Face to Face
Nita McCallum
Construction Support Manager/Inspection Services Manager

Nita was born and raised in Western Washington. There, she studied civil engineering before working on a series of quality control projects for private/commercial nuclear power companies, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.

She worked on projects in 10 different states, eventually making her way to Alaska in the winter of 1994 for a two-month-long electrical safety assignment with her parent company, Stone & Webster Engineering. This job led to contract work with several Alyeska contractors and eventually to a permanent position at Alyeska Pipeline Service Company in June 1997. Nita worked as a maintenance quality generalist, operations supervisor and construction manager before being transferred to Fairbanks, where she now works as both construction support manager for pipeline reconfiguration and inspection services manager.

Nita is well suited to wearing two (hard) hats at work because at home she raised two sets of twins. Her children are now grown and Nita spends her free time stoking the wood-burning stove that she has used for cooking since the days when that was all she had for cooking.

What are your responsibilities as construction support manager and inspection services manager?

My construction support manager duties are “HSEQ,” short for Health, Safety, Environment and Quality. My team is responsible for safety, environment and quality for the pipeline SR project – our job is to get it right and keep it safe. We are direct support to the construction manager as well as each and every individual assigned to the pipeline SR project. As inspection services manager (ISM), I have responsibility for the 3rd party inspection contract. This contract provides qualified personnel responsible for inspecting Alyeska equipment and installations as requested by engineering. Presently there are about 50 contract personnel associated with this contract – most of them are first line inspectors assigned to either Fairbanks or Valdez. As ISM, I have three direct reports that are basically holding up the fort until the reconfiguration project slows a bit.

What are your biggest professional challenges and rewards?

The reward is that I love a challenge – the challenge is finding the time for all the parts and pieces.

What do you plan to do when pipeline SR is over?

Breathe. This is a very exciting and demanding project, defined as ‘fast track’ and ‘just-in-time.’ We describe our work as analogous to laying track in front of a freight train. The good thing is that it keeps you hopping and the really good thing is that you know you can call timeout whenever it’s required to keep our folks safe and our work compliant. Actually, I’ll probably be back begging my supervisor to let me help out on another project.