Jun 18, 2026 · 14 min · 7 segments
In this Engineering Matters Awards episode, we celebrate the winners of the Health & Safety Champion category, which recognises engineers who are changing how we protect people in some of the world’s…
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Scott ShipleyGuestTim SheehanHostMonica CayetGuest
Alex ConacherHostScott Shipley is the Director of Swiftwater and Whitewater Parks at Calibre Engineering in Highlands Ranch, Colorado and they specialise in the design of whitewater parks and swiftwater rescue training facilities.
What we have done is create a facility that can function day or night, that can recreate the real scenario and the real power and the real events that they will come across when they go out into a flooded environment, whether it's in a village or in an urban environment or out in a swift water rescue facility in the river as if a car went off the road.
And so for us, what we're really doing in a very controlled environment that has an on and an off switch, that has lights that we can turn on, that has rescue personnel stationed all around the area and very close access to that rescue so that you can really reach out and save these people who are in a very real and difficult situation in that training environment.
And so we really feel like we're preparing people for worst day of a lot of people's lives in a way that allows us to be sure that they're able to approach that in a safe manner.
Judges in this category were impressed by the company's ability to use real-life modelling to assist first responders in flooding situations in a safe and controlled manner.
They also noted that Scott presented a good idea with sound reasoning and readily quantifiable benefits.
When it comes to measuring quantifiable improvements, Scott says this is hard to measure.
But that doesn't mean there aren't moments where the power of effective training hadn't been front and centre of his own lived experiences.
What's the metric that you look at? But the aha moment for me, and I think we all had our eyes on this because I used to live in that region of the world, was Hurricane Helene, which ripped through Western North Carolina, right through Asheville, right through the Nolichucky River Valley, in a bunch of places that have high velocity rivers in an average day.
And here we were seeing people doing rescues in this very high sort of 100 year flood, if not higher scenario.
When I started looking at the pictures from that flood rescue and comparing it to, for example, rescue from a vehicle, there's a really stark comparison between what was a very dangerous rescue to get somebody out of a car, and it was in Time magazine, and the scenario that we create, you can see that direct parallel.
We were preparing people to do exactly what it is that we sent them out to do, and the picture is intimidating when you look at this picture and you see the terror that's involved and the white everywhere and the flood and the people in the background you realize hey but for the fact that we prepared people for that they couldn't go out and do that that's a that's a very deadly rescue to implement but when you know what you're doing a standard set of steps to get that person out and so we feel that we had done something very powerful there from a facility that we designed back in 2006 trained so many people at that facility.
And then now in 2000, I guess that would have been 2024, start to see the real effects of that in sort of a disaster on this very large scale.
Scott Shipley is the Director of Swiftwater and Whitewater Parks at Calibre Engineering in Highlands Ranch, Colorado and they specialise in the design of whitewater parks and swiftwater rescue training facilities.
What we have done is create a facility that can function day or night, that can recreate the real scenario and the real power and the real events that they will come across when they go out into a flooded environment, whether it's in a village or in an urban environment or out in a swift water rescue facility in the river as if a car went off the road.
And so for us, what we're really doing in a very controlled environment that has an on and an off switch, that has lights that we can turn on, that has rescue personnel stationed all around the area and very close access to that rescue so that you can really reach out and save these people who are in a very real and difficult situation in that training environment.
And so we really feel like we're preparing people for worst day of a lot of people's lives in a way that allows us to be sure that they're able to approach that in a safe manner.
Judges in this category were impressed by the company's ability to use real-life modelling to assist first responders in flooding situations in a safe and controlled manner.
They also noted that Scott presented a good idea with sound reasoning and readily quantifiable benefits.
When it comes to measuring quantifiable improvements, Scott says this is hard to measure.
But that doesn't mean there aren't moments where the power of effective training hadn't been front and centre of his own lived experiences.
What's the metric that you look at? But the aha moment for me, and I think we all had our eyes on this because I used to live in that region of the world, was Hurricane Helene, which ripped through Western North Carolina, right through Asheville, right through the Nolichucky River Valley, in a bunch of places that have high velocity rivers in an average day.
And here we were seeing people doing rescues in this very high sort of 100 year flood, if not higher scenario.
When I started looking at the pictures from that flood rescue and comparing it to, for example, rescue from a vehicle, there's a really stark comparison between what was a very dangerous rescue to get somebody out of a car, and it was in Time magazine, and the scenario that we create, you can see that direct parallel.
We were preparing people to do exactly what it is that we sent them out to do, and the picture is intimidating when you look at this picture and you see the terror that's involved and the white everywhere and the flood and the people in the background you realize hey but for the fact that we prepared people for that they couldn't go out and do that that's a that's a very deadly rescue to implement but when you know what you're doing a standard set of steps to get that person out and so we feel that we had done something very powerful there from a facility that we designed back in 2006 trained so many people at that facility.
And then now in 2000, I guess that would have been 2024, start to see the real effects of that in sort of a disaster on this very large scale.
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