Denver-based firm goes to work at remote military base

A Denver-based geotechnical engineering firm recently completed a project in a decidedly different landscape than Colorado: the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Engineers from CTL Thompson worked on a satellite communication project for the U.S. Navy on Diego Garcia, the most remote military base in the world.

Diego Garcia is an atoll — a ringshaped island formed from a coral reef — just south of the equator. It is a territory of the United Kingdom and is home to a joint U.S./ U.K. military base. Military personnel and contractors live on the island.

CTL worked with the Navy during the war in Afghanistan to develop facilities at Diego Garcia. This year, the company went back to provide more geotechnical testing and consulting for a communications facility that is being expanded on the island, including the construction of new radar antennas.

The atoll, 1,000 miles from the nearest continent, is just half a mile wide and 18 miles long. Unlike mountainous Colorado, its elevation is only a couple feet.

Spencer Schram, a CTL engineer who was based there for a month during the winter, joked that the trip was his “work vacation.”

“It wasn’t a bad place to be in January, for sure,” he said.

But the job came with plenty of challenges, too.

The first one was figuring out how to get a track-mounted drilling rig to such a remote location. CTL hired a company out of Sacramento, Calif., to transport the rig, which shipped out of Oakland and stopped in Singapore before finally reaching the atoll after a trip of about four months.

All of the logistics, in fact, were complicated. There are no gas stations on the island, and they had to rely on a contractor to provide them with fuel and water.

There was also no cellphone service for outside providers, so the company had to purchase a burner phone to communicate with other people on the island. Sending emails could take minutes or sometimes hours, Schram said.

The atoll’s jungle environment made the technical aspects of the project challenging as well. CTL drilled holes in different parts of the atoll to identify possible locations to put antennas, but the soil was very soft, which made drilling difficult. The atoll was prone to rain and earthquakes, which could cause the ground at the drilling sites to liquefy. The soil was mainly sand, and Schram said that sometimes seashells would come up from the drilling sites.

Despite the difficulties, Schram said it was a rewarding project.

“We truly enjoyed taking on the various challenges,” he said.