Suttisak Soralump
President of Southeast Asian Geotechnical Society

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Obituary for Rolf Peter Brenner (1937-2019)

On March 31, 2019, Rolf Peter Brenner passed away after a lengthy illness in Weinfelden in the eastern part of Switzerland, where he had also gone to school in his young days. After graduating from high school, he studied civil engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland, from where he graduated in 1962 with top marks. He gained his first professional experience working for the consulting companies Conrad Zschokke in Geneva, Switzerland and Dames & Moore in San Francisco, California. From 1966 to 1971, he studied soil mechanics and soil dynamics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. His PhD dissertation was concerned with the effect of vegetation on the stability of slopes. Afterwards he returned to Switzerland and worked in the Research Institute of Military Constructions in Zurich, where he carried out studies on the effect of nuclear explosions on soil and underground shelters.

From 1974 to 1981, he was a faculty member seconded by the Swiss Government in the Division of Geotechnical Engineering and the Director of the Soil Mechanics Laboratory at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Bangkok, Thailand. His main research work at AIT was on the geotechnical properties of soft clay in the greater Bangkok region. He was also involved in geotechnical investigations for the new Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. In 1981, he returned to Switzerland and worked for Electrowatt Engineering (nowadays known as Poyry Switzerland) in Zurich. From 1997 onwards, he was an independent geotechnical and dam engineering consultant.

Peter Brenner was involved in dam projects in altogether 34 countries in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe for almost 30 years. He worked on several large embankment dam projects in the Middle East and, in particular, Iran, including the Ataturk dam in Turkey and the Mosul dam in Iraq, two of the largest rockfill dams in the world. For 12 years, he was also the project manager for the safety evaluation of the three large dams along the Daugava River in Latvia. He was also the geotechnical engineer for the foundation design of the 372 m high Liberation Tower in Kuwait.

In 1991, he was involved in the investigation of the massive Randa rockslide near Zermatt in Switzerland and the mudflows caused by the explosion of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines. He was one of the first foreign engineers to inspect the damage to the Sefid Rud buttress dam caused by the magnitude 7.6 Manjil earthquake in Iran, as he was in Iran at the time of the earthquake. Some 45,000 people were killed by this earthquake in the region of the dam. In 2009, he also joined the international team of dam experts, who inspected several dams in China damaged by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which affected about 2000 dams and reservoirs.
Peter Brenner took a keen interest in the activities of the International Commission for Large Dams (ICOLD). He was the Chairman of the ICOLD Committee on Dam Foundations and was a member of the Committee on Embankment Dams until recently. He authored two ICOLD Bulletins on dam foundations and cut-off walls and participated actively in several other geotechnical bulletins. From 1991 to 2016, he attended most of the ICOLD Annual Meetings and Congresses.

Throughout his professional life, Peter Brenner was interested in applied research and published many technical papers on geotechnical problems, large embankment dams and earthquake effects on dams. In his later years, he was a visiting faculty member until 2004 at AIT and IHE Delft International Graduate School for Water and Development and a member of the panel of experts of an Iranian dam project until 2016.

I had the pleasure to work with Peter Brenner on several large dam projects in Albania, Latvia, Thailand and Iran. I also succeeded him as the Swiss-seconded faculty member at AIT in 1980. In the last couple of years, we travelled together to China, Vietnam and Laos, where we had the opportunity to visit various dam projects.

Besides a large number of technical books and journals, Peter Brenner also liked to collect technical reports from all the projects in which he was involved. He once told me that he had shown his impressive personal library to engineers from Mongolia, who told him that it was probably larger than that of the Academy of Technical Sciences in their country.
Peter Brenner was a hard worker and a known perfectionist. Many of his colleagues have fond memories of him and miss him very much.

Martin Wieland, Chairman, ICOLD Committee on Seismic Aspects of Dam Design, c/o Poyry Switzerland, Zurich

May 27, 2019

Obituary Prof. Tien H. Wu (1923-2018)

We are saddened to relay that Dr. Tien H. (T.H.) Wu passed away on Thursday, June 7, 2018. He served as a faculty member at The Ohio State University from 1965 to his retirement in 1994. Professor Wu taught undergraduate and graduate classes in geotechnical engineering on topics such as soil mechanics, rock mechanics, soil properties, advanced soil mechanics, seepage, foundations and earthwork design, and probability and statistics. He remained an active professor emeritus, collaborating with other geotechnical engineers on books and journals.
His research included the topics of strength properties of soil and rock, glaciology in Alaska and Antarctica, stability of embankments and natural slopes, groundwater and seepage, soil-structure interaction of buried tubes, risk and reliability assessment for foundations and slopes, safety of dams, and biotechnical reinforcement of slopes. He had over 90 technical publications resulting from his research and published several books on Soil Mechanics and Soil Dynamics.
Professor Wu’s professional service has included several committees and/or panels of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the National Research Council (Transportation Research Board, Geotechnical Board), the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, and the National Science Foundation.
His many awards include the U.S. Antarctica Service Medal in 1967, the College of Engineering Research Award in 1988, the ASCE State-of-the Art Award in 1990, the Earnest Award from the ASCE Cleveland Section in 2000, and the Ralph B. Peck Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers Geo-Institute in 2008. Professor Wu was elected an ASCE Honorary Member in 2003.

During the Second World War, he served in the Japanese military, an experience which included being near enough to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945 to be affected.

He returned to PWRI after the war ended, and his engineering acumen was immediately needed. Japan experienced a series of severe earthquakes and floods, which further complicated the damage the country, had suffered to its infrastructure during the war. It was one of the most difficult times in the history of Japan, he said to me when I was young. As a civil engineer, in particularly, as a geotechnical engineer, he worked to restore Japan’s infrastructures from the effects of war and natural disasters.

His strength of leadership was an especially important contribution to the design and construction of a great number of important infrastructures; and his work improved projects across a broad range of sectors, including those dealing landslides, road building and pavements, slope stability, flood control, river and coastal dyke engineering, ground investigation and soil test, earth pressure and retaining walls, rock-fill and earth-fill dams, ground subsidence, foundations of long-span bridges, earthquake geotechnical engineering and, eventually, geosynthetic engineering. The breadth of his work was extraordinary, considering how difficult it is to become a specialist in even one of these areas today. After rising to serve as PWRI’s director, he retired in 1970 and entered academia and became a full professor of Civil Engineering of the University of Tokyo, where I was studying as doctoral candidate. In 1977, Prof. Fukuoka transitioned to a professorship at Tokyo University of Science where he remained until his retirement in 1986.As his career progressed; he contributed greatly to multiple professional organizations. He helped establish the Japanese Geotechnical Society (JGS) in 1949 and served as President from 1976 – 1997. He was integral to Tokyo playing host to the 9thInternational Conference on Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, then served as President of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering (now ISSMGE) from 1977-1981.During this period, while at Tokyo University of Science, he started the research on geosynthetic-reinforced soil retaining walls and geomembrane lining at the bottom of reservoirs. The work led him to participat in the 2nd International Conference on Geosynthetics(2ICG) in Las Vegas in 1982. This visit, in turn, led him to contribute to the establishment of the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS) in 1983, working with J. P. Giroud, and other geosthynsetics field colleagues.

Prof. Fukuoka’s work with the IGS founding cannot be overlooked. At that time, most of the geotechnical engineers in Japan did not recognize the importance of Geosynthetic Engineering. He established a technical committee on geosynthetics within the JGS in 1983, an act which led to an IGS chapter in Japan in 1985: the first IGS Chapter. It put the society on a path to grow healthily through establishing domestic and regional organizations (IGS Chapters) around the world. Today, there are 43 IGS Chapters.

It is important to emphasize the framework Prof. Fukuoka set up for the IGS Japanese Chapter. His vision has influenced the strong growth of the IGS overall.

Foremost, he did not establish an independent Japanese Geosynthetics Society; later, he made the group a chapter of Island, thus, all individual and corporate members of the chapter were also IGS members.

Secondly, he recognized the need to allow Japanese to be the primary language of the chapter members’ activities within the chapter itself, even if English was the common language for larger, international engineering gatherings.

To this domestic-industry -growing end, Prof. Fukuoka:
– Published the membership list in Japanese.
– Founded the Japanese -language publication “
– Geotechnical Technical Information”, published three times per year, for sharing geosynthetic case histories, the latest technical information of geosynthetic engineering practice, research updates, and translated information from the IGS News.  Established an annual two- day symposium on geosynthetic engineering, conducted in Japanese and with proceedings. These proceedings were eventually graded up to the annual Geosynthetics Engineering Journal, which contains peer-reviewed technical papers in Japanese or English.

The importance of these decisions has been validated by the healthy and strong activities of IGS Japan over the past 30 years; and Prof. Fukuoka’s influence through that first IGS Chapter can be felt in the formation and activities of the next 42 national and regional chapters that have been added of the IGS since.

Reported by Fumio Tatsuoka, IGS Past President

Memories of Professor Masami Fukuoka