ENR Profiles WJE's Contributions to Forensic Engineering

It’s an honor to be featured on the cover of a nationally respected magazine. More than half a century after our three founders—Jack Wiss, Jack Janney, and Dick Elstner—graced the cover of Engineering News-Record (ENR), WJE is featured again.

In celebration of ENR's 150th anniversary, the magazine is revisiting past features all year, including the 1972 cover article “Engineers Who Look for Trouble," which profiled WJE, a small, sixteen-year-old engineering firm that was blazing a new path in engineering: forensic investigation.

Fifty-two years later, WJE has grown substantially. And so has the market for problem-solving.

“Studies and tests performed by forensic engineering firms have made designs more efficient, turned unknowns into knowns and made building with newer technologies a far less risky proposition,” the article notes.

Since the 1972 profile, our firm has been involved in the investigation of many significant failures. Some of the most notable are explored in the new ENR article. From investigating the collapse of two skywalks at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency in 1981 to reconstructing a TWA airplane that crashed and killed 230 in 1996, ENR's newest profile examines some of WJE’s highest profile contributions to the engineering industry's understanding of structural failures.

“I like to think that the industry has learned from those mistakes, and that we’ve maybe even contributed to a better understanding of how structures fail to prevent them from happening again,” Executive Vice President and Senior Principal Gary Klein told ENR.

Read more about our work and history in ENR's “Forensic Engineering: Turning Unknown to Known.”