Victor Milligan was the founding partner, with Dr. H.Q.Golder, of Golder Associates. He has been viewed as a world-class athlete and outstanding leader and civil engineer.

From the company’s earliest days, Victor had a clear view of what Golder could become. He was instrumental in developing an ownership structure in which shares would be widely held among active employees rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few founders. Golder’s culture of employee ownership, technical excellence, entrepreneurism, trust, and integrity can largely be traced to his leadership.

Writing in Golder’s 50th anniversary historical overview in 2010, John Boyd noted: Victor Milligan “was an incredibly talented, warm, and personable individual. Everyone he met came under the spell of his charm and, perhaps more importantly for the company, succumbed to his vision of an open, collegial environment for people with strong technical capability, focused above all else on doing high quality work. He set the philosophical groundwork for the firm and persuaded all of us to take on the world.”

In 2004, while thinking about his contribution to Golder and the way he ran the company, Victor made a series of comments about life, including:

• Live a broad life and live with passion.

• Always go for the best you can in everything you do – from food, to people, to work to sport.

• Success is like a moving target that you can never quite achieve. The journey is the most important.

• God has given us life to enjoy it. Make the most of life. Life is not always kind, but is always rich – you learn from every experience – good or bad.

• Treat a client as a person – they are people first and a client second.

• Measure yourself against the best and be on a constant search for excellence.

Born in Northern Ireland, Victor graduated from Queen’s University Belfast with a B.Sc (First Class Honours) in Civil Engineering in 1951, and obtained an M.Sc from the same university for research in soil mechanics one year later. After working for two years for James Wlliamson & Partners in Glasgow on hydroelectric construction in Scotland and a power station in Belfast with several geotechnical challenges, Victor was awarded a Research Fellowship in soil mechanics at Purdue University.

Dr. Victor Milligan (1929 - 2009)

From school boy days, Victor had been a gifted middle distance runner. He captained the Northern Ireland team at the 1954 British Empire Games in Vancouver, where he finished fourth (with a personal best time of 4:05 that set a Northern Ireland record that stood for 20 years) in the “Miracle Mile,” an event that pitted the only two people up to that point to have run sub 4-minute miles against each other for the first time. He continued to be a strong advocate for amateur athletics. Victor looked back at sport as a recreation, but emphasized the importance of embracing many different aspects of life – recreation, vocation, family, friendships, travel – in a well-rounded life.

Vic often told a story from his younger running days related to measuring oneself against the best. There was a time when he had to choose between two races. One was in Northern Ireland when he would have won easily; the second was a race in Europe during which he would be up against the best runners in the world at that time. He chose the European race. When asked why by his fellow countrymen, he explained that he would rather run a race where he was challenged than one that was a sure thing. Victor’s father had a saying that shaped his life, “Always pass yourself.”

Following a serious mountain climbing accident, he emigrated to Canada, where he worked for Geocon Ltd. for two years in Montreal and then in Toronto, becoming Assistant Chief Engineer.

Victor was only 30 when he accepted the challenge of running an expanded consulting practice with Dr. H. Q. Golder in 1960. He was a great believer in the apprentice and mentor model, and was an enthusiastic apprentice to his mentor, Hugh Golder, whose “intellectual honesty” formed the basis of excellence.

Starting as a Principal, Victor was President, then Chairman from 1974 to 1984, and then served as a Senior Principal until 1994. During this period, Vic oversaw Golder’s expansion across Canada and into the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. In 1994, he set up his own consulting practice, acting as an independent consultant and mentor to Golder Associates, while also serving on consulting boards to international clients.

Victor had a great breadth of interest and experience in a wide variety of geotechnical projects. He was an acknowledged world expert in hydroelectric and embankment dams as well as soft-ground tunnels, but also worked on tailings dams, dredging projects, landfills, bridges, piling projects, excavations, geosynthetics, and reinforced earth .

The first dam project in the earliest days of Golder Associates was the Arrow Lakes (now Hugh Keenleyside) dam on the Columbia River near Castlegar. It was built without dewatering the central portion of the river in order to construct the dam. Victor worked with Dr. Golder and Arthur Casagrande. In 1969, He successfully promoted a major hydroelectric study with the Greek Power Corporation (PPC), in conjunction with SNC from Montreal. It included 26 potential dam sites.

During his career, Victor worked on over 150 dams up to 200 m in height, including many across Canada. He kept his association with Greece and later consulting assignments included the Thissavros hydroelectric dam (at 170 m one of the highest rockfill dams in Europe) and Evinos (a 125 m high gravel fill dam supplying water to Athens). For a number of years, he also reviewed deformations following construction and impoundment of the Ataturk hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates River in Turkey (a 180 m high rockfill dam, estimated as the fourth-largest dam volume in the world). Throughout, he paid particular attention to construction details, especially those relating to drainage and filters and expected settlement.

His consulting reports were always extremely well-written, clear and also generally relatively short! He used hand-drawn sketches to summarise key information for all concerned with the project.

Victor published extensively, with over 50 published papers, including delivering the prestigious 38th Karl Terzaghi Lecture to the American Society for Civil Engineers in 2002 in Washington. It was titled “Some Uncertainties in Embankment Dam Engineering,” which demonstrated the importance of observations relative to details of geology and construction and the need for the profession to re-examine the importance of design assumptions and observations during construction. In particular it focused through many case histories on the uncertain effects of cold weather, the use of broadly graded soils (tills) as core material and the placement and segregation of tills and filter materials. In his introduction of Vic, Alan Macnab commented, “Victor Milligan has only one standard. Whatever he does, it must be the best.”

Victor served as Chairman of the Consulting Review Board for the Singapore Land Transport Authority on over 20 km of extensions to the existing underground Rapid Transit system (MRT). In addition, he worked on 12 major tunneling projects including the Toronto subway system, the Atlanta subway system, Melbourne Underground, and the Caracas subway in Venezuela.

Victor was one of the founders and the initial editor of the Canadian Geotechnical Journal in 1964, was president of the Consulting Engineers of Ontario, and served as vice president for North America of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineers.

He was elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 1994; Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the U.K. in 2001 (where only 70 such persons are allowed from overseas); Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada in 2004; and Honorary Fellow in 2005 by the Institution of Civil Engineers (UK) – the oldest professional body for engineers in the world. He was the only person from Canada to be so honoured at that time.

He received two honorary doctorates - from the University of Waterloo in 1990 and the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1993. Victor included these comments on the challenges facing future engineers in his address to graduating students at Queen’s University:

“The expectation of most people about engineering is that it is an exact science, yet those in practice are all too aware that, much of the time, the civil engineer works “on the boundary between the calculable and incalculable….Engineering excellence does not mean technical perfection, but an ability, within the available options, to provide the most appropriate engineering solution.

To an engineer in everyday practice, failure is unthinkable, but nevertheless, to a greater or lesser degree, it occurs worldwide. Detailed analysis of failures has indicated that the central problem is universally “human” error. In other words, the heart of the matter lies not in the refinement of codes of technical practice, models and methods of analysis, or in poor quality control of materials, but in people. Human error is as old as human time, and part of all our lives.

Today, many of our engineering problems are at the edge of the current “state of the art.” Problems of the environment, with the search for alternative fuels and energy sources and with the development of new materials and processes, are all matters of public concern. The engineer in design must today often address technical problems that are not yet wholly understood and yet at the same time, be answerable not just to his client but to the public-at-large.

Consequently, we can see that the specification for an engineer today encompasses much more than technical training. It is not just what the engineer has learned in order to graduate, but what will be learned after graduation. It is essential that you continue a lifetime practice of learning covering a wide spectrum of disciplines and interests in both humanities and sciences.

Vic received a number of medals, including the Engineering Medal for Excellence from Professional Engineers of Ontario; the Legget Award from the Canadian Geotechnical Society; the Beaubien Award from the Association of Consulting Engineers of Canada; the Sir John F. Kennedy Medal, the Julian Smith Medal for contribution to the development of Canada and the K.Y.Lo Award for international recognition, all from the Engineering Institute of Canada.

Victor’s lifelong commitment to being the best was acknowledged by the Professional Engineers of Ontario, which awarded him a Gold Medal posthumously in 2009, “in recognition of outstanding accomplishments and contributions made to society and the engineering professional as a citizen and as a professional engineer.”

For more information about The Golder Foundation, please send an email to Info@golderfoundation.org