Ken Johnson receives ASCE award

Ken Johnson receives ASCE award September, 2018 Ken Johnson is the 2018 recipient of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Can-Am Civil Engineering Amity Award in recognition for his outstanding work with civil engineers across the pan arctic region of North America to advance professional relationships between the civil engineers in the United States of America and Canada.

Ken is a distinguished and highly experienced engineer with an expertise in cold region engineering. He has served the engineering profession with distinction for 30 years, and is very well known for his work with northern Indigenous communities, all of which face formidable service delivery and infrastructure challenges. He is an extremely rare individual in that he functions as a public intellectual in addition to his engineering duties, promoting the understanding of the history of engineering and contemporary northern engineering. He has spoken to many audiences over the past 30 years, both within and beyond the profession, and has organized and participated in conferences and workshops in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, Alaska, Greenland, and Finland.

He has been a true leader in encouraging the recognition and celebration of Canada-American engineering achievements, recognizing the vital collaborative efforts that have done a great deal to shape the history and evolution of the Far North. He orchestrated the successful nomination for the White Pass and Yukon Railway for an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark designation, which was awarded in 1994. Ken was delighted to represent the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering both in the nomination process and at the ceremonies held in Juneau, and Skagway, as well as Whitehorse Yukon. In 1996 Ken championed a similar recognition of the Alaska Highway, and on that occasion, he was a key participant in both the formal application process and the recognition events in Fairbanks, Alaska, Whitehorse, Yukon, and Dawson Creek, British Columbia.

Cross-border and collaborative initiatives typically have difficulty securing appropriate recognition. Because such projects belong in two or more jurisdictions and involve two or more

sets of engineers, companies and workers, they often struggle to be promoted by the participating countries. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of Canada and America, which share such long national boundaries, and which have hosted numerous cross-border construction and development projects.

Ken was determined to rectify this by working with his peers in Alaska and the lower 48 to select two Canada American projects and sought overdue recognition for them. The narrow gauge White Pass and Yukon Route railway, associated with the world-famous Klondike Gold Rush, is a truly impressive feat of civil engineering that connects tidewater in Alaska with the navigable headwaters of the Yukon River system at Whitehorse, Yukon. The Alaska Highway, a collaborative project of the US Army Corps of Engineers and the United States Public Roads Administration, covered some 1500 miles from northern British Columbia, through the Yukon Territory, to Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaska Highway was built in extreme haste, under wartime pressures, and stands to this day as an enduring illustration of the friendship and mutual assistance of our two countries.

Ken has also had a significant presence in the broadcast media as an on-camera and off camera resource during the Yukon and Alaska filming of the 2005 History Channel Documentary on the history of the White Pass and Yukon Railway titled “Wits, Grits and Guts”.

He has also made important contributions to International Cold Regions Conferences. The first international effort was in 1999 as organizer, for the CSCE’s First international cold regions conference, which attracted participants from the US. Ken was also a contributor to the Arctic Encyclopedia, published in 2005 with 8 entries in the 3 volume publication.

More recently which Ken was an invited speaker to the Conference on Water Innovations for Health Arctic Homes (WIHAH) in Anchorage, Alaska, September 2016 attending on behalf of the National Research Council of Canada. He also represented the Canadian Polar Commission as an invited specialist participant at Workshop on Water and Sanitation Innovations, United States Arctic Research Commission (2013) in Anchorage, giving a presentation on “Canadian Operation and Maintenance Approaches and Sustainability”. Most recently, Ken made several presentations on northern water and sanitation at the Second Congress of the University of the Arctic, in Oulo, Finland (September, 2018).

Another facet of Ken's activities on behalf of northern Canada and Alaska is his extensive involvement with the Northern Territories Water and Wastewater Association (NTWWA). He has served as an organizer, facilitator, presenter for the annual conferences over the past 15 years, an international ambassador for the organization, a board member for 10 years, and the editor of the association's annual journal. In fact, the 13th edition of the journal was dedicated to an international audience. Increasingly, Ken has been publishing articles featuring Arctic infrastructure and research originating in Alaska and other circumpolar jurisdictions.

Ken is also a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineers, an honour he received in June, 2018.