BKF Engineers Add New Awards to Long List of Honors

By Hacienda Network Staff Writer

Now in 101st Year, Firm's Work is Seen Throughout Bay Area

BKF Engineers, a firm whose Tri-Valley office has been a feature of Hacienda since its inception in 2001, has received recognition for a number of its projects in the 2016 ENR awards. They are the latest accolades for a firm that celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, with a history of providing civil engineering, planning, and surveying services for some of the Bay Area's most recognized projects.

"We've been involved in the Bay Lights project on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge," says Natalina Bernardi, PE, LEED, a vice president and principal with the firm. "Locally, we've been involved in the expansion of I-580 from San Ramon Boulevard all the way down to Greenville and the Tri-Valley area. We've also been involved with the City of Pleasanton's project in the I-680/Bernal interchange."

"Another local project is the new retail-commercial-residential development at the corner of Bernal and Stanley Boulevard," adds Daniel Schaefer, PE, LEED AP, also a BKF vice president and principal, "and then we've been working since 1998 on the redevelopment of Alameda Naval Air Station. The first project on the actual base itself is about ready to start construction next month."

BKF is also currently working on a number of campus and headquarters projects for some of the most well-known tech firms in the world, although they are unable to mention their clients publicly.

"We've been ranked number one in the Silicon Valley Business Journal for the last five years," says Bernardi. "BKF has more engineers in Silicon Valley - that's described as Santa Clara County and San Mateo County - than any other engineering firm, so we're a huge force in the engineering services field here in the Bay Area."

The firm's prominence was demonstrated in the 2016 ENR awards, where BKF received five California Best Project Awards and two ENR Global Awards. For example, the Hacienda office played a key role in the Highway 101/Route 116 Lakeville Interchange in Petaluma, for which they received an award of merit in the highway/bridge category.

"We worked with the Sonoma County Transportation Agency on that project, and the focus of that particular work was to improve accessibility from 101 and route 116," Bernardi says. "We provided improvements for accessibility so that vehicles could get in and out through the interchange a lot more effectively."

High-profile projects are nothing new to BKF. In its long history, the firm has contributed to projects including master planning the Lockheed Martin facilities in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale as well as Stanford University and Stanford Shopping Center in the 1950s; Hetch Hetchy projects and a pumping station in the 60s; Phase II of Stanford Shopping Center in the 70s; NASA Ames Research Center, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Genentech, Santana Row, Alameda Naval Air Station, Oracle World Headquarters, and Palm Drive at Stanford in the 80s and 90s; Santana Row, the Highway 152/156 Interchange, Honda Port of Entry as well as preliminary work on SVBX (BART - Fremont to San Jose), VA Palo Alto Medical Center Improvements, and SMART, a rail project in Sonoma and Marin counties in the 2000s; and the Netflix Campus, Gerald Desmond Bridge, VA Palo Alto Campus, Transbay (Salesforce) Tower, SMART, Devil's Slide Trail, Hunter's Point, ParkMerced, Treasure Island, Marin-Sonoma Narrows, and countless hospitals, schools, offices, parks, roads, trails, and more in the last five years.

"Going forward, we are embarking on a lot of projects that benefit the Tri-Valley community that we're really excited about," says Bernardi. "One is working with Dublin and Livermore on the Dublin Boulevard extension project, planning for a roadway extension from the existing terminus at Fallon and carrying it all the way down through to Livermore. We're also working with the City of Pleasanton on analyzing each of their eight interchanges on the 580 and 680 corridors in order to determine what improvements could be made to make them safer facilities for bicycles and pedestrians, offering improvements that could be planned for and implemented rather than waiting for the last minute."

"On the private side, we are working on several workforce housing projects," Schaefer adds. "In Pleasanton, there's a senior living facility that is under construction now at Kottinger Gardens. It's a half-acre site and they've got multiple phases where they're trying to retain the existing residences and build new and move the residents back in. It's a fairly complicated, multi-phase project."

The company has also been recognized for its working environment. The Bay Area News Group named BKF the best place to work in the region in 2015, one factor which may account for the growth of their Hacienda office. "We opened this office in 2001 with about seven permanent people, and we're now at about 45 permanent individuals here, both survey and engineers."

For additional information on BKF Engineers, access the company's web site at www.bkf.com.

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