He rescued Channel Tunnel for Britain. He brought US Ecology to Boise. Noted engineer dies
Jack K. Lemley, named honorary Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his work fixing the troubled Channel Tunnel during a long construction career, died Nov. 29 in Boise. He was 86.
Lemley’s career spanned a half-century and led him to projects in 65 countries, racking up more than 7 million miles in the air.
Lemley was born Jan. 2, 1935, in Coeur d’Alene, where he grew up, to Kenneth and Dorothy Lemley. He went to work for the Idaho Transportation Department at age 15 and worked for the agency through college.
Lemley traced the roots of his success to those early years doing manual labor on big construction projects, he once told the Idaho Statesman.
He graduated from the University of Idaho in 1960 with a degree in architecture. But that wasn’t his first love.
“I would have been a terrible architect,” Lemley, then 78, told the Idaho Statesman in 2013, a year after he retired. “All I ever wanted to do from the time I was a small boy was build big things.”
After college, Lemley took a job as an engineer for the Guy F. Atkinson Co., based in San Francisco. He supervised construction of 25 miles of underground water tunnels beneath New York City and the construction of Interstate 5 through downtown Seattle.
In 1977, he came to Boise as executive vice president in charge of heavy construction for Morrison-Knudsen. He served as general manager of M-K’s $1.3 billion construction of King Khalid Military City in Saudi Arabia and a 14-mile water tunnel under New York City.
The Boise-based company, founded in the early 1900s by Harry Morrison and Morris Knudsen, received international acclaim for helping build the Hoover Dam in Nevada, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline.
Lemley was deeply disappointed when M-K passed him over for a promotion to CEO, instead choosing Bill Agee, the CEO of the Bendix Corp., which made automotive brakes to aircraft avionics. Agee, who died in 2017, was born in Boise and grew up in Meridian.
“I don’t think a financial education qualifies you to be a contractor.,” Lemley told the Statesman. “I’ve been reading the diary of Ann Morrison, and it goes through the years of her and Harry’s courtship and then how they built that company. And then when you compare that with Bill Agee, there is no comparison.”
Under Agee, M-K recorded record profits between 1989 and 1991 before losing $310 million during the 1994 fiscal year. The company board fired Agee in 1995.
Lemley left Morrison-Knudsen, now AECOM, after Agree was hired as CEO. By 1989, he was in charge of the $12 billion Channel Tunnel linking England with France through a 31-mile underground railroad.
The project 140 feet below the bed of the English Channel had been in trouble for three years. Lemley was hired to fix it.
“The tunnel was just in a horrible mess,” Lemley told the Statesman. “After I’d been there a few months, I realized that I knew more about the tunnels than the people in charge. I’d go down there every day. I knew the people running the machines and each of the headings on the British side. That’s where the trouble was. The French side was on time and on budget.”
In December 1990, a British miner and a French miner, digging from opposite directions, first established a land link between the two countries. Lemley was the third person to make the crossing.
“It was the completion of the most sophisticated, highest-capacity rail system in the world,” he told the Associated Press in a 1994 story.
From 1995 to 2002, Lemley became the CEO of U.S. Ecology, which disposes of hazardous waste. He moved the company’s headquarters to Boise from Houston.
Lemley was also chosen to head construction efforts for the 2012 London Olympics. He later quit the project after he became concerned that politics had hampered his ability to deliver the work on time and within budget.
“I went there to build things, not to sit and talk about it,” Lemley told the Statesman in 2006. “So I felt it best to leave the post and come home.”
Lemley served as a consultant to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority on the ‘Big Dig’ project that improved the flow of traffic through Boston.
Lemley was inducted into Idaho’s Hall of Famein 1997 and into the Hall of Fame of the Idaho Technology Council in 2011.
Outside of work, Lemley enjoyed white-water rafting, skiing and sailing and was was an avid bike rider. In retirement, he split time between Boise and Ketchum.
He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Pamela Lemley, and extended family including children Jim Lemley,Tara Lemley, John Lemley, Kristin Thomas and Jill Simplot, his sister, Grace Hege, and four granddaughters.
No public services are planned.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks for friends to consider a donation to The Humane Society or to a favorite charity.
This story was originally published December 7, 2021 at 1:42 PM.
