Northeast Engineers sees growth in Middle East

Middletown’s Northeast Engineers & Consultants Inc. has found a way to work 16 hours on most days.
When Principal A. Eric Offenberg is sitting at a dinner party in Dubai at 5:30 p.m., he can tell investors and developers that he’s dining with that he’ll be able to have answers to their questions in the morning. That’s because back in Middletown, where the engineering firm has a staff of about 50, there are – at that moment – engineers arriving at the office at the beginning of their workday.
“So I can teleconference with them, at the beginning of their day,” Offenberg said. “Then go to bed and when I wake up the answers are there, waiting on my computer.”
Aside from the ease of communication, there are other reasons to grow your business in the Middle East, said Chief Executive Officer Blake Henderson. With the weak dollar and a low rate of new construction during the recent economic downturn, the United States hasn’t been the best place to work on infrastructure.
So Henderson’s firm, which has been in Middletown for about 22 years and operates internationally as Secure Global Engineers, has been pushing during the last five years to grow its presence in the Middle East. Between constructing more than 15,000 homes in Iraq, creating a sewer system for Baghdad and its emerging business in Dubai, the firm has created a business model that’s based on about 80 percent of its projects coming from overseas.
During the past few months, Northeast has been working out a deal to acquire another engineering firm, Maguire Group Inc., which has a Providence office. Now, the two firms are working together on Middle East and federal projects under the name SGE Maguire JV, Henderson said.
And now the firm has announced that it will act as the master engineering firm for the infrastructure of Africa, a series of 23 islands being built by Russian firm Capricorn Limited as part of Dubai’s The World project. That’s the 300-island development that’s under way off the coast, in the Arabian Gulf.
“For us, the design work for a project this big is enormous. It could lead to a very high growth rate for us next year,” Henderson said of the contract signed a few weeks ago. “That’s our biggest award, to date, in terms of its scale.”
The 23 islands make up about 346 acres of the $14 billion project. When completed, the total 300 islands – expected to range up to 20 acres each – could be almost the size of 6,200-acre Block Island.
Africa, which will have a mixture of Five-Star and Seven-Star hotels, will have room for 14,000 people.
Northeast currently has six Americans working in Dubai – it also has a villa and apartment in the city – and partners with a Lebanese firm that has 40 engineers in the city. Northeast is now setting up a new office space in Dubai to accommodate expected growth. The firm also has been awarded a contract for Dubai Festival City and the creation of a sales center for developer Emaar in Dubailand. It has worked on proposals for sections of the city and a few bridges. “In Dubai, they’re building many of these things for the very first time, so the local talent doesn’t have the experience that we do,” Henderson explained.
For The World, Capricorn Limited had expected to only buy two islands, Offenberg said, pointing to an initial rendering of the Africa project in his office last week. “But then they decided, as everyone does in Dubai, that they wanted to do better than everybody else.”
So Capricorn bought another 21 islands and created a plan to connect them into two large islands with interior lagoons. Making that plan a reality is now what Northeast is charged with, Offenberg said.
“We have to make sure it works,” Henderson said.
The Africa project will have a marina with 500 to 800 slips, about 50 villas that will retail between $30 million to $50 million each. It will also be self-sustaining and have it’s own energy plant for at least the next six years – eventually, as part of The Universe project, it will have a connection to the mainland. Northeast’s conceptual design for the Africa project should be competed in three months and construction could start early next year. &#8226