Running the Madison office of an engineering firm may not sound like the perfect jumping-off point for a jet-setting lifestyle, but for Dave Werren, it’s been a lifetime pass to exotic locales and bracing challenges.
Then again, as the president of the U.S. operation for Baird & Associates, a global coastal engineering company that boasts offices in Canada, Chile, the United Arab Emirates, Barbados, and Australia, Werren is more than happy to turn the familiar credo “think globally, act locally” on its head. His heart remains in Madison, where Baird has now been in business for 25 years, but his work spans – and in a small but significant way, remakes – the globe.
“I grew up in the Madison area, and had many opportunities to leave, and I’ve traveled the world, and I tell you what, when I come back to Madison, I would argue that it’s one of the best places I’ve ever been around in terms of a quality place to live,” Werren said. “It’s very easy to attract talent to Madison, Wis.”
Indeed, Baird’s work has taken its employees everywhere from Dubai to Iceland and Australia to the Arctic Circle, helping coastal denizens meet some of the 21st century’s most pressing challenges.
The firm’s work encompasses several general categories, including ports and harbors, waterfronts, water quality solutions, renewable energy, watersheds and coastal management, and hydraulics and hydrology. Boil it down, and it points to one of the company’s founding missions: “advancing science and engineering methods where water meets land.”
That’s still a narrow niche in the engineering game, but it’s expansive enough to keep the firm’s employees challenged, engaged and – to hear Werren tell it – consistently entertained.
“It’s very rewarding, it’s very satisfying, and frankly, it’s a heck of a lot of fun,” said Werren. “One of the things we like to talk about is whole-brain engineering. Engineers happen to have a reputation of thinking with the analytic side of their brains and maybe not the emotional side, so we sort of use that phrase, trying to say, ‘Let’s not just think as engineers, but as people would think in a holistic way.’ How does engineering help people, and where in the past have mistakes been made, and let’s acknowledge those and apply the best technology we can.”
Operating at the border of civilization and the unruly sea would seem to expose one to lots of opportunities for failure, particularly in an age when natural disasters seem ubiquitous and high-profile engineering failures like those that followed Katrina and last year’s Japanese tsunami occur with unsettling frequency. Indeed, one might say there’s an irony to the fact that 21st century solutions are stepping in to mitigate problems that are thought to be caused by 20th and 21st century technologies.
“Generally, because of good systems and advanced warnings, particularly in the last 10 years, people get a lot of good notice [of natural disasters],” said Werren. “And then the question is after that, what happens to the landscape? What happens to the structures that you leave behind? What happens to beaches and houses or facilities along the shoreline? And that’s the kind of thing that we do – we often design structures to prevent damage, or to help mitigate that damage.”
Much of the challenge of preparing for coastal disasters revolves around economics and politics, says Werren, even if engineering solutions are readily available.
“In this business, we do a lot of work that relates to picking a design effect,” said Werren. “So we try to choose and say, ‘Well, would this storm occur once in a hundred years or once in a thousand or once in 10,000? …. And in a one in 100-year event, there’s only a 1% chance I’ll get hit with that in one year. Well, if the structure is around for 100 years, actually there’s about a 63% probability that you’ll get the storm, so it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll get the storm if the structure is up long enough.”
That’s where politics comes in, says Werren.
“The problem is, if you want to design it for a one in 10,000-year event, which maybe an oil company will do offshore with a platform, it’s very expensive. And public policy often is, ‘Well, we’ll maintain it, or we’ll watch out for these things.’ And as you know, sometimes decisions are made for political reasons and short-term views, and that doesn’t necessarily lead to good consequences.”
Challenging the future
Baird is also involved in two other compelling 21st century challenges – finding alternatives to fossil fuels and preserving the quality of the world’s drinking water.
In addition to creating foundations for windmills so that wind farms can effectively be moved offshore, the company is exploring the promising field of wave energy.
“There’s a number of manufacturers and concepts out there working to extract energy from waves,” said Werren. “[This involves] understanding what these conditions are and how reliable the waves are, and what the shape of the waves are, which is all fundamental in trying to extract energy from them.
“And with many of these, you have the same problem we talked about with Katrina. You can build something and it will work really well, but then you get a big storm and the conditions get so severe, suddenly it becomes damaged, and I can’t produce electricity or energy economically and still design for a 10,000-year event. So what’s my risk of building something that’s a little less robust but produces energy at a competitive rate? That’s the kind of stuff we’re looking at.”
Celebrating 25
Among the company’s more interesting projects was the work it did in Dubai for one of the most unusual building endeavors in the world.
“We did the feasibility study on the first Palm Island,” said Werren, referring to the famous man-made, leaf-like islands that were created to add luxurious beach space to the shores of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. “We said, well, economically, we’re not sure that this is something that makes a lot of sense, and they said, ‘Thank you very much, we’re going to do it anyway.’ And then there was Palm Island 1, 2, 3, The World; they started building more and more islands. And ultimately, I think our prediction of economics came home to roost, because they way overbuilt. And of course, they then had to confront the global economic crisis.”
Reflecting on the past 25 years, Werren says that taking care of both his employees and his clients has been key to the firm’s success. Having fun is part of Baird’s mission statement, and that comes across in the company’s culture.
Every couple of years, the entire company gets together for retreats for bonding time. The employees from every office travel to locations around the world. In the past, those destinations have included Mexico and Alaska. That together time, says Werren, allows the company to seamlessly work through multiple offices and multiple time zones.
At the same time, care is taken to convey to the company’s employees the importance of quality work.
“We’ve been extraordinarily successful in sticking to a message of providing outstanding service to clients, trying to be their trusted advisors and doing whatever it takes and encouraging our employees to understand that kind of culture,” said Werren. “The rest sort of takes care of itself. People who don’t put in the extra mile and don’t take care of their clients are suffering the hardest, and we’ve continued to grow through a period where a lot of other firms are shrinking.
“So for whatever reason, we’ve got the right formula and it seems to be working.”
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