S&ME Inc. News

Knoxville, Award of Merit ACEC-TN

Overcoming challenges, making use of opportunities

In Tennessee, S&ME helped a grateful client and a grateful community bring to life a long dormant industrial park, overcoming numerous complex challenges.  Below are two sections of the entry’s project description.

Future Value to the Engineering Profession

This project provides examples to the profession of, 1) how multiple societal needs can be met by being open to unusual opportunities and 2) that applying innovative thinking to site selection and design issues can be significantly beneficial.

Rather than have a mine site (that must be reclaimed) and a separate industrial park site, we combined the two here.  The Spring City Plant/Mine provides an unusual opportunity for Spring City Industrial Park authorities to better market the park.   The mining activities will eventually leave a rough-graded site for future industries, rather than hilly land.  The city and county also gain a new employer and tax revenues much sooner than if they had waited for the site to sell on its own, including revenues from a clay royalty paid by General Shale.

The plant and mine sites represent an “industrial ecology” where raw materials are located near their point of use.  Production is the most energy-efficient available and located near appropriate transportation infrastructure. By-products of the production are beneficially reused nearby.

Meeting and Exceeding Owner/Client Needs

Construction of the mines would not have been possible without careful coordination of the future use, permitting, and design requirements of all stakeholders.  S&ME made sure the team understood the needs of General Shale as well as the local development and permitting authorities.  These were incorporated into our team’s design and permitting documents.

Our client has expressed satisfaction and appreciation for S&ME’s achievements in overcoming challenges to meet and exceed the project’s rigid needs and schedule.  We worked closely with client and owner representatives to complete tasks on schedule and within budget.    A General Shale manager, called S&ME “instrumental in the planning…,” with its work “wide-ranging and highly professional.”  He said we brought the project “added value,” and were “critical in bringing it to a successful conclusion.” –For more information, contact Ken Barry, PE, WRE, Knoxville.