June 5, 2022 /

HRG marks the beginning of its 60th year in business this June, and we want to celebrate this achievement with all of you who made it possible! From now until the end of 2022, we will be commemorating who we are and what we’ve accomplished in a series of messages containing photos, memories, and facts that chronicle our evolution through the years.  This page will be updated regularly, and you can join the celebration on LinkedIn and Facebook by following the hashtag #HRGcelebrating60

Community service  has always been the core of our business: enhancing local neighborhoods by improving safety, fostering health and wellness, connecting people and places, and promoting strong economies. We do this through the professional services we provide, but also through charitable donations, sponsorships, and volunteer service:

HRG’s legacy is manifested in hundreds of miles of pipeline, steel, concrete and waterways we’ve designed or improved throughout Pennsylvania and the surrounding states.  Our projects are a living monument tracing the history of our company and the history of the communities we serve as they develop over time. Let’s look at HRG’s history as told through the projects we’ve delivered through the decades.

HRG’s founders had extensive experience in water and wastewater engineering, so they envisioned this would be the foundation of their work when they opened the firm in June 1962. You may be surprised to learn they also did a considerable amount of work related to recreational facilities in these early years. Young, scrappy and hungry businesses tend to take work where they can get it, and one of our biggest clients in the 1960s was a construction company that specialized in building swimming pools. HRG designed and obtained permits for more than two dozen pools throughout Central Pennsylvania. We also provided engineering services for approximately 45 campsites for various non-profits, including the Boy Scouts of America. Our premier project in this market was the Goshen Scout Reservation in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia (shown here). This reservation features six resident camps situated around 425 acres of crystal blue water in Lake Merriweather.  HRG designed the camps and the dam that created this lake from the Little Calfpasture River.  We also provided construction administration services.

HRG is the retained engineer for dozens of municipalities and municipal authorities .  It wasn’t always that way; however. We signed our first municipal retainer contract with Lower Paxton Township in 1971, then quickly developed retainer and on-call relationships with Lower Allen Township, Swatara Township, and several other communities.   Still, this decade is known as the environmental era in HRG’s history because as much as 90% of our work came from water and wastewater design projects, including the Steelton Water Filtration Plant shown here.

At the start of the next decade – as we evolved from Herbert Associates to Herbert, Rowland & Grubic, Inc. – we were still known primarily as a civil and sanitary engineering firm.  But this decade saw us add our first regional office in Lancaster and expand more heavily into traffic and transportation engineering.  We developed a traffic responsive computer system to control 13 intersections, two speed sampling stations and three fire house emergency preemption stations in Lower Paxton Township. We also began our capital improvement planning work for Dauphin County’s bridges. That program has garnered numerous awards, articles in state and national publications, and become a model of bridge management for other counties around the state.

We continued diversifying our services in the 1990s, growing our reputation in transportation and land development, taking on more complex surveying assignments, and adding new capabilities in electrical engineering, GIS, and public sector finance (such as utility rate setting and budgeting). We also had a small, but thriving planning division in the 1990s, as well. Their projects included a fair housing assessment for the City of Altoona, a comprehensive plan for Cranberry Township, a corridor study along Route 272 in Lancaster, and a landscape policy plan for the communities surrounding Allegheny Ridge State Heritage Park.

HRG continues to build our reputation across our many service offerings.  We remain an industry leader in the civil and sanitary engineering space, delivering industry firsts (like the first beneficial reuse of wastewater in Pennsylvania for the University Area Joint Authority, the innovative wastewater to energy treatment process for Milton Regional Sewer Authority, and the first regional stormwater authority for the Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority). Our transportation group has left its mark on some of Pennsylvania’s most significant landmarks like the Point State Park Fountain (which serves as the centerpiece of the Pittsburgh skyline) and the Kinzua Viaduct turned Skywalk, a major tourist attraction in McKean County that has been featured by CNN Travel, PBS, the Discovery Channel and Engineering News-Record. Our land development group has played a significant role in the industrial warehouse development along the I-81 corridor of Central Pennsylvania, but they also have long-standing relationships with some of the biggest regional players in the commercial sector (like Weis and Sheetz).  Now they’re evolving to do more landscape architecture and campus-oriented development at universities and retirement communities.  After more than a decade of dormancy, HRG’s planning division is back and rapidly growing, particularly in Western Pennsylvania. And the future looks even brighter, thanks to the dedication of our talented team!