Stormwater and Flood ManagementSouth Australia
11 July 2024
Ken Schalk this week celebrates 40 years of service at Tonkin. Having joined Tonkin in 1984, Ken is currently Tonkin’s Principal – Hydrology and Hydraulics. During his career Ken has held a number of leadership positions at Tonkin, including Managing Director, and played a key role in shaping Tonkin into the successful engineering consultancy we are today.
Ken, during his 40-year career at Tonkin, has worked in a range of roles, initially joining us in 1984 as Graduate Engineer aged twenty-one, and eventually his value to the organisation saw him become Director and Managing Director in the 1990s and early 2000s. Currently, in his role as Principal Engineer for Hydrology and Hydraulics, Ken remains one of the organisation’s most experienced members of staff, and provides invaluable mentorship to engineers of all levels at Tonkin.
Early in his career Ken worked across a range of engineering disciplines, including stormwater, structural design and waste engineering, but it was hydrology and hydraulics that was of special interest and the area where Ken developed his deep technical expertise. One of his key achievements was to author the guidelines for Urban Stormwater Management Planning. Also, in 2011 he was awarded the South Australian Professional Engineer of the Year and has been regarded as the pre-eminent stormwater engineer in South Australia for much of his career.
Ken was instrumental in getting Tonkin started in the use of TUFLOW for flood modelling in the early 2000s, which is now a big part of our stormwater offering. Ken was also years ahead of his time in the 1990s when he coded a program which he called GENIE - a GIS-like front end to coding ILSAX text based hydrological models. The program saved Tonkin’s engineers many hours and it put us well ahead of our competitors and further established Tonkin’s reputation as one of South Australia’s leading water engineering firms.
Over the years, Ken has been involved in a slew of significant projects, including critical floodplain mapping across Adelaide and South Australia. Ken played a major role in the investigation and design of stormwater drainage and water quality improvement systems throughout South Australia.
We thank Ken for his commitment, passion and leadership at Tonkin over the last 40 years. Ken is one of the key people in Tonkin’s history who has helped make the company what it is today.
