Geo-Congress 2026 preview #3: I-15 Reconstruction Project

Geo-Congress is the annual meeting of the Geo-Institute - sort of a geotechnical family reunion. Every year in February or March, our community gathers for amazing keynotes, great technical talks, the biggest geotechnical exhibit hall in North America, and a lot of fun! To prepare for the 2026 conference in Salt Lake City, we bring you a series of live streams featuring case histories from the Intermountain West!

Our third in the series will be presented Tuesday, January 13, at 2pm ET. Steve Bartlett from Terracon and Grant Gummow from the Utah Department of Transportation will present "Competing with Time – Challenges of Soft Ground Engineering for Fast-Paced Projects."

Want to learn more about the Geo-Institute? We're a technical society with about 12,000 members - mostly geotechnical engineers and geologists. Visit geoinstitute.org to get to know us!

Dr. Bartlett is a Senior Consulting Engineer at Terracon. He holds a Ph.D. and B.S. degree in Civil Engineering and Geology, respectively from Brigham Young University. He was worked for Westinghouse, Woodward-Clyde, the Utah Department of Transportation, and the University of Utah. He has considerable experience in soft ground engineering and research, geotechnical earthquake engineering, and accelerated construction of geosystems. He was part of the design team for the I-15 Reconstruction Project in Salt Lake City prior to the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

Grant Gummow is a Geotechnical Engineer with the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT). He has successfully delivered high profile transportation projects using traditional design-bid-build and alternative delivery methods for nearly three decades. Mr. Gummow completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Civil Engineering at Brigham Young University with an emphasis on embankment settlement of lakebed deposits. Grant provides a unique perspective to geotechnical design and operations with his involvement both as a designer and afterwards as an Owner’s geotechnical engineer of the I-15 Reconstruction Project, which was the largest design-build project ever undertaken at its time and instrumental to the success of the 2002 Winter Olympics. From an early age, Grant had a passion for playing in the dirt, a pursuit which, despite his mother's concerns, ultimately led him to become a geotechnical engineer.

Check out the first Geo-Congress 2026 preview on the Teton Dam failure!