Kiewit.com

By the time Kiewit celebrated its centennial in 1984, the company had district offices throughout the United States and Canada, and was performing nearly all types of construction work. In the risk-filled construction business, few companies make it to the centennial mark, so this was a meaningful milestone.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kiewit continued to grow and prosper, developing contracting opportunities in the public sector and expanding into significant markets in the private sector.

Notable projects in this period included the Fort McHenry Tunnel beneath Baltimore Harbor; rebuilding downtown Atlanta’s I-75/85/20 Interchange; rehabilitating the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.; fabricating Bullwinkle, the world’s largest freestanding oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico; and constructing portions of the Hibernia oil platform in the waters off St. John’s, Newfoundland.

In the 1980s, Kiewit began making significant investments in ventures outside its core businesses. The company began investing cash generated from — but not needed by — its construction and mining businesses. This led to the separation of the construction and diversified businesses in 1992. Two major subsidiaries were created under the Peter Kiewit Sons’, Inc. holding company: Kiewit Construction Group and Kiewit Diversified Group. The diversified investments, in everything from high-speed fiber optic networks to public/private toll roads to geothermal power plants, garnered superior returns, prompting Barron’s magazine to pronounce Scott “one of the shrewdest investors around.”

Ken Stinson became president of Kiewit Construction Group under the restructuring. Scott became chairman of the holding company as well as chairman and CEO of Kiewit Diversified Group.

In 1993, Stinson was named chairman and CEO of Kiewit Construction Group. In 1998, Kiewit Diversified separated from Kiewit. Scott remained on the Kiewit Board of Directors. That same year, Stinson became chairman and CEO of Peter Kiewit Sons’, Inc. Kiewit became a leader in the use of the design-build delivery method during this period. By starting construction before design is complete, and by ensuring construction issues are considered early in the process by the design team, design-build has helped our clients complete some of the largest and most complicated projects in the country, ahead of schedule and below budget. The $800 million San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor in Orange County, California, was Kiewit’s first design-build mega-project. It led to the $1.4 billion I-15 Reconstruction project in Salt Lake City, Utah.