Transportation

As part of a transportation and recreational infrastructure initiative at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Mr. Parnell participated in the engineering design of an approximately eight-mile asphalt-paved greenway and pedestrian trail serving base personnel and facilities. The project had to reconcile recreational use with the operational demands of one of the nation’s largest military installations while providing a safe, continuous pedestrian corridor.

His principal role was laying out the corridor traverse and setting the trail alignment. Using field surveying techniques, he performed the preliminary geomatics needed to fix the alignment through the constraints along the route: waterway crossings, roadway crossings, utility conflicts, buildings, training areas, and other congested portions of the base. Route selection balanced pedestrian safety and separation from vehicular traffic against the need to accommodate existing infrastructure and keep the trail continuous.

The corridor included four waterway crossings, each requiring a simple bridge structure to maintain uninterrupted access. The crossings were integrated with the trail alignment, grading, and drainage systems to provide durable, low-maintenance pedestrian structures while limiting disturbance to the surrounding waterways.

The work drew on transportation planning, civil site development, surveying and geomatics, drainage coordination, and structural design, coordinated among engineering disciplines and military stakeholders.

At KCI Technologies in Raleigh, the roadway side of the Ramp C over Mallard Creek project, in the Charlotte area, involved the ramp alignment that produced the bridge’s heavy skew: the ramp geometry, superelevation, and profile were set by the interchange layout and the crossing angle, and the seven-span structure followed that alignment. The Spence–Best overpass in Goldsboro similarly carried a roadway profile over the crossing on a low-skew alignment, with approach grades and cross sections developed to meet the structure at each end.

At the City of Austin Electric Utility Department, later Austin Energy, a number of the substation site-development projects were in rural, hilly terrain outside Austin, Texas, and Mr. Parnell had a hand in designing their access roadways. These were mostly gravel roads, laid out to reach the substation yard from the public road at grades that heavy equipment transport, including transformer delivery, could negotiate, with the alignment fitted to the terrain, drainage carried across and along the road, and the roadway tied into the yard grading and drainage at the site.