Nick Oettle, Ph.D., P.E., G.E.

Nick Oettle is a Vice President based in California with more than 18 years of experience in geotechnical and earthquake engineering. He focuses on the design and evaluation of dams and levees, especially their seismic design and risk.

Nick has been involved in the design of more than 12 major new dams and dam modifications and the seismic stability evaluation of more than 20 embankment dams. Nick has coordinated between government agencies on large projects for important stakeholder issues, including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the California Division of Safety of Dams (DSOD). Recently, he has worked on new dams and dam modification projects totaling several billions of dollars in construction value, including Pacheco Dam, Santiago Creek Dam, Santa Felicia Dam, Sites Reservoir, Silver Lake Dam, Moccasin Dam, and New Felt Lake Dam. He is currently on the Independent Panel of Experts for the Sacramento Area Levee System.

Nick has conducted research in the area of numerical modeling on a number of issues, including the assessment of infrastructure to surface fault rupture and the seismic response of dams. He traveled to Japan as a member of the GEER reconnaissance team that documented damage from the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake. In addition, Nick has authored more than 30 publications in peer reviewed journals and conferences.

Throughout his career, Nick has contributed extensively to the development of industry guidelines and standards. This includes ASCE 7-22 and 7-28, where he authored provisions for the treatment of topographic amplification, consideration of liquefaction-induced downdrag, design against seismically induced ground deformation, and surface fault rupture. He has also co-authored forthcoming USSD guidelines for conducting earthquake ground motion studies for large dams and forthcoming ANS 2.30 guidelines for surface fault rupture evaluation.

Nick has also taught classes at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, given lectures to several local ASCE chapter meetings, universities, agencies, conferences, an ASCE webinar on computational geotechnics, and served as a peer reviewer for several academic journals.

He earned his Ph.D. in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, with minors in seismology and numerical modeling, and his Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He has been a registered professional engineer in six states.