Will Kirby
40, leader of transport sustainability
Hdr
OMAHAH
Helping to improve water quality and sanitation service in Bolivia at the beginning of his career led to Kirby’s passion to build community -related projects and sustainability. He also promoted his desire to increase this effort obtained a master’s degree in Sustainable Systems Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Kirby, the first training engineer work, was a line of transmission engineer, says that taking into account all the ways that a project will affect a community is crucial to its success.
“If you do not take into account the impact on the environment, the community and the resources you have available to build, maintain or operate a project, this project will fail,” he says. “It is quite cut and dry.”
Throughout his career, Kirby has occupied several positions dedicated to improving the environment. It is now directing the development of the Omaha Climate Action Plan, which identifies the city’s risks and vulnerabilities and will include suggested actions to improve preparation and resilience.
As a leader of tasks of the Sustainability Reproduction Book for the South Transport Authority -East Pennsylvania, Kirby directed the coordination between the client and his Sustainability Committee to create a game book and a parent to improve the operational sustainability throughout the organization. His performance helped HDR carry out additional agency work, including a climate resilience plan.
Kirby was also responsible for the project for a viability assessment of the Douglas County landfill near Omaha. He led the team that reviewed their existing conditions and developed an analysis that included the deployment of solar energy production.
Kirby says that the infrastructure sector faces the challenge of getting things to be built without creating pollution or other negative impacts on communities.
“In my perspective we have to discover ways of doing things in a sustainable and durable way while using resources that are given to us,” he says. “It means working closely with all the groups of interest and members of the community who may have a project affected by a project.”
Previous planning is crucial and sometimes a project will not exceed the planning stage.
“You have a lot of checks and balances on a project,” he says. “You want to assure you that the project you are building is the right project.”
When it comes to sustainability, “people usually have the concept that a project will automatically cost more money,” he says. “Sometimes it can be a lot of gaze if they do not consider some more difficult benefits to quantify such as resilience or costs of the life cycle.”
Kirby says it is important to find allies that can foresee the environmental benefits of a project and provide critical information.
“Try to emphasize or maximize things that can be done [for sustainability] And obtaining this information to the leaders is certainly big, “he says.” It makes it very sense or it is effective to find champions that understand or achieve it, so they talk about it, and see their ability to influence the results in the design of sustainable development. “
Kirby devotes his free time to volunteering. Participate in the shadow of work and are presented to elementary school students to foster interest in STEM. It also regularly helps inmates and students interested in sustainability and resilience to explore opportunities.
As an ambassador to the HDR Foundation, Kirby defends donations and promotes participation and grants colleagues applications to help spread resources to support organizations.
