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J A M E S E . RO B ER T S
1930–2006
Elected in 1996
“For the development and implementation of innovative
bridge retrofit concepts and criteria under seismic conditions.”
BY RICHARD DOKKEN
SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY
J AMES E. ROBERTS, a longtime leader in the bridge design
profession, died on July 6, 2006, at the age of 75. He was born
on November 24, 1930, in Missouri and moved with his family
to California when he was 6.
Jim Roberts held a number of significant engineering titles
throughout his 50-plus-year career, including state bridge
engineer for California and chief deputy director for the
California Department of Transportation. He was a leader
during the state’s highway and bridge construction boom in
the 1950s and 1960s. He is the only Caltrans employee to have
been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. Jim
earned his bachelor of science degree in engineering from the
University of California, Berkeley, and his master of science
from the University of Southern California (USC). He was a
registered professional engineer. He served on active duty in
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the Korean conflict
and in all served 33 years in the U.S. Army Reserve. He retired
as a colonel. His obituary called him “An Engineer’s Engineer,”
a term respectfully coined by a coworker. Roberts did not
identify himself as an engineer’s engineer, however.
He always maintained a professional attitude, work ethic,
and appearance in the office, which carried over, in part, from
his military experience. His career at Caltrans started in 1951
263
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264 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
as a junior engineer before he had completed his B.S. degree
from UC Berkeley. He later earned his master’s degree while
working full time as a resident engineer at Caltrans. For several
years he logged a full day at a job site in the Central Valley
and then made the six-hour round trip to USC for evening
classes. Even then he was always the first one to the office in
the morning.
After accumulating a decade of field experience, Roberts
was assigned to Caltrans’ Design Section 2 in 1962. His
mentors in the bridge design section were engineers who
would go on to be public works directors and chief executive
officers of engineering firms. The early 1960s were a time of
tremendous change in bridge engineering. Computational
tools had recently become available. Roberts learned quickly,
worked fast, and asked questions constantly. He soon not only
mastered the conventional bridge design techniques of the time
but also absorbed the importance of the new computer-aided
wave of bridge design. His bridge projects grew in importance
as his experience grew.
In the 1960s, most steel bridges were simple. Curved
steel bridges used short spans with straight girders flared to
accommodate the curves. The slide rule was used for most
design calculations. The first large bridge design that Roberts
was responsible for as a senior engineer was the Tuolumne
River Bridge in California’s Tuolumne County. That bridge
was substantially different from other steel bridges of the time.
It was a six-span, 1,400-foot-long bridge on a 1,200-foot radius
with a 350-foot main span and an 8 percent super-elevation.
Time was of the essence, as the bridge would be constructed
over a river that was soon to turn into Lake Don Pedro.
Roberts’s efforts on this project exemplified the leadership
and engineering skills that he demonstrated throughout his
career.
The design standards of the time did not fully address many
of the structural issues presented by this particular bridge.
Research was under way nationally on curved steel girders with
spans as long as 150 feet, but these lengths were substantially
shorter than the planned spans on this bridge. Preliminary
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J A M E S E . RO B ER T S 265
longhand calculations of the structure implied results that
were substantially different from those of a traditional short-
span bridge, and the available design tables were completely
inadequate to handle the three-dimensional effects of this
highly curved bridge. The only computer software available
to address bridge analysis was a then-experimental piece of
software called STRUDL. The Tuolumne River Bridge became
the first application of this type of software to a bridge in the
western United States. Similar software applications to complex
bridge designs have only recently become commonplace.
Roberts’s work was performed 40 years ago.
Roberts’s leadership was further tested during the
construction of the bridge. Midway through erection of the
steel girders, a material failure occurred during construction of
a steel bridge near Sacramento. That bridge utilized the same
materials that were already in Roberts’s partially constructed
Tuolumne River Bridge. With flooding of the valley imminent,
the design team feverishly worked out extensive field
modifications to the fracture-critical girders while lawyers for
the state and the steel fabricator argued over liability.
Roberts’s team argued internally over an appropriate
repair strategy. Ultimately, they relied on seasoned judgment,
intuition, and new computer tools to produce field repairs for
the substandard steel-plate flanges on the bridge. It would be
more than a year before enough was known about fracture
mechanics to determine just how close the team might have
been to losing the bridge. In 2007, a year after Roberts passed
away, the structure was officially renamed the James E. Roberts
Memorial Bridge.
Roberts went on to many leadership roles. He soon took
over a Caltrans bridge design section and then served several
years as the chief engineer for the Sacramento Regional
Transit’s light rail system. He then went back to Caltrans and
became director of the Engineering Service Center, where he
was responsible for the work of 2,300 engineers, architects,
and support staff responsible for designing, building, and
maintaining all of California’s bridges. He was at the reins as
the state bridge engineer when the 1987 Whittier earthquake,
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266 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the 1994 Northridge
earthquake hit. He supervised a renaissance in seismic retrofit
design that occurred at Caltrans in the late 1980s and early
1990s. Because California has historically been on the cutting
edge of bridge design, his leadership made not only California’s
roads and bridges safer but also much of the nation’s.
Roberts eventually served as chief deputy director (while
simultaneously running the bridge department) of Caltrans
before retiring in 2001. He continued to work part time,
advising bridge designers until his death in 2006.
An engineer is someone who can confidently stamp a
set of plans. Jim Roberts was responsible for the design
and construction of countless bridges in California. More
importantly, he was a leader, an accomplished speaker, a
man with great foresight, and a mentor and he was politically
savvy. That amounts to much more than a typical “engineer’s
engineer.”
Jim Roberts is survived by his wife, Patricia Lee Brighton
Roberts, of Carmichael, as well as two children and two
grandchildren.
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