RTunnelTalk reporting
ock excavation was a passion for Dr Evert Hoek. His is a name immediately associated as a pioneer in the science of rock mechanics and as an undoubted giant in the field of rock excavation, known the world-over as a leader in the practice of deep rock excavation. Through a career-long mission to impart his profound understanding of rock mechanics and the creation of underground space, clients, owners, mine operators, contractors, technicians, and generations of new recruits to the industry of underground engineering have benefitted from Hoek’s work and his generous knowledge-sharing.
Remembering Dr Evert Hoek
August 1933 – July 2024
After a lifetime dedicated to his family, his profession, and his adopted country Canada, Dr Evert Hoek died on 6 July 2024 at his home in Vancouver, aged 90.
During his career Dr. Hoek worked in more than 30 counties and on dozens of challenging projects including about 100km of tunnelling on the Egnatia Highway in Greece, the Yacumbu-Quibor water tunnel in Venezuela that took 32 years to excavate, and many mining projects experiencing extreme conditions at great depth.
Born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Hoek attended Cape Town University and subsequently emigrated to UK and then to Canada. From 1966 to 1975, he was a Professor at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London where he also set up a faculty-wide centre for rock mechanics at the Royal School of Mines. From 1986 to 1993, he held Chair of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) at the University of Toronto. In 1980 he co-authored a book with fellow rock mechanics specialist E.T. Brown of Australia, on the failure criterion of rock, which essentially puts numbers to geology to predict the failure mechanism. It has been refined to include the correlation between the model parameters and the geological strength index which is now used widely in tunneling and mining as the seminal thesis on rock engineering design.
During his career Hoek was recognised with many awards and posts. In 2006 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and was elected also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and to the Canadian Academy of Engineering. Among his many notable and memorable lectures are the Rankine Lecturer on the strength of jointed rock masses in 1983; the first Müller Lecture of the International Society of Rock Mechanics in 1991 titled When is Design in Rock Engineering Acceptable; and the Terzaghi Lecturer of 2000 on large diameter tunnels in bad rock. In 2014, Hoek was recognized with the Tunneller of the Year Award by TAC, the Tunnelling Association of Canada, and in 2018, ITA, the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, honoured Hoek with a Lifetime Achievement Award. (Watch the videos below.)
Through all, practical work in the industry was Hoek’s main career attraction, first during his tenure with Golder Associates in Vancouver where he rose to Senior Principal and Chairman, and then for many years running his own geotechnical consulting practice. He said in an interview that: “The experience that people like me have is something that is very difficult to convey but it is worth conveying, because ultimately tunneling is a practical, hands-on process. It is all very well doing calculations, but when you are in the tunnel and it doesn’t behave as the computer predicts, you have got to innovate and figure out day-byday what the rock is telling you.”
Among the many tributes to Evert Hoek, one in particular encapsulates his spirit as, “a true teacher, a wise advisor, a calm thinker.” A true legend of his time. n
References
• Video: TAC Tunneller of the Year 2014
• Video: ITA Lifetime Achievement Award 2018
• Video: Dr. Evert Hoek - Distinguished Lecture Series
• Hoek’s Corner: An In-Depth Reference Library for Rock Mechanics – rocsience
• Video: Face-to-Face with Dr Evert Hoek – TunnelTalk
Video: TAC Tunneller of the Year 2014
Video: ITA Lifetime Achievement Award of 2018
Evert Hoek, ever the practical expert
