CH2M HILL’s Canadian Engineering company, CH2M HILL Engineering, Ltd. (CHEL) merged with Toronto-based Gore & Storrie in September, 1995 to form CH2M Gore & Storrie, Ltd. (CG&S). CG&S employed more than 450 professionals and is the largest water/environment firm in Canada.
Prior to the merger, Gore & Storrie was Canada’s largest environmental engineering firm, specializing in the water/wastewater and environmental markets. The highly respected firm was an employee-owned company that had operated in Canada since 1919, and had built an organization of offices in eight cities across Eastern Canada. It had been a recognized leader in the environmental field and has been honored on several occasions with the Schreyer Award, the highest recognition for engineering excellence in Canada. In 1991, Gore and Storrie won a major Award of Excellence for an ingenious sludge dewatering, transportation, and incineration upgrade at the Metropolitan Toronto’s Main Treatment Plant. Other notable award-winning projects were the Lorne Park, North America’s first major underground water purification plant with parkland on top, and a closed-loop sludge destruction system with energy recovery that eliminates the need for supplementary fuels at the Lakeview Pollution Control Plant in Mississauga or what was then known as West Toronto Township.
In addition to William Gore and William Storrie, one of the original founders of CG&S was the well known and highly respected bacteriologist and public health specialist of that period, Dr. George Nasmith, together forming the partnership known as Gore, Nasmith & Storrie. Dr. Nasmith brought to the tiny firm the expertise that would be required for dealing with the environmental issues that face society today. When this partnership was formed in 1919, the company was a pioneer in the consulting engineering profession, since at the time the whole of Canada boasted only twenty other consulting engineering firms. Thanks to its early and distinctive specialization, Gore and Storrie Limited (as the firm became named upon its incorporation in 1954) became Canada’s largest consulting engineering firm practicing exclusively in the environmental field.
Because of Gore and Storrie’s stellar reputation and its history of notable accomplishments, CH2M HILL was fortunate to be able to acquire it when it became available in the early 1990s. The union enhanced the service network and expanded the technical resources of the CH2M HILL organization but more importantly it served to “enrich the reservoir of insights and perspectives we can share with our clients” according to the CEO of CH2M HILL, Ralph Peterson.