Underground Construction - May 2018 - 33

materials, have been well accepted by the engineering community.
This acceptance has led to my placement
on a design solution team with Dr. Mohammad Najafi, director of CUIRE at the
University of Texas, Arlington. CUIRE won
a 24-month study to produce a standardized methodology for cementitious liners
for AASHTO. I am also chairman of the task
group for ASCE charged with producing a
new Manual of Practice on how to design
flexible liners. I have served periodically as
an expert witness for the underground infrastructure industry.

NASSCO involvement
As you can see, I am very involved in many
areas, but that involvement parallels my
very first exposure to NASSCO, which was
back in 1999. My boss asked me to become
a NASSCO member, but he also told me that
if he was going to invest the money in membership dues, I needed to be an extremely
active member. I took that to heart and have
been deeply involved ever since by participating on various committees, becoming an
ITCP-CIPP trainer, and advising on special
projects, when called upon to do so. I also
was honored to serve as NASSCO president
in 2009.
Everything NASSCO does goes back to setting standards. I personally am a proponent
of NASSCO performance standards over
vendor-supplied standards because many of
those that come from manufacturers read
like recipes. They don't always lend themselves to a smooth execution by a contractor
in the field. The documents need to recognize
the realities of what happens between the
engineer who shares what he or she learned
in the design phase, to the contractor's performance. They need to be built around real-world, achievable results.
When Norm Sirna and Ernie Alexander
founded NASSCO more than 40 years ago, it
was all about reaching engineers and getting
those standardized documents in place so
the work could be done both properly and
profitably. My hope for NASSCO is that it
continues to grow in its ability to communicate with and train the next generation of
engineers to understand our business environment and the importance of setting standards for the assessment, maintenance and
rehabilitation of underground infrastructure.

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UConOnline.com | MAY 2018

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Underground Construction - May 2018

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