PND is an Alaskan corporation formed in 1979. The firm is head-quartered in Anchorage, Alaska, with additional offices in Juneau, Alaska and Seattle, Washington. PND employs 70 full time staff, half of whom are licensed professional engineers and/or surveyors. PND undertakes a wide variety of transportation, civil and marine projects through-out Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, and overseas. Clients range from private individuals to Fortune 500 corporations, from local governments to federal agencies.

King Cove Road Project is a new 18 mile long road project located in Aleutians East Burrough, Alaska. The project connects the community of the King Cove to an all weather airport located in Cold Bay and provides the residents a much needed year round 24-7 emergency ingress/egress. The project negotiates several major fish stream crossings with 10 bridges up to 120 feet in length and 9 fish passage culverts up to 12 feet diameter. Approximately 5 miles of the road were constructed in the summer of 2004 and the remaining road sections are scheduled to be constructed the summer of 2005.

The project was bid as a design-build team consisting of SKW/Eskimos, Inc. with Nathan Powell as the overall project manager. PND, Inc was contracted by SKW to serve as the engineering design consultant. 

The first 3-miles of the road were designed by PND using Land Development Desktop (LDD). This portion of the project was considered the simplest due to the relatively gently sloping terrain and side borrow type construction methods used by the contractor. The remaining road segments, however, were situated on variable terrain including 40% side slopes and a long segment located on the beach paralleling Cold Bay for approximately 1.5 miles. Design of these road segments were much more challenging and required a program with more finesse and real time mass haul to evaluate alignment options quickly and efficiently. PND selected Softree due to its user friendly graphical interface and its ability to have the profile, plan, section and mass haul windows open all at the same time. The learning curve was fast on the program and the end result was a road design that required less time to prepare than thought possible while accurately tracking quantities in real time.

 The program is just what is needed in this type of application and compared to LDD saved time and was easier to use.