The Deep Foundations Institute issues a call for nominations for this year’s batch of major industry awards. Nominations are due by April 15.

Three awards will be presented at the group’s Annual Conference on Deep Foundations, held in Oct. 21-24 in Atlanta. Those awards include:

• The Outstanding Project Award. This honor goes to one distinctive geotechnical project by a DFI member, chosen from a list of submitted projects. The award was presented last year to representatives of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the Treviicos-Soletanche Joint Venture (TSJV) for a project to reinforce the Wolf Creek Dam in south central Kentucky.
• The Distinguished Service Award. The DFI bestows this award on people whose “exceptionally valuable contributions” advanced the deep foundations industry. The 2013 winner, Arturo L. Ressi di Cervia, is a recognized expert in slurry walls and served on the group’s board of trustees from 1990 to 2010.
• The C. William Bermingham Award. This award, named for the DFI past president, recognizes innovation. Last year’s award went to the Thermal Integrity Profiler (TIP) developed by Foundations & Geotechnical Engineering LLC of Plant City, Fla., and Pile Dynamics of Cleveland. At the time, the group called the device “unlike any other system of assessing quality and integrity of cast-in-place concrete foundations.” The device uses the heat generated by curing cement to assess the quality of drilled shafts, bored piles, augered piles, and drilled displacement piles.

The fourth major honor, the Ben C. Gerwick Award for Innovation in Design and Construction of Marine Foundations, recognizes excellence in marine engineering. In 2013, the award went to two Bauer Group companies, Bauer Maschinen GmbH and Bauer Spezialtiefbau GmbH. The DFI recognized their efforts to design, develop and deploy the Bauer Seabed Drill (BSD) 3000. The rig is lowered to the ocean floor and operated from a support vessel, rather than a jack-up or large semi-submersible derrick. This award will be presented during the DFI’s Marine Foundations Seminar held in August in New York.

For more details on individual awards and nomination forms, visit www.dfi.org/awardslectures.asp.

The DFI is an international association of contractors, engineers, academics and suppliers in the deep foundations industry with more than 3,300 members worldwide. For more information about the Deep Foundations Institute, visit www.dfi.org.