Tonia Jurbin, Senior Geotechnical Engineer, BC Hydro, will visit the CE Faculty and give a 40 min open seminar Tuesday Feb. 4th at 15:00 in room 158 in VR II. The seminar is open to everyone.
BC Hydro (BCH) is Canada’s third largest electric utility serving 1.9 million customers within the western coastal province of British Columbia. For most of the last 23 years Tonia has been working in the transmission engineering division in transmission maintenance. This group ensures the security of some 18,000 kilometres of transmission line and right of ways throughout some of the most challenging terrain in Canada. Many kilometres of transmission lines are extremely remote, accessible only by boat, helicopter, ATV or hiking; as such, her list of safety training is extensive. Tonia is also involved with distribution system construction, capital projects, and seismic upgrades.
The biggest threat to transmission line security is natural hazards including flooding, erosion, rock or snow avalanche, landslides, creeping or unstable soils, snow and ice loading, and fire damage. Secondary threats such as encroachment, danger and hazard trees, vehicle accidents, vandalism and theft also occur but the risk to the security of the lines from secondary hazards is much smaller.
Tonia will be discussing landslides, including highlighting sites that have had long term and emergency response issues and illustrating the decisions that had to be made as to whether a site is safe for BCH crew to enter and make repairs.She will also be discussing structure site protection and mitigation strategies.
Tonia has also been working as a freelance writer since the late 1990’s (www.toniajurbin.com) focusing mainly on construction and engineering and is currently teaching ‘Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering’ to the 2014 graduating class of Civil Engineers at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.