A Coffee with… Amanda Owings (Transportation Engineer) and Greg Mines (Structures Engineer)

With many disciplines working together on a variety of projects, perhaps the best way to get a feel for a firm’s impact is simply, a coffee with… the people doing the work.

This video series features experts sharing insights gained during their time in the AEC industry, with an emphasis on the importance of collaboration to meeting a common goal of creating better communities.

In this edition, we sit down with a leader of our transportation engineering group and a member of our structural engineering group to hear how their work intersects to create infrastructure that gives people the independence to move.

Find out in the video and its transcript below:

Introduction

Greg: The interface between, you know, roadway and civil and bridges is really about that, that connection of community.

Amanda: Well, that urban built environment was really cool to me too. You know, being able to actually walk through your projects as an engineer drive by.

Greg: ‘I did that,’ right?

Amanda: Exactly.

My name is Amanda Owings. I am the transportation and infrastructure business unit lead for the Oregon and Southwest Washington offices.

Greg: My name is Greg Mines. I am a structures engineer in our bridge group out of Vancouver.

What excites you about the work you do?

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Greg: I mean, bridges are both, you know, literal and metaphorical. So you have, you know, like you’re connecting, you know, connecting communities. And then also, we’ve done a few projects replacing connections that were lost.

Or you’re either trying to help people move through an environment or you’re trying to connect different communities with each other in different areas of community.

Amanda: And adding on to that is giving people options when they don’t have any, right, If they have an alternate way to get somewhere or an independent way to move about their community.

That’s what I think is really heartwarming about the work that we do is that you are now eliminating barriers. You’re giving people independence to move. And that’s something that everybody wants to have. They want that freedom.

What has your path been like in the field?

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Greg: I’ve worn many hats at Otak. I started out doing bridges and then for a while actually went and did some buildings for the national parks. And I get, I get a lot of projects that don’t fit in any particular bin of, of someone’s specialty. So I’ve [done things like] gone scuba diving for projects etc.

I’ve been here for 14 years. But why don’t you kind of fill me in on, on kind of your history with the company?

Amanda: Oh, sure. I started at Otak in 2000. That was my first job out of college. So I was an EIT, worked into my PE as well as project management, and then found that I wanted to try a little bit on the public side.

So for 9 years I was working at two different agencies and really kind of missed consulting, missed the networking, missed working with multidisciplinary teams. So it’s been really nice coming back and being able to work with lots of different people.

Greg: What’s some of the like perspective that you brought from that that public work and, and working for who is frequently our client and coming back again?

Amanda: It’s really helpful to know where their pain points are and what things that they struggle with getting through their councils or through budget or really just working with the public.

So when, when it comes to how a design is put together or how a project is presented, if the public can’t quite understand it then and we need to redesign it. And so I, I have that perspective that’s really helpful just to see it from how the agency is going to be able to pay for it, explain it, maintain it in the future.

What’s it like working closely with the public and local communities?

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Amanda: Well, the urban planning side of my work is quite rewarding because it does create projects and work with the communities directly. So the community is really giving their voice to what the design team is working on, and it’s really does make for a much more creative project in the end, and you’re really doing something that the public wants.

One of the communities that I worked in is that there was an intersection that had lots of crashes. It was really unsafe and we worked really hard to get that intersection repaired. And now it’s not even on the safety list and nobody ever thinks about that intersection anymore.

It’s those kinds of things that it’s like, you know, you’ve done a good job when nobody talks about it anymore. A backwards way of finding pride in your projects. But it’s true.

What are some favorite projects you’ve worked on?

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Amanda: We had a project for Washington County, was Olson Rd. And it was one of my very first projects and it had taken almost two years to really get through all the design. There’s like 100 driveways to sign, lots of public outreach.

But that project sticks with me because I can drive it. In fact, I drive it as many times as I can.

The second project that was really rewarding to me was a project in Tigard through their downtown, and we submitted and got a national APWA award for it.

So it was on the cover of the magazine that we really need to see.

Greg: We did one project in Olympic National Park. Crystal Creek Bridge is the name of it, and it was a suspension bridge. It was asymmetrical. It was a design build project. So we’re working with the contractor really closely and making the decisions.

So there was kind of this additional insight that we had during design and it came out and it’s a really cool bridge.

How does your work benefit from a multidisciplinary environment?

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Amanda: It is important to work with other disciplines in the industry because it does help you kind of foresee some of the issues that you know are going to be coming. And the more that you can relate with their work kind of makes you design more stuff that much better.

It just goes that much more smoothly.

Greg: Especially early on in a project. I feel like sometimes you’ll get like a maybe a plan set and, and you can tell that it’s not a project yet. It’s four or five individual projects, each discipline kind of doing their own.

And then you start doing that collaboration where you, you sit down and you know, you’re all, if you do a plan sheet turn or whatever, but you trade and then you look at everybody else’s and you’re like, ‘oh, hey, I think we can change this here.’ And then when you start to blend that together.

Amanda: Or asking the questions, ‘why did you do it this way? What can I do to make this a little bit easier for you?’

Greg: And working with the same people you kind of get to know, this is something that, you know, we looked at previously with, with Amanda… she can probably solve this.

The deep bench that we have of that expertise in and, and have it all just in house, You’re just blown away by what you can find.

Amanda: I love that I can pick up the phone and call you anytime when I have a structural question that’s not even related to a project that we’re working on together. But just having that access to you or your team is really helpful to our transportation group.