WSP USA

Parsons Brinckerhoff

Company type	Private
Industry	Civil engineering, Planning
Founded	1885
Founder	William Barclay Parsons
Headquarters	One Penn Plaza, New York , United States
Number of locations	London, Hong Kong, Sydney
Area served	International
Key people	James L. Lammie (Chairman) George Pierson (CEO) Richard A. Schrader (CFO)
Products	Project Management Consulting
Revenue	$2.34 billion (2008)
Operating income	$100.2 million (2008)
Net income	$73.9 million (2008)
Number of employees	Approximately 13,000 worldwide
Subsidiaries	Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, Inc. (PBQD) Parsons Brinckerhoff Construction Services, Inc. PB Facilities, Inc. PB Asia PB Transit & Rail Systems PB Power PB Air PB Water
Website	www.pbworld.com

Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) is a planning, engineering, and program and construction management organization. The company has been involved in planning and designing some of the world's largest public works projects, such as Boston's Big Dig, Britain's rail system Network Rail, the Sabiya power plant in Kuwait, Cairo's Metro, and the Deep Tunnel Sewerage System in Singapore. Its Chairman is James L. Lammie and Chief Executive Officer is Keith J. Hawksworth.

Company history

The company was started by General William Barclay Parsons, who opened an office in 1885 in Manhattan, where the company headquarters are still located. Parsons was known as an ambitious and exceptional engineer. The first undertaking of his new company was the design of New York City's first subway, the IRT. Completed in 1904, this line—extending from lower Manhattan to Harlem—remains the world's most heavily used rapid transit system. Parsons's second major project was to design a 1,000-mile railroad in China, from Hankow to Canton, a line that is still in use today. In 1906, Henry M. Brinckerhoff—a pioneering highway engineer—brought his expertise in electric railways to the firm.

In 1964, Walter S. Douglas led the design and supervision of the construction team for NORAD (North American Air Defense Command Center), a hardened underground facility under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Additional projects through the years included the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), the George P. Coleman Memorial Bridge, and the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

When work began in 1996 on the 2,400-megawatt Sabiya power plant in Kuwait, Merz & McLellan (newly acquired) was responsible for design, project management, and site supervision. PBQD was in charge of project management services for the H-3 highway, the largest construction project in Hawaii history, completed in 1997. That year it won a contract, with CH2M Hill Ltd., for the planning, design, construction, and project management of a $6 billion deep-tunnel sewage collection, treatment, and disposal system in Singapore. PBQD was the prime engineering consultant for the construction of Pearl Harbor Naval Station's Ford Island Bridge, which opened in 1998. It was managing the construction of Cairo's subway, which began in 1986 and was scheduled for completion in 2003.

Four acquisitions were made during 1998, including Booker Associates Inc., a St. Louis-based engineering and architectural firm, and Kennedy & Donkin Group, a British engineering firm. In addition to the aforementioned undertakings, the projects in which PB was taking part at this time included London's $1.4 billion Heathrow Airport Terminal 5; Saudi Arabia's $1.2 billion Ghazlan II Power Station; and Brazil's $500 million Castello-Raposo, Lot 12 toll road.

PB's main job in the 1990s was its work with Bechtel Group as project manager for Boston's Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project, the largest civil engineering project in U.S. history. Authorized in 1987 as a mile-long portion of Interstate 93 that would run through downtown Boston underground, it was also intended to link the Massachusetts Turnpike to Logan Airport by means of a third tunnel through Boston's inner harbor. In 2005, the company worked on the Fulton Street Transit Center project, which includes constructing a new transit hub incorporating six subway stations and connecting 12 operating subway lines in Lower Manhattan. In 2006, PB won the management contract for Palm Jumeirah's infrastructure, which includes providing management to Nakheel, a Dubai developer, for construction of infrastructure, including roads, bridges, marine structures, utilities, power, water and wastewater facilities, and vehicular and utility tunnels between the Palm Jumeirah and the Crescent.

In September 2009 it was announced that PB had agreed to be acquired by Balfour Beatty, a UK-based firm, for $626 million. The deal is conditional on funding from Balfour's investors in a £353m rights issue and agreement of Parsons Brinckerhoff's shareholders.

Organization

PB now provides comprehensive services for all types of infrastructure projects including power, buildings, environment and telecommunications. It has offices in nearly 80 countries around the world. In 2006, PB underwent a corporate restructuring that consolidated PB's six operating companies into three. The three operating divisions are the Americas (North and South America), International (Europe, Africa, Middle East, Asia, Australia), and Facilities (facility operation and maintenance along with U.S. Federal Government contracting).

Company Financial

PB's revenues reached a record $698 million in fiscal 1998. Net income came to nearly $9 million, and the company enjoyed its 23rd consecutive year of increased value per share of stock. PB posted total revenues of $1.69 billion in fiscal year 2006 (FY06), an increase of 16.7% on the $1.45 billion in FY05. The net income of $46.4 million in FY06 was an increase of over 70% in part due to the sale of PB Farradyne. The net income in FY07 and FY08 continued to increase to $62.1 million and 73.9 million respectivly.

Family of firms under Parsons Brinckerhoff Inc Holding

• PB Placemaking
• Parsons Brinckerhoff Ltd
• PB Associates
• Company39.com

Engineering & other related disciplines

Column-generating template families

The templates listed here are not interchangeable. For example, using {{col-float}} with {{col-end}} instead of {{col-float-end}} would leave a <div>...</div> open, potentially harming any subsequent formatting.

Column templates

Type	Family	Handles wiki table code?†	Responsive/ mobile suited	Start template	Column divider	End template
Float	"col-float"	Yes	Yes	{{col-float}}	{{col-float-break}}	{{col-float-end}}
	"columns-start"	Yes	Yes	{{columns-start}}	{{column}}	{{columns-end}}
Columns	"div col"	Yes	Yes	{{div col}}	–	{{div col end}}
	"columns-list"	No	Yes	{{columns-list}} (wraps div col)	–	–
Flexbox	"flex columns"	No	Yes	{{flex columns}}	–	–
Table	"col"	Yes	No	{{col-begin}}, {{col-begin-fixed}} or {{col-begin-small}}	{{col-break}} or {{col-2}} .. {{col-5}}	{{col-end}}

^† Can template handle the basic wiki markup {| | || |- |} used to create tables? If not, special templates that produce these elements (such as {{(!}}, {{!}}, {{!!}}, {{!-}}, {{!)}})—or HTML tags (<table>...</table>, <tr>...</tr>, etc.)—need to be used instead.

See also

• 5-1-1
• Personal rapid transit
• Garden State Parkway
• New Jersey Route 74
• Metro Purple Line (LACMTA)
• Panama Canal expansion project
• Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge
• Dartmouth Bridge
• Lions' Gate Bridge
• Wilson Bridge
• HMCS Athabaskan (G07)
• Massachusetts Turnpike
• Polytechnic University of New York
• Economy of Lebanon
• Project On Government Oversight
• Merz & McLellan
• Parsons
• Henry M. Brinckerhoff

External links

• Official PB website
• PB Project Visualization
• PB Australian website
• PB United Kingdom website