Geotechnical News December 2011
55
THE GROUTLINE
Grout Line
Paolo Gazzarrini
Overture
We are at the 26th edition of the Grout
Line (more than 4 years have passed
since the first edition) and a lot of
material for this issue.
I start with very sad news that
I would like to share with you; A.
Clive Houlsby, a very renowned rock
grouting expert passed away last Sep-
tember. I didn’t know him person-
ally but I am very well aware, as is
everyone in our industry, of all the
enormous work and dedication he
provided for the grouting industry.
I thank Jim Warner for preparing the
following.
In Remembrance of A. Clive
Houlsby
Renown rock grouting expert A. Clive
Houlsby passed away peacefully at
age 82, on September 17, following
six weeks of hospitalization in his
ongoing battle with cancer. Houlsby
revolutionized
North
American
grouting practice through presentation
of his well documented case history
data, as an instructor at the annual Short
Course on Grouting Fundamentals
and Current Practice, now sponsored
by the Colorado School of Mines,
and as an Invited Keynote lecturer at
the once each decade International
Conference on Grouting in 1982. He
leaves his wife of 55 years Betty and
two daughters Susan and Janet. He is
to be honored as a “Grouting Great” at
the awards ceremony of the upcoming
International Conference on Grouting
and Deep Mixing to be held in New
Orleans, in February 2012. A citation
previously prepared for that ceremony
follows.
A. C. Houlsby
Sydney, Australia
A keen interest in engineering and
construction came naturally to Clive
Houlsby. As a child he reveled in
constructing sand castles and dams
on the beaches of his native Australia,
where he became keenly aware of
the importance of the ratio of water
to the sand, too much and the shape
slumped, too little, it wouldn’t stand.
But his greatest delight (and future
career) were established at age 9,
when he discovered
“This stuff which
could be mixed with sand to form all
sorts of interesting shapes. And a
day later the shapes were hard and
were permanent! Glorious enjoyment
limited only by the supply of cement
from father’s small resources.”
Based
on his prior experience on the beach
,
“it came naturally to apply appropriate
water:cement ratios to the cement
molding.”
And so, his life of playing with ce-
ment continued until graduation from
Sydney Technical college in 1952,
with a Diploma in Civil Engineering.
He then entered the real world, work-
ing in a design office for a few months.
But he couldn’t play with cement in a
design office, so in 1953, he transferred
to the Sydney Water Board as a Con-
struction Engineer assigned to the new
Warragamba Dam construction. Grout-
ing wasn’t well established in Australia
and experienced people were lacking,
besides it was considered dirty and be-
neath their dignity by most engineers.
So young Clive was assigned to over-
see the grouting work where he “was
given free hand by the bosses”.
Warragamba Dam was to be the
largest concrete gravity dam in the
southern hemisphere and serve as the
main source for Sydney’s water sup-
ply. It’s a 351 meter long, 142 meters
high, with a thickness of 8.5 meters at
the top and 104 meters at the base, and
A. Clive Houlsby.
