Jacob Chacko is a Principal Engineer at GR8 GEO. He is a registered Civil and Geotechnical Engineer in California and has over 25 years of experience with a wide spectrum of multi-disciplinary projects spanning the onshore, offshore and nearshore environments from contracting and engineering consultancy perspectives. He is a member of the American Clean Power Subcommittee developing recommended practices for Geotechnical work for offshore wind facilities where he helps coordinate the subgroup drafting recommendations for geophysical site investigations and geohazards and contributes on foundation design aspects. From 2011 to 2018 he managed Fugro’s Consultancy services for the Europe-Caspian region including a team of over 140 professionals located in 6 countries and was a Director of Fugro’s operating company in Turkey. He previously developed and managed Fugro’s international earthquake engineering practice in California until 2011 when he moved to Turkey.
He has managed the pursuit, development, execution, and successful completion of large multi-disciplinary infrastructure projects involving onshore, offshore and nearshore geotechnical and geophysical site investigations as well as interpretation and engineering design services. Select projects include the Izmit Bay “Osman Gazi” Suspension Bridge and the 3rd Bosphorus “Yavuz Sultan Selim” Bridge in Turkey, the SOCAR Oil Gas and Petrochemical Complex Project in Azerbaijan, the BTC and TANAP pipelines in Turkey, the Istanbul New Airport, the Sinop Nuclear Power Plant in Turkey, the “1915 Çanakkale” Bridge in Turkey and the Turkstream pipeline landing in Turkey. He is the lead geotechnical engineer for the detailed design of the 30-km long Bataan-Cavite marine bridge across Manila Bay in the Philippines.
While based in California he coordinated geotechnical engineering and design work for large coastal-infrastructure projects in the Americas, including the BART Transbay Tube Retrofit Project, San Francisco International Airport (SFO) Runway Expansion project, the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge Replacement Project, and the Baja California LNG Regasification Project.
He has also overseen the execution of numerous earthquake engineering projects in several seismically active areas around the world including Turkey, California, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, Azerbaijan, Trinidad, Algeria, U.A.E, Turkmenistan, India, Indonesia, and Taiwan. Most of these projects typically included probabilistic seismic hazard analyses, site response analyses, liquefaction evaluations, and soil-structure interaction analyses.