O'Connell and President Blake Henderson.
Northeast Engineers & Consultants Inc.
Owner: Blake Henderson, president and founder
Location: 42 Valley Road, Middletown
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Type of Business: a multidisciplinary engineering and consulting firm
Employees: 39
Annual Revenues: approximately $4 million
Northeast Engineers & Consultants Inc. is a one-stop shop engineering firm. From land-use studies and surveying and site planning to environmental and water quality testing, soil structure analysis and waterfront engineering, Northeast does it all.
“It has been effective for us to be multidisciplinary because we can do everything in-house,” said Blake Henderson, founder and president. Northeast said it has been recognized as one of the largest multidisciplinary engineering firms in New England.
Henderson, who founded the firm in 1987, is an engineering generalist by trade. After taking a master’s program at Virginia Tech that allowed him to be a general civil engineer (he said it was a program heavy in math), he began work in residential land development.
“I got caught in the recession and had to downsize, and I realized I was too focused with one type of client,” he said. “Since I had a broad knowledge (of engineering) I decided to use it and expand my reach.”
During the next year, Henderson acquired a staff of engineers in different disciplines, and began going door to door, peddling his services to all of the major Rhode Island companies and groups. He secured contracts with the Department of Defense, local buildings and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, after repeatedly knocking on its door. Henderson has a two-year contract to perform all engineering projects at the base, and a five-year contract with the Air Force National Guard and Army National Guard for facilities engineering at Quonset.
It seems the effort has paid off – now Northeast Engineers boasts clients including different branches of the military, Gilbane, the Narragansett Bay Commission, Raytheon, GTECH, Hyatt, Marriott and a number of organizations and developers proposing some major Rhode Island developments.
Northeast Engineering & Consultants – which has two Middletown offices, and an office in Easton, Mass., and Ventura, Calif. – provided civil engineering and environmental and coasting permitting for Portsmouth’s Carnegie Abbey Golf Club, which opened in 2000 on Narragansett Bay and redesigned the site plan for the Newport National Golf Course.
Save The Bay hired Northeast to do a variety of different engineering tests and evaluations for its learning center off Allens Avenue, the site of a former dump.
In order to make the ground sturdy enough for a community learning center, an engineer at the firm devised a system to hard-pack the soil.
Repeatedly dropping a 12-ton block onto the soil with a crane, Northeast was able to make the site safe for construction. The firm also did a number of waterfront, water and soil tests to evaluate the edge of the property, which was designated for a wetland restoration project, a living classroom for students.
“We did all of the waterfront engineering, all of the water quality testing,” Henderson said. “We calculated what a 100-year storm would do to the center and landfill,” and stacked stones around the property in a way that would keep the land safe from erosion.
Northeast owes much of its organization and efficiency to Geographic Information Systems, which allows engineers to access property, land-use environmental and other information at the click of a mouse. The firm is linked to the Rhode Island GIS, which provides data for the entire state.
“We have become something different than what I was trained (to be) as a civil engineer,” Henderson said. “Where we used to have slide rules, now we have gone high-tech. When we look at a property we need to determine where the sewers are, the water table, the impact the development would have on the surrounding area and even the traffic flow,” and that information is attainable using GIS. “Speed is essential in a busy marketplace.”
Henderson and his engineers always show clients a timetable on the permitting process; many developers invest $3 million or $4 million before the first permit is approved, and they want to be assured that the process will go smoothly and as scheduled.
Permitting is the biggest hurdle for engineers, he said, and the system is also outdated.
“We have an archaic system – we have two (environmental) regulatory bodies, the Coastal Resources Management Council and the DEM but neither work together (as one),” he said. “It’s well intended but not well organized.”
It took Northeast two years to get all of the permits for Carnegie Abbey, he said, and things will only get worse as Rhode Island’s population grows.
“Our biggest and best projects are going to be on the coastline, and they’re all fed by streams,” Henderson said. There are environmental issues, archaeological issues because of our Native American heritage and coastal erosion problems.
“We found out that the Battle of Rhode Island took place on the site of Carnegie Abbey, and there’s an old country road in the middle of the golf course” that had to be incorporated into the design, he said. “Every site has problems. We haven’t found that perfect property.”
