Kimberly M. Warner, the project engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Wolf Creek resident office below Wolf Creek Dam, has been honored with the Construction Management Excellence Award for her exceptional contract administration, leadership and management skills during the repair work on the dam.

Part of the Corps’ Nashville District, this award is for the Great Lakes and Ohio River Division of the Corps. It is a regional district award, which includes states from Tennessee to Michigan and Warner, who won the award over 11 others, will now compete with about nine other regional district winners from around the world. The winner is expected to be announced this summer.

“It was definitely a surprise,” Warner said. “My former boss, Bill Flickinger, put me in for it. He retired at the end of November last year.”

Warner said she was notified via email from the division office in Cincinnati that she won the award on Febuary 27.

“There are two awards, there is one for construction management excellence, which is the one I got out of the division, and the other is the hard hat of the year, which is more of the field type,” she said.

She said contract administration is basically taking care of all the contract changes, the modifications, the pay requests, making sure contractors’ invoices are adequate and that the contractor gets paid every month.

“This has been a very complex, high profile contract and there has been a lot of changes in it,” Warner said. “We’re getting ready to finalize the 106th modification for this contract, of course it has been going on for years now.”

She said many of the modifications are just at the administrative level, such as adding funding to the contract so they can pay for the contractor, changes in the specifications or adding items or funding that weren’t anticipated.

“Sometimes a mod increases or decreases cost, sometimes it increases or decreases time, or both,” she said. “One of the biggest mods we had back a couple of years ago was when we starting having some movement in the critical area. We had to stop the contractor from working in there until we could figure out what was going on…in stopping them there we interrupted their schedule and we caused them to be less efficient. When we finally did resume months later we had to change the order the contractor was going in. That was probably the biggest change that we had.”

Warner, who is a Louisville native, has lived in Russell County since 2001 but joined the Corps of Engineers in April 2007.

“I was really glad to get back with the government,” she said. “I had worked with the government before and gone into private industry so I was glad this project started.”

When she began with the Corps it didn’t even have the current resident office. Instead they had a little corner at the bottom of the powerhouse.

“We built this office and the new Ray Mann Rd. connection and Halcomb’s Landing and the contract before this one that actually built the platform and did a lot of drilling and grouting,” Warner said. “It is strange that (work on the dam) is finally ending but we are looking at doing another small contract down at the switchyard.”

She did say that there was plenty of site restoration work to do this summer, as well as a couple of other projects at the fish hatchery.

“This office will be here for a while longer although they are trying to shift people to other projects, mostly at Center Hill (in Tennessee) where a similar project is going on,” she said. “I don’t yet know how much longer that I will have here.”

Her son, Justin Warner, graduated from Russell County High School in 2009 and basically grew up Russell County, meaning that the county will always hold a special meaning to her.

“Russell County has been good to me,” she said.

While Warner has been a project engineer for much of her time with the Corps, she is currently filling in as chief of contract administration on a temporary basis after Flickinger’s retirement.

She said she also served 13 months with the Corps in Afghanistan back in 2010-11 and just recently earned the status of professional engineer on her very first try, which only a very small percentage of people pass the test on the first try, which Warner did.

Warner, who graduated from Sacred Heart High School in Louisville, also graduated with her bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Louisville in civil engineering. Her masters speciality was geologicial engineering.