2026 USSD RCC Dam Workshop

Del Shannon has more than 30 years of experience and holds degrees in both Journalism and Civil Engineering. He is the Senior Principal Geotechnical Engineer for Knight Piesold, a Past President of USSD, chair of the USSD Committee on Concrete Dams, President of Hydropower Foundation, a lead author of the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card, and serves in leadership roles for several professional organization. He is a geotechnical engineer by background and specializes in the design and construction of both earthen and concrete dams and similar hydraulic structures. For the last 20 years he has been promoting the benefits of involving contractors earlier in the project delivery process, and has been involved in the first design/build dam projects in five states. Three of his dam projects have received national awards from the USSD and ASDSO. In his free time Del loves playing soccer and attended the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar where he saw Argentina beat France. He also enjoys creative writing and has published several creative fiction stories and novels.

Scott Jones is the Principal Structural Engineer for the Hydropower, Dams, and Hydraulic Structures Department at Kiewit Infrastructure Engineers.  He has over 20 years of experience working primarily on the design and evaluation of concrete dams and appurtenant structures, such as spillways, radial gates, intake towers, and outlet structures.  Scott served as the Engineer of Record for the design and engineering support during construction of Lake Conestee Replacement Dam in Greenville, SC.

With over 40 years of experience working almost exclusively on dams and hydropower within the Technical Department of the Dragados Construction Company, Rafael is currently semi-retired.

He has participated in the construction, and in several cases also in the design, of more than 40 large hydraulic projects in Europe, Africa and North, Central and South America, 10 of which have been RCC dams.

He has published and presented more than 50 papers, a significant portion of them in the field of RCC dam design and construction, and was the lead author of Chapter 5, Construction, of ICOLD Bulletin 177 (2020) on RCC dams.

He is a member of the SPANCOLD and ICOLD Committees on Concrete Dams and past member of the USSD Committee on Concrete Dams.

Rafael currently chairs the Organizing Committee of the 29th Congress and 96th Annual Meeting of ICOLD, to be held in Madrid, Spain, in June 2028.

Tim Dolen is a Professional Engineer and president of Dolen and Associates in Fort Collins, CO, specializing in mass and RCC mixture design, materials properties, and on-site construction. He is the past chairman of ACI Committee 207 on Mass Concrete and the Report on Roller Compacted Mass Concrete. Tim worked for 33 years with the US Bureau of Reclamation on mass concrete design, construction quality control, and on seven major RCC dams and spillways. He led the task group to develop the first ASTM standardized test procedures for RCC. He led the development of several RCC innovations including high paste, super-retarded RCC mixtures, methods of bonding RCC lift lines, and air-entrained RCC. For the past 15 years, Tim has worked as the onsite technical representative for major RCC dams including the Gibe III Dam in Ethiopia, the Trung Son Dam in Vietnam, and was the RCC construction engineer for the Muskrat Falls RCC Dam in Canada from 2017 to 2018. He was on site for the successful application of sloping layer method (SLM) and immersion vibrated RCC (IVRCC) placing on three dams in North America. He has been evaluating the performance of all types of mass and RCC dams and is the co-author of ICOLD Bulletin 177, Chapter 7 Performance of RCC Dams. Tim has worked on site to solve RCC construction placing challenges in virtually any type of climate from equatorial, monsoonal, to sub-arctic conditions.