On Tuesday, November 18, 2025 DVGI gathered for its monthly dinner meeting at Valley Forge Casino’s Parkview Ballroom. The meeting featured a presentation by speakers Catherine Chia-Calabria, PE of McCormick Taylor and Jason Taylor, PE, PG of Susquehanna Civil on The Story of Hanging Rock – SR 320 Section M07, Montgomery County, PA.

PennDOT District 6 had long considered Hanging Rock a “legacy” project. Due to its complex nature of design, location, and environmental permitting issues this project was with the Department for more than 20 years. After many attempts to advance the project, PennDOT subsequently selected McCormick Taylor and was successful in bringing the project to construction, completing the design in just 3 years. The project team worked through the rigorous environmental clearance process and complexities of the site to achieve a new design that reconstructed the flood prone roadway, raising it above the 100-year flood elevation.

The project installed nearly 1,000 linear feet of retaining wall for support against the fast-moving waters of Gulph Creek during storm events. A 600-foot-long section of the retaining wall features a cantilevered roadway over the creek to move the travel lanes away from the historic Hanging Rock. This simple yet innovative solution allowed for conventional means and methods of construction to achieve the project goals and restore mobility and safety on PA 320. Thank you for sharing your project with us!

On Saturday, November 1st, members of the DVGI volunteered their time at the Girls Engineering Tomorrow’s Technology Expo at the Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, PA. DVGI has participated in the Girls Exploring Tomorrow’s Technology (GETT) Expo every year that it has been held since 2016. GETT is an initiative of the Innovative Technology Action Group (ITAG), a program under the Chester County Economic Development Council. It is hosted by a K-12 school in the greater Delaware Valley. The GETT Expo is an annual day-long event for girls in grades 5 through 10 and their parents to learn about career opportunities in a broad scope of STEM related industries. The day is filled with exciting, enlightening, and experiential workshops led by successful women in STEM fields. This year, the DVGI estimates about 250 young girls participated in DVGI’s activity. This year DVGI prepared a Soil Layers activity for girls to create edible soil profiles in a cup!

Grass = Green Sprinkles/”Jimmies”
Topsoil = Crumbled Oreos Cookies
Subsoil (Clay) = Chocolate Pudding
Bedrock/Weathered Rock = Chocolate Rocks
The girls were also able to top their educational treat with gummy worms!

We would like to thank our members who volunteered time to support this year’s GETT Expo efforts: Amanda Hess (Villanova), Ashley Kellmyer (GTA), Cassidy Niederland (GTA), Elisabetta Iannetti (Pennoni), Grace Hepler (WSP), Kristin Sample-Lord (Villanova), Marissa Ciocco (Princeton Hydro), Melinda Eason (USACE), and Theresa Loux (Aero Aggregates). See www.gettpa.org for more information about the expo!

Please join us in congratulating the 2024-2025 DVGI Geotechnical Project of the Year Award recipient, Peirce Engineering, Inc. for Roberts Children’s Health at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The campus expansion project in University City will include an inpatient tower building connected to the flagship hospital. Peirce Engineering collaborated to provide geo-structural services required to jumpstart the project.

On Tuesday, September 16th, DVGI was joined by speaker Jennifer Brandt, P.E. of Peirce Engineering, Inc. for a presentation discussing the project. Jen detailed the project’s challenges (the congested city location surrounded by medical buildings, the unknown geotechnical conditions, and adjacent research buildings and potential noise and vibration impacts) and a variety of geotechnical solutions including soil nailing, underpinning, rock bolting, soldier beams and lagging, tieback anchors, and drilled shafts.

The DVGI presented the team with their award at the conclusion of the presentation. Thank you for sharing your project with us!

On Thursday, June 19th, 2025, 81 DVGI members and friends participated in the annual DVGI Golf Outing at Kimberton Golf Club in Phoenixville. Engineers, contractors, and suppliers took time out of their busy schedules to support the DVGI scholarship fund. The weather was perfect, and the refreshments were cold for the 9 a.m. start at the beautiful venue. The outing was a scramble format inviting all levels of golf skill.

The Keystone-Foundation team posted the best team score overall, while the ECS/Peak Utility Locators team had the dubious honor of the worst or “most honest” team score. After the round of golf, participants gathered for lunch and drinks on the patio. Michael Derr, P.E. (Geo-Technology Associates, Inc. (GTA)) won the longest drive hole while Michael Shedlosky (MENARD USA) won the closest to the pin prize, and Andrew Crivelli (GeoConstructors Inc.) mastered the Shortest Driver.

The event was a great chance for DVGI members and friends to socialize in a more casual setting. Shout-out to DVGI Director, Conrad Cho, P.E., LEED AP (Langan Engineering & Environmental Services) for staffing the registration table and roaming the course with refreshments. And a big THANK YOU to DVGI Director, Lei Gu, PE, PMP, ENV SP (Michael Baker International) for his continued efforts as our Golf Outing Chair!

Special thanks to our 21 sponsors which made the event a huge success and provided over $7,000 for the DVGI Scholarship Fund. The money will be distributed to students during DVGI’s annual Student Night dinner meeting next March. Thank you for helping us make this a record-setting year! We hope to see you all again, at next year’s outing.

DVGI concluded its successful run of 2024-25 dinner meetings on Tuesday, May 20th at the Valley Forge Casino. Attendees were in for a real treat as the ASCE Geo-Institute’s 2024-2025 Cross-USA Lecturer, Prof. Richard Bathurst, Ph.D., P.Eng., of the Royal Military College of Canada, presented “From measurement to LRFD calibration of MSE walls.” Prof. Bathurst reviewed how measurements from instrumented full-scale field and laboratory tests of mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls have been used to calibrate load and resistance factors in the AASHTO load and resistance factor design (LRFD) procedure for tensile strength and pullout failure modes of these walls. Such calibrations have improved the accuracy of the MSE wall design process, allowing for more reliable predictions of wall safety and performance as well as value engineering of these structures. Moreover, Prof. Bathurst explained how a simple closed-form solution – easily calculated in a spreadsheet – may be used to incorporate these advances in the LFRD model for MSE walls, negating the need for complex probabilistic simulations for these designs.