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Spotlight Marcel Hermans
A new direction
WEDA’s Summit and Expo ’17 convenes in Vancouver at an interesting
time for the dredging industry and for the association
Marcel Hermans
WEDA
▷ “There is definitely much happening in the field
today,” said Marcel Hermans, chair and president of
the WEDA board of directors, pointing out that the
conference’s multidisciplinary subject matter, short
courses, papers, and exhibits is indicative of the broad
scope of the dredging industry throughout the
Western Hemisphere. The conference theme is
Dredging the Americas.
The event also exemplifies the wide-ranging
expertise of WEDA’s membership. Representatives of
about 16 dredging-related fi elds will be attending,
speaking, interacting, and sharing best practice. Those
experts range from contractors in six industry areas
– dredging, navigation, coast and inland fl ood
protection, deepsea mining, offshore wind energy, and
oil and gas production – to marine engineers,
manufacturers, representatives of ports and harbours,
consultants, public authorities, universities,
engineers, hydrographic surveyors, and geologists,
among others.
Diverse topics, important goals
Topics will span a wide range of pertinent matters,
with WEDA’s call for papers earlier this year a marker
of some of the areas of keen interest in the industry
today, including equipment, safety, dredged sediment
management, land reclamation, dredging for beach
nourishment, benefi cial reuse, budgeting and cost
estimating, innovative techniques, and navigation
channel design.
Short courses are being offered in the latest
developments in slurry transport and in safety
culture. As described by WEDA, the course on slurry
transport will examine specifications and a model to
handle complex projects, while the safety session will
“actively engage participants in sharpening their skill
set” to meet “safety challenges specific to each
participant’s organisation”.
In addition, WEDA will be recognising outstanding
achievement in engineering and operations with
distinguished awards for environmental excellence,
safety excellence, lifetime achievement, dredger of
the year, DCA/WEDA best paper, the DSC Dredging
‘Why dredging is good’ award, young author award,
and best booth.
The recognitions, along with every component and
programme of the summit and expo, speak to the
continuing goals and objectives of WEDA as a whole:
to exchange knowledge, provide a forum to present
and exchange ideas, transfer technology, and boost
co-operation among associations and societies. The
summit and expo will do all that while highlighting a
crucial issue: the need to understand and develop
“solutions for problems related to the protection and
enhancement of the marine environment”.
A synergistic event
WEDA is promoting those goals and objectives in
terms of its careful planning of this leading
international industry occasion. Hermans explained,
“We make sure that the summit and the expo are two
integrated parts of the same event.” Doing so makes
for a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In
other words, this is a synergistic event. He continued,
“We place much emphasis on the layout of the facility
in order to promote interaction,” as, for example,
having an expo fl oor very close to conference areas.
When conference attendees proceed to, and
through, the expo, they will encounter not only a
wide range of exhibitors’ products, services, and
information but also something new for WEDA. “We
are experimenting with fi ve-minute lightning talks
on the expo fl oor this year,” said Hermans. “It’s a fi rst
for us.”
Experimenting is part of the continuing process of
crafting a blue-chip event for attendees. “In general,
our expo has worked well and we want to make sure
that we do it right,” he noted.
Looking back. forging ahead
On another tack, Hermans sees the event
continuing to be an important venue for “a lot of
new connections, and not just the ones made
during the presentations or at the expo: we also
want to have solid social functions that work well
for networking and just talking.” Such informal but
valuable interactions may also come in breaks and
at the fringes of the programme. For example, being
in Vancouver, an attractive locale, will draw
attendees out to explore the city and to do so, in
many cases, together.
In its subject matter, programming, and locale,
this year’s effort is continuing a track record of
worthwhile events, whether they are the annual
summit and expo or WEDA chapter conferences
throughout the Americas.
Hermans, a long-time WEDA member, should
know. He joined WEDA in the late 1990s, not long
before he moved from his native Netherlands to the
United States, where he joined Port of Portland,
4 | 26-29 June 2017 Fairplay.IHS.com