companies they believe have achieved exceptional success in marketing within their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and the Kenner community. Those companies help make the Kenner, Louisiana area a great place to live, work and play.

SSE Owner Stan Schultz added, “We have worked hard to serve all our Louisiana customers in our efforts to rebuild the levee system and house-raising around New Orleans. Having the Best of Kenner Award committee recognize our efforts is very satisfying.”

Stan Schultz, Owner

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2012 Kenner Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the Kenner Award Program and data provided by third parties.

Schultz and Summers Engineering is a Missouri based Civil Engineering Company located in multiple locations around the Midwest and is based out of Poplar Bluff, Missouri. In 2008 they opened a branch office in Kenner Louisiana to focus on providing surveying and materials testing service on the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) flood control projects. They have a large state of the art USACE validated testing lab and are one of the select companies that have been approved for Blanket Purchase Agreement with the USACE. To date, SSE has provided QC testing services on 20 different projects for companies such as Tetra Tech, AWC, Aquatera, Conti, WR Compass, Southern Services and LS&CKY to name just a few. 

SSE Kenner manager Thomas Hudson concluded, “This recognition is the result of all our employees hard work. They take seriously our job of supplying the best material testing and surveying services to our customers. We will continue to do all we can to help rebuild the levee’s protecting New Orleans.”  

Seven Miles of New Orleans Levee

Here is a short video that shows our work on LVP 109 for Archer Western Contractors.  The project cost over $140 million to rework a 7.2 mile stretch of levee starting on the south bank of Lake Pontchartrain and running South along the bayou.  Work includes moving over 3.1 million tons of soil to enlarge the existing levee, demolish existing gates and construct new gates that cross US Highway 90 & US Highway 11.  Also, they will remove and replace four (4) drainage structures, remove and replace pump station discharge pipes, and upgrade two (2) pump stations. Additionally, they installed over 9 million feet of wick drains as well as constructed T-wall/I-wall transitions at CSX Railroad, US Highway 90, and US Highway 11.  “Working with Martin Pospisil and all his staff has been very rewarding,” stated SSE owner Stan Schultz.  “There are a lot of moving pieces to this project, but so far technicians like Thomas Hudson, January 2011 employee of the month Cory Brown, and James Badkoubei have been able to keep things on schedule and within budget.”

For Stan and all the SSE employees this was a particularly challenging job.  They also were responsible for drilling 126 well holes and installing the geotechnical instrumentation for monitoring the levee.  This required ordering all the necessary equipment and personal to drill these holes, and properly install the magnetic extensometers, inclinometers and plelmeters all while the work on the levy continued.  SSE technician Cory Brown said, “It was a challenge to keep the drill rig going and ahead of the dirt moving crews.  The whole project schedule depended on us to meet our goal each day and the bad weather was always a worry.  I am proud to say we finished our part ahead of the schedule!”    

SSE Helps Keep Archer Western Contractors on Schedule

AWC is a member of the Walsh group and was ranked as the 2nd largest domestic heavy

Contractor in the United States by Engineering News-Records Top Contractor Rankings and they

were ranked as the 125^th largest privately owned company in America by Forbs magazine. 

The old LVP 109 levee before construction

NEW ORLEANS- Since June 20, 2010 Archer Western Contractors (AWC) has had Schultz and Summers Engineering (SSE) helping them to finish LPV 109.02a levee project.   AWC Project Manager Martin Pospisil said, “Having SSE on the project has been very beneficial to our progress.  Their technicians show up every day on time and ready to work and Stan has been available to handle any questions or problems that arise.”

A drill rig on one of the 126 wells

The Contract Award was for $112,247,806 to rework a 7.2 mile stretch of levee starting on the south bank of Lake Pontchartrain and running South along the bayou.  Work includes moving over 3.1 million tons of soil to enlarge the existing levee, demolish existing gates and construct new gates that cross US Highway 90 & US Highway 11.  Also, they will remove and replace four (4) drainage structures, remove and replace pump station discharge pipes, and upgrade two (2) pump stations. Additionally, they installed over 9 million feet of wick drains as well as constructed T-wall/I-wall transitions at CSX Railroad, US Highway 90, and US Highway 11.  “Working with Martin and all his staff has been very rewarding,” stated SSE owner Stan Schultz.  “There are a lot of moving pieces to this project, but so far technicians like Thomas Hudson, January employee of the month Cory Brown, and James Badkoubei have been able to keep things on schedule and within budget.”

Despite all the wet weather they met their goal of completing this project by August of 2011.  Quality Control manager Raphael Campos added, “With the hurricane season in New Orleans we have to maximize our progress on sunny days.  Around here we put in some long hours and all the SSE folks have been willing to do whatever it takes to keep us moving.”

For Stan and all the SSE employees this was a particularly challenging job.  They also were responsible for drilling 126 well holes and installing the geotechnical instrumentation for monitoring the levee.  This required ordering all the necessary equipment and personal to drill these holes, and properly installing the magnetic extensometers, inclinometers and piezometers all while the work on the levy continued.  SSE technician Cory Brown said, “It was a challenge to keep the drill rig going and ahead of the dirt moving crews.  The whole project schedule depended on us to meet our goal each day and the bad weather was always a worry.  I am proud to say we finished our part ahead of the schedule!”   

Schultz concluded, “I’m thankful to be working on one of the bigger projects in the New Orleans region but being able to help solve problems and keep LPV 109.02a on schedule has been very rewarding professionally.  Martin made us feel like we were a key part of his team and working with AWC has been one of the highlights of our work here in Louisiana.”

STOPPING IN HAWAII BEFORE ARRIVING IN GUAM

Honolulu, Hawaii

By-Rodney Jetton

Stan and I drove up to St. Louis Monday evening because we had to catch a 6:00am flight to Hawaii.  I stayed up way to late working on a few letters and all too soon the 3:30 alarm went off and we were getting ready to head out on our trip to recon Guam and see if SSE should open up a branch office there.

You’re probably wondering why we are thinking about opening an office in Guam.  The short answer is because the Department of Defense (DOD) is moving the Marine base in Okinawa, Japan to Guam.  They have estimated it will cost about $14 billion to build the new base there.  The Japanese also want us to leave Guam and have pledged $6 billion to help pay for the move.  The move means there will be a lot of construction on Guam, but that doesn’t explain why a small civil engineering company from Missouri would consider moving there.

Here is the rest of the story.  Our work in New Orleans has been tremendously successful.  Stan went there, met with the local contractors, and quickly had a USACE validated construction testing lab operational.  In the beginning, most of the big firms would not hire SSE.  They had never worked with us before and they were afraid to trust something as important as testing to a small firm from Missouri. 

After several months CKY hired us for a little testing job and soon after that, our workload exploded.  Southern Services, Tetra Tech, Grillot Construction, Archer Western Contractors-The Walsh Group, WRCompass, The Shaw Group, Volkert, Odebrecht, and Integrated Pro Services were just a few of the major contractors who started requesting our services on their projects.  

The big contractors were not the only ones noticing the dependable testing services we were providing.  The USACE also took notice of our quality tests and accurate reports.  The Corps quickly awarded SSE a $5 million Blankest Purchase Agreement (BPA) to do Quality Assurance (QA) testing for them.  

Things were rapidly expanding for us in New Orleans.  Stan kept sending more of our Missouri employees down there to keep up with the workload and he also started looking for local qualified technicians who could join our team.  He had initially planned for 5 to 8 employees but within 18 months we had over 30 engineers and technicians providing both QC and QA tests in New Orleans.

During this time Tetra Tech was having some difficulty finding a surveyor to keep up with their timeline on one of their major projects.  They mentioned this to Stan and soon we had one of our Missouri crews helping them get the floodwalls and gates near the 17^th Street canal laid out for construction.  Our company had done construction staking on hundreds of lane-miles of Missouri highways as well as the largest privately owned airport in America, which is in Branson Missouri.  

Even though much of the surveying in New Orleans involved complicated sector gates and floodwalls, our survey crews jumped in and worked with the project managers to keep the jobs on schedule.  Once the word got out about our surveyors, it wasn’t long until we had as many as four survey crews going full time for several different contractors on some of the largest floodwalls and levees ever built in America.

 You’re probably saying, Rod this is an interesting story but what does New Orleans have to do with Guam?”  The short answer is everything for us.  Most of the contractors we have been helping in New Orleans are major corporations with worldwide operations.  They design and build things all over the globe.  For example Engineering News Record (ENR) ranked Kiewit as the 3^rd largest contractor in America, The Shaw Group is #7, and The Walsh Group is #12.  They also ranked Tetra Tech as the 5^th largest environmental engineering firm, AWC is # 20, and WRCompass is #49.   

Many of these companies are taking a serious look at going to Guam and a few of them are already there.  They started asking Stan to consider going to Guam.  So, we are studying the feasibility of setting up a testing lab to support the work to build a Marine Corps base on Guam.  

That’s why we woke up at 3:30 Tuesday morning to catch a plane to Hawaii.  We needed to stop in Hawaii because many of the contractors in Guam have their pacific headquarters in Hawaii and the Navy is headquartered here as well.  I’ll write more about our Hawaii meetings in my next post.  

Stan arriving at the Honolulu airport