Geotechnical Storytelling in a Halloween Costume

In honour of Halloween this week, I wanted to share a spooky, eery and certainly nerdy tale of a costume from 2008. Enjoy!

The scene:

October 2008, with an invitation to a Halloween party at a co-workers house with the need for a great costume. You and your bestie/colleague had spent most of the year working on the same project – Highway 97 Four-Laning into Prince George, BC.

So what are these two young engineers to do? Find a couple’s costumes with their partners? Of course, not – we decided on a couple’s costume together!

The Solution:

At work, I had been tasked with designing the soil anchored wall and had spent untold hours calculating and modeling the capacity of each anchor and the requirements to hold back the slope above it. There were revisions upon revisions and at times my head felt like it was spinning. We also attended many meetings with the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure to discuss the project’s specifics, design and receive their feedback.

To create the costume, I visited the local thrift store to find a grey bedsheet to use as the shotcrete wall. I used felt for the anchor ends and their bearing plates and sewed them to the wall. Luckily, I had learned to sew as a child from my mother, a skill that was essential for pulling off this look.

“K” had been working on the geotechnical design for the highway including sections with excavation and other segments with various thicknesses of fill. She too had gone in circles looking at highway alignment, fill thickness, road base layers and potential borrow sources.

To create her costume, she found a black robe at a Halloween store along with a collection of Hot Wheels at a thrift store to set the foundation (pun intended) for Highway 97. Electrical tape in white and yellow created the road lines to bring the whole project to life.

The costume was a huge hit at the party. The party attendees included:

• The senior geotechnical engineer of record for the project,
• The CAD design technologist who not only hosted the party but had to put up with our infinite number of drawing revisions during the project, and
• Many other colleagues who were impressed/concerned(?) by our commitment to the job.

Ahead of the times:

Construction of the project occurred between 2009 and 2010 so our costume was, in fact, the first real-life prototype of the final project to be built. These days, projects can be modeled in 3D, shown with digital twins and presented with virtual-reality headsets. But in 2008, it took a little engineering and creative ingenuity and a costume party problem to come up with this solution.

Highway 97 and the wall in August 2024. Embedded map courtesy of Google Maps Street View.

Have you ever created a costume with an earth science tone? I’d love to hear all about it! Reach out to me with your story.