Engineer retires after 1K projects, including at T-Dome and maybe your kid’s school

It’s fair to say much of Tacoma’s current landscape took shape on Don Scott’s watch.

“My kids will tell you that as I go around Tacoma, I can almost point out hundreds of buildings and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I designed that one or I designed this one,’” Scott told The News Tribune recently. “They got tired of hearing that as they were growing up.”

Scott, 64, retired at the end of June as senior principal at PCS Structural Solutions in Tacoma, though in retirement he will continue to consult for PCS.

He’s also one of the nation’s few wind-design experts, and his passion and work in that area isn’t slowing down.

He originally joined the 15-person team at Chalker Engineers in 1982. In 1987, Scott, Dan Putnam and Jim Collins purchased the firm, becoming Chalker, Putnam, Collins & Scott Inc.

In the two firms’ combined history, they “touched at least the majority of all commercial buildings in Tacoma,” he told The News Tribune in a recent phone interview.

PCS in its work as a structural engineering firm today has 73 employees with offices in Seattle, Tacoma and Portland.

Scrolling through the firm’s projects page is basically a tour through most major medical and school buildings in the area, not to mention casinos and apartments, among other sites.

Forty years and more than 1,000 projects over his career, Scott ticks off a short list of projects he’s been involved in through the years: Tacoma General Hospital, St. Joseph Medical Center, Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup.

The school projects number “at least 600-700 through the 40 years,” he said.

“I actually worked on the additions to the Fawcett Elementary (in Tacoma) that is just getting torn down to get replaced with the new Fawcett Elementary School that our firm is doing,” he noted.

“You don’t think about how much of the community is built around the schools that are there, how many of the community activities and everything are built around the schools ... as the community grows,” he said.

One of his more memorable projects was with the Tacoma Dome. As he described, major acts coming in used to need outside consulting to set up their individual sound and light systems, hanging “thousands and thousands of pounds” of speakers and such from the interior roof structure. Each time, Scott was called in to analyze.

As he recalled, Dome officials quickly grew tired of paying him each time “for a one-off thing.” So they proposed having him design a structural light grid, “where you can define how much we can hang from every point on the grid and not overload the roof structure.”

He designed a structure that can be raised or lowered, in use now on site, as well as the supports for the neon art installations inside. During recent Dome renovations, Scott said, he was involved in the “behind the wall” projects, those not seen by the public including the new performers area.

He will continue as the president of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers and remain on the ASCE 7 Wind Load Subcommittee.

He’s leading efforts to incorporate climate impacts into national standards for environmental loads.

“These standards are more forward-looking instead of relying on historical data to set the basis of our design requirements,” he said in PCS’ announcement of his retirement. “They will lead to more resilient structures that will help our communities respond to and recover from large environmental events such as hurricanes, snow, ice, flood, and rain.”

PCS noted in its announcement that Scott first became inspired in wind design in the late 1970’s by one of his University of Idaho professors.

According to PCS, “The 70’s were also when the last concerted effort had been made to perform wind tunnel research in support of the ASCE 7 Wind Provision, which set the standard for wind codes.

“Recognizing that modern structures require updated data, Scott was an active driver with the ASCE Committee to establish a fundraiser for new wind tunnel studies. The data provided by the studies will inform the next generation wind load standard for ASCE 7-28.”

In retirement, Scott plans to continue working to help set standards in wind design, as well as travel and spend time with family, which includes five kids, “all grown and gone,” he adds, and seven grandchildren.

“That’s probably the biggest thing we enjoy most is just getting the family together and going outdoors and spending time outdoors hiking, or trips,” he said.

“We have a trip to the Mediterranean scheduled for September. So we’ll do a few of those things that just keep us outdoors.”