Acres Manitoba wins top Manitoba award for hydro station studies

The goal of the Awards of Excellence Program is to encourage Manitobas consulting engineers to be creative, innovative, and strive for excellence in all that they do, said Cheng Wong, P.Eng., chair of the committee in charge of the annual awards for Consulting Engineers of Manitoba.
Mr. Wong was speaking at the gala awards dinner attended by 300 guests from industry, government and Manitoba’s business community.
Engineers bring ideas to life and touch every aspect of modern life,” continued Mr. Wong. “It is our privilege to serve society in such a meaningful way and our responsibility to set the bar high and demand nothing but the best from our profession.
Acres Manitoba Limited won the top award known as the Keystone Award for their project that scored highest overall. The project is a field-based data collection program that they developed for monitoring the sedimentation and erosion impacts related to three generating stations for Manitoba Hydro. The stations are the Wuskwatim, for which work is beginning, and two proposed hydro stations, Keeyask and Conawapa.
Awards of Excellence went to:
? ND LEA Inc. (Infrastructure), for Temporary Railway Detours for the Red River Floodway Expansion.
? Earth Tech (Canada) Inc. (Industrial) – Brandon Generating Station Cooling Tower Biocide System Replacement
? UMA Engineering Ltd. (Innovation) – Twin Red River Floodway Bridges on Trans Canada Highway No. 1 East
? J.R. Cousin Consultants Ltd. (Resource Development) – Holland Chlorine Dioxide Disinfection
Awards of Merit were won by:
? Crosier Kilgour & Partners Ltd. (Building Engineering) – University of Manitoba Engineering and Information Technology Centre
? KGS Group (Infrastructure) – Plaza at the Forks
? SNC-Lavalin Engineers & Constructors Inc. (Industrial) – Dorion Fish Culture Station Renovation
? ND LEA Inc. (Innovation); Pocket Suites Afffordable Housing
? KGS Group (Resource Development) – Hawthorne Flood Pumping Station
This year, 19 projects were submitted.
The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Alfred John Poetker, P.Eng.
The citation says that “throughout 42 years of practice, Alf Poetker has demonstrated exceptional leadership, integrity, innovation, diligence and respect for his fellow engineers and the citizens of Manitoba.”
Mr. Poetker launched his own consulting practice in 1978, which expanded and was eventually acquired in 1990 by the Cochrane Group. He was president of the company and now works part-time for Genivar, the successor to Cochrane.
He was a special advisor to the Manitoba Clean Environment Commission, was an expert
witness and volunteered as an instructor for water and waster water plant operators.
He has served on the board and as president of Consulting Engineers of Manitoba and at the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Manitoba he has taken leadership roles in facilitating the process by which foreign-trained engineers become registered. He also helped negotiate to settle the recent dispute between the province’s engineers and architects.
In his free time, Alf volunteers for a Community Based Language Program for immigrants. From 1996 to 2004, Alf was on the board of the Family Life Network, a multi-national non-profit Christian media production agency providing programming in 16 languages to over 1,000 media outlets world-wide.
The Lifetime Achievement Award’s title sponsors are XL Insurance and Oldfield Kirby Esau.