Influential Illini

W. Charles Greer, Jr., P.E. (BS 71, MS 73)
Senior Vice President, Director of Engineering and Science
MACTEC Engineering and Consulting Inc.

After 30 years as a civil engineer, Charlie Greer calls himself a “jack of all trades.” At UIUC in the early 1970s, Greer studied transportation and geotechnical engineering. After earning his bachelor’s in 1971 and his master’s in 1973, the Decatur, Ill., native went to work for Law Engineering and Environmental Services in Atlanta, Ga., as a soils and materials engineer. The career that followed has afforded him project variety, interesting challenges, the opportunity to work all over the world, more than 2 million frequent flyer miles, and an award he calls “the civil engineer’s Oscar.”

One of Greer?s most high-profile projects was the 1999 relocation of the 200-foot tall, 5,000-ton Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina, for which he served as Senior Technical Consultant and Technical Reviewer. Built in 1870, the national landmark was in danger after 130 years of beach erosion. After winning the design-build project in a competition run by the National Park Service, Law performed geotechnical, environmental and materials evaluations for the design of the move, which successfully transported the lighthouse half a mile to safety. The project was awarded the Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2000.

?I call it the civil engineer?s Oscar,? Greer says. ?The lighthouse move was a project you?d almost pay to work on. ? I can actually say I have crawled under the lighthouse while it was up on jacks.?

Another favorite project area for Greer has been his ongoing work at Atlanta?s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world, where he has headed up a number of projects involving geotechnical, materials, pavement and environmental issues.

?I?ve worked on virtually everything there is to work on over there over a period of 31 years,? he says.

Greer is especially proud of the money saved by extending the life of runways through materials evaluation, nominal repairs, and common sense. A runway Law helped rebuild there in 1974 is still performing ?like a champ,? Greer says, and will most likely last until 2015, despite the fact that such runways are usually designed for a 20-year life. Another runway, called ?the 40-day wonder? because it was built in 40 days and 40 nights in 1969, was thought by the Department of Aviation and the airlines to be in need of reconstruction in 1984 but is still going strong.

?We?ve kept the thing operating since 1984. We?ve managed to skip a whole generation of replacement,? Greer says. ?It will probably need to be replaced in 2009. It will be 40 years old, and we will have added 25 years to its life. These runways are primary take-off runways and are two of the busiest in the world.?

Greer recalls an early project as one of his first chances to use what he learned at UIUC. It was the late 1970s, and he was six years out of school. A contractor asked Law to design a plan to move two nuclear reactor pressure vessels over 46 miles of state, county and private road in Tennessee. The vessels were 25 feet in diameter and along with the equipment required to move them weighed 3.5 million pounds. It would be the heaviest load moved over U.S. roads at that time.

?How do you take something that hasn?t been done before and figure out how to do it?? Greer says. ?What I got at Illinois was a practical approach to solving problems. Peck, Ireland, Barenberg, Thompson, Robnett and Herrin clearly taught you the power of observation. You may only get one chance to go to a site, so look at everything, and write down what?s important. And what you think is not important may be, so write that down, too. Then you break it down into simple, smaller common-sense problems, and the solution becomes obvious.?

The team designed a plan to transport the load on 384 wheels. (?If you can put enough wheels under it, you can move anything,? Greer says.) To test their design, they proof-rolled the whole 46 miles on one simulated axle. With that experience, they were able to refine the plan, and the two moves were accomplished successfully.

To students facing their first job, Greer suggests the strategy he used 30 years ago, when he first interviewed with Law and liked what he saw, employee-owned firm that worked on interesting geotechnical projects: ?Pick a place that does what you want and where you can get as much experience as fast as you can. Learn the business aspects of your organization as well as the technical aspects. Develop excellent project management skills because everything is a project.?

Greer has taught Maintenance Management courses at Georgia Tech for the Master?s Program in Facilities Management. He sits on the Advisory Board for that program as well as the Advisory Board for the Civil Engineering Department at Florida State and Florida A&M universities. He serves or has served on several technical committees at the national level for the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Concrete Institute, and the Transportation Research Board. He has made numerous technical presentations at U.S. and international conferences and has published several technical papers in the trade journals. He was named Engineer of the Year by the Georgia Society of Professional Engineers in 1987 and was a C.C. Wiley Travel Award Winner while at Illinois.

Greer lives in Dunwoody, Ga., with his wife, Sarah (elementary education, ?71). They have three grown children, Rachel, Nathan and Rebecca, along with son-in-law Mark Brown and grandson, Andrew.