Ayres shares in Best of the Best award

FORT COLLINS — Engineering News-Record magazine has awarded its Best of the Best and Project of the Year honors to the project that provided permanent repairs to the U.S. Highway 34 corridor along the Big Thompson River near Loveland, which was damaged during the September 2013 floods. Ayres Associates with an office in Fort Collins played a key role in the project.

The Engineering News-Record selects regional award winners each year in 20 categories and then chooses Best of the Best national award winners among those regional winners. Also, from those 20 national winners, it picks a single project of the year.

The U.S. 34 project was named Project of the Year, in part because the project finished two years ahead of schedule while maintaining a safe construction record despite hazardous site conditions. The Colorado Department of Transportation project was designed by lead firm Jacobs Engineering and subconsultants Ayres Associates, Muller Engineering, RockSol Consulting Group, WSP, and Yeh and Associates. Kiewit Infrastructure Co. was the general contractor.

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Ayres provided the hydraulic analysis and engineering that guided the early design steps in a project that had to reckon with the destructive forces of the Big Thompson River, whose fury after a 21-inch rain event over a few days in Northern Colorado killed eight people and did $2.9 billion in damage, including 23 miles of destruction along U.S. 34, 12 miles of which was virtually erased from the landscape.

Innovations noted by ENR included installing partially grouted riprap beneath the surface along a 2-mile stretch of U.S. 34 to create a more solid foundation, protecting bridge approaches with rocks, moving the road away from the river where possible, and in some cases rerouting the river to make the roadway more resilient in future floods along the busy tourist route.

Ayres Associates is a multidiscipline consulting firm of 310 professionals in Colorado, Wyoming, Wisconsin, and Florida. The firm provides services in water resources, transportation, municipal, structural, and utility engineering.