Jim McMinimee, Utah's Super Fast Bridge Builder, is Dead at 51

James C. “Jim” McMinimee, who pioneered accelerated bridge construction techniques in Utah and across the U.S., died suddenly on May 10 in Washington, D.C. He was 51. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, for which he was a contractor, says he died of natural causes, but did not provide further detail.

McMinimee

McMinimee led AASHTO’s effort to implement the latest congressionally-mandated Strategic Highway Research Program, a transportation-sector effort probing highway congestion.

For 25 years, he had worked at the Utah Dept. of Transportation, becoming chief engineer and project development director. He was instrumental in pushing design-build and bridge fabrication methods, such as self-propelled modular transporters. ENR cited McMinimee in 2008 for his efforts to speed completion of the $1.5-billion Interstate 15 project in Utah and other milestones (ENR 1/12/09 p. 50).

“Jim was just a great leader and innovator,” says consultant Tom Warne, a former UDOT director who hired McMinimee. “He created the model for applying design-build on projects of all sizes.”

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

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