Alumni Profile

In 1969, Ken Stinson (MS 1970 CEE) was a Stanford graduate student in need of a summer job. He signed on for an internship with the construction company Peter Kiewit Sons’, Inc. which was building a portion of San Francisco’s BART subway system. Today, he is the chairman and former CEO of Kiewit, guiding a $5 billion-a-year construction and mining giant that is responsible for some of the biggest infrastructure projects in U.S. and Canadian history.

What are some of the most interesting Kiewit projects right now?

The closest large project in terms of proximity to Stanford is the building of a big portion of the new San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge from Yerba Buena Island over to Oakland. We’re almost complete with our contracts, which total nearly $1.5 billion. Eventually the existing bridge will be taken down. This is a replacement because they could not bring the existing structure built in the 1930’s up to earthquake standards.

Among other projects currently underway are the widening of about 100 kilometers of highway from Vancouver, British Columbia to Whistler in time for the 2012 Winter Olympics, building a new runway at O’Hare Airport in Chicago and the construction of 3 new coal fired power plants under design build contracts.

What are some of the historical projects you’re most proud of?

We constructed a fair amount of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco including the Transbay Tube that takes you under the bay from San Francisco to Oakland. We also constructed more lane miles of the original Interstate Highway system than any other contractor.

We’re also responsible for two of the largest offshore oil platforms of their kind. Bullwinkle is the tallest traditional steel structure, known as a “jacket,” ever built. At more than 1,300 ft., it is taller than the Sears Tower in Chicago, but most of it is underwater. We also built the largest floating structure in the world: a massive concrete platform now anchored a couple of hundred miles off the Newfoundland coast to develop an oil field called Hibernia.

Since the bridge collapse in Minnesota a lot of people have been wondering about the state of our infrastructure. Is there a problem?

There is a problem, clearly. All variety of studies, including the principal one from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), have pointed to the need to repair and replace a meaningful portion of our bridge infrastructure. It was obviously a tragic incident. But it really has focused the attention of lawmakers and citizens on the need to maintain our infrastructure and, in some cases, replace it. It’s a dramatic and unfortunate example of how people take the infrastructure that we have in the U.S. for granted, whether it is driving over a bridge, turning a light switch on, flushing a toilet or turning on the water. They expect that it will be there and often times they don’t appreciate the cost and the need to spend money to keep it—particularly in the case of bridges and highways—in safe shape. People drove over that bridge in Minneapolis —thousands and thousands of people, thousands and thousands of times—and thought nothing of it.

So it’s a matter of investment or is there a more fundamental problem?

There is not some secret hazard lurking out there that we don’t know about. It’s been studied. We know about it. We just haven’t had the political will to adequately fund doing what needs to be done. And we’ve postponed and postponed. People do that sometimes in their homes. They’ve got a roof that leaks maybe a little and they keep putting it off and putting it off and it gets worse and worse. I think we’ve done that with our infrastructure.

How has construction technology evolved over the last few decades?

Significant advancements in construction materials and improvements in equipment productivity and reliability have perhaps been the most interesting. For example, the concrete and reinforcing steel that we put in place to build our highways in the 1950s experienced significant deterioration, particularly in areas where we have hard winters and deal with salting and freeze/thaw cycles.  Today the strengths and the quality of concretes have improved significantly, as have methods for protecting the reinforcing steel from corrosion.

The NAE recently elected you as a member. What did that recognition, along with a recent award from ASCE, mean to you? 

I was very honored. You’ll perhaps think I’m being falsely modest, but the awards were clearly recognitions of contributions made to our industry by our company and by our people. Probably one of the biggest transitions we, at Kiewit, made as an organization is going from the traditional separation of  bidding and building a project to combining the design and building under one responsibility.  Fifteen years ago we were wary of being involved with any design responsibility. But the world has changed and the mode of contract for delivering projects has changed.  As a company, we’ve been the leader in this transition.  But I don’t take credit for it. I’m the beneficiary of recognition for the company’s accomplishments.

So what was your career path? 

When I graduated from Notre Dame with a civil engineering degree I really didn’t quite know what I was going to do. But I knew one thing: It was 1964 and I was pretty certain I was going to get drafted.   And I was. So I joined the Navy and went to the Officer Candidate School and into the Civil Engineering Corps.  I then volunteered for the SEABEES, which is the construction arm of the Navy.  I served two and a half tours in Vietnam as a Company Commander responsible for building highways, bridges, and cantonments. At the time we called it “disposable infrastructure” because on occasion we’d no sooner get a bridge built than somebody would blow it up. That’s where I really got my first hands-on experience with construction and working with people and managing people.  Coming out of that, I knew without any question I wanted to have a career in construction. It was actually a very positive experience. I got a lot of responsibility at a young age and under some arduous circumstances. It was a 24-hour a day, 7-days-a-week business, so I learned a lot about managing people in a variety of ways.

Immediately after I came out of the service I went to graduate school at Stanford. I started in the spring semester in April of 1969. Then I needed to get to work and make a little money and so I worked for Kiewit that summer. We were building a BART station in San Francisco, the Glen Park station. I worked that summer and then finished school the following April and went back to work for Kiewit.

At that point in time, we had just finished the San Francisco Transbay Tube and were the low bidder to build a similar tunnel in New York City across the East River from Manhattan to Queens. I was assigned to that project and was in New York for three-and-a-half years. I started as an engineer but ended up managing a portion of the job. Later, I went to Washington State for two bridge projects over the Columbia River: one in eastern Washington between Pasco and Kennewick and the other, a portion of the I-205 bridge between Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, Wa. Then in 1980, I was assigned to a $425 million project in Baltimore to build a big tunnel under Baltimore Harbor.  At the time, it was the largest interstate highway contract every let.  In 1982 I came back to Omaha and I’ve been here ever since.

How did Stanford help prepare you for this?

It was a great help. Stanford had a very strong construction management program.  Clark Oglesby was the visionary and enthusiastic leader and he put together a very strong faculty, including people like John Fondahl and Henry Parker. It was a great blend of individuals with academic backgrounds and construction backgrounds. Stanford offered an excellent platform for expanding my knowledge in a variety of construction areas.  For example, I learned the state of the art, at the time, scheduling methodology.  There was also an excellent program on productivity improvement utilizing methodically from the industrial sector and applying it to construction practices.  Those two had a very positive impact on me.   There was a lot of other course work that took my knowledge to the next level in a fairly short period of time.   And I was really ready for it at that time.