WSP Gets Ready to Tackle the Southeast’s Biggest Infrastructure Challenges

Across ENR’s Texas & Southeast region, WSP has climbed the charts, from reporting $542 million in 2021 regional revenue to its 2025 total of $1.185 billion, securing 2nd place on this year’s regional Top Design Firms ranking.

The acquisition of Wood Group and its approximately 6,000 employees was especially impactful for the Southeast, significantly bolstering WSP’s footprint in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

At the time of the purchase, WSP President and CEO Alexandre L’Heureux said the move would “contribute to the achievement of our strategic ambitions while expanding our geographical range and adding expertise in key sectors. This will create even greater momentum as we future-proof our cities and our environment.”

WSP’s broad expertise is indeed showing up across a diverse range of projects—and keeping the firm more than busy. Its work includes raw water supply wellfield and injection well systems in an effort to deliver alternative water sources in Polk County, Fla.; delivering meteorological guidance to the Georgia Dept. of Transportation; helping to create living shorelines in Apalachicola Bay; designing and delivering a shore power system at PortMiami; and serving as lead designer to the Superior-Lane JV team constructing Florida DOT’s approximately $1-billion Westshore Interchange project.

To expand Hartsfield-Jackson’s Concourse D, the project team is employing 19 large-scale modules for the new structures.
Photo courtesy WSP

Staying Hot in the Southeast

The Atlanta construction market is increasingly keeping WSP active. Since 2019, the firm has served as general engineering consultant on Georgia’s $1.25-billion I-285 at I-20 West Interchange project, which started construction in 2025. The project will reconstruct and widen several interstate system-to-system ramps at the I-285/I-20 interchange and add auxiliary lanes along I-20 west and I-285 north of the interchange, among other improvements.

Top among its current Atlanta-area contracts, though, is its work leading the Atlanta Aviation Associates joint venture’s effort to deliver the $11.6-billion ATLNext program at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. There, WSP is performing numerous duties, including program/project management support, quality management, safety oversight, constructibility reviews and supplier diversity outreach, among others.

Contained within that program is the $1.4-billion expansion of ATL’s Concourse D, where WSP reports that the CM at-risk joint venture of Holder Construction Group, C.D. Moody Construction Co., Bryson Constructors and Sovereign Construction and Development is building a total of 19 modular construction units and moving them more than 1 mile and across two runways to grow the concourse from 60 to 99 ft wide and extend its length by 288 ft.

“Given the scale and visibility of the Concourse D project, WSP’s role goes far beyond traditional program management,” says Edmund Ramos, WSP vice president for aviation delivery and the project’s deputy program director. “Our main contribution is helping the airport balance heavy construction with daily operational demands.”

Regarding the sprawling work at ATL and other major projects, Claudia M. Bilotto, WSP’s Atlanta-based Southeast region executive, says, “Part of leading a big job is you have to be able to administer a big job—and have the infrastructure to do that.

“We have a lot of very experienced project managers who have done big jobs before,” she continues, “but we also have the infrastructure to support them.”

The firm’s ability to provide clients a wide variety of services is key, Bilotto adds.

“We have clients like Amazon where we’re able to provide services from site location, due diligence and civil work all the way to the engineering of the data center itself and the facility,” she says. “Being able to provide a full suite of services to clients is a critical part of our growth strategy, and it’s been really effective.”

“Being able to provide a full suite of services to clients is a critical part of our growth strategy.”

—Claudia Bilotto, Southeast Region Executive, WSP

Another notable Atlanta project that WSP is engaged in is the Stitch, which is described as a “transformational civic infrastructure investment” that will create approximately 17 acres of community park space atop a ¾-mile-long platform spanning the Downtown Connector between Ted Turner Drive and Piedmont Avenue, among other features.

While also noting WSP’s considerable environmental and resiliency work, Bilotto adds, “What I’m really excited about is the sheer breadth that we cover across the Southeast. In this area of the country, we have some of the most exciting projects just because of the growth—and we’re also a firm that’s able to be engaged in those projects in many different ways.”

Work in the Sunshine State that is especially of note includes the estimated $1-billion Westshore Interchange project, considered Tampa’s largest-ever highway construction contract. Joint-venture partners Superior Construction and The Lane Construction Corp. engaged WSP as lead designer for the phased design-build (PDB) project, which will add capacity in general-use and tolled express lanes and upgrade the east end of I-275 at the Howard Frankland Bridge, replace an existing loop ramp and construct new direct connectors to and from Tampa International Airport.

In the phased design-build approach, the joint venture team will work collaboratively with FDOT to refine the design, with work packages incorporated into the project in phases as the design progresses. Through the PDB procurement—the first of its kind for a major transportation initiative in Florida—WSP will facilitate collaboration between stakeholders to produce innovation and design optimization.

Notably, WSP has a history of working with Superior Construction, including serving as the lead design firm on the $171-million, 2,111-ft-long John T. Brooks Bridge over Santa Rosa Sound, currently under construction in Fort Walton Beach, Fla.

Evan Lawrence, construction project manager with Superior, says that in addition to WSP’s excellent communication with the project team, their work on the Brooks Bridge has shown that “their problem-solving ability is second to none because they are such a big resource.”

“A lot of engineers understand what it looks like on paper, but they don’t know what it looks like in the field,” Lawrence adds. “WSP really just truly understands how we have to build. It’s a more agreeable approach where [both parties know] we’re going to have cost overruns, we’re going to have issues on the job, but let’s work through them,” Lawrence says. “There’s never any pointing fingers.”

The Apalachicola Bay Living Shoreline/Franklin 98 project aims to bolster the resilience of 6 miles of Florida Highway 98.
Photo courtesy WSP

Attracting, Keeping Talent

Another notable acquisition of sorts took place this past April, when WSP announced that Katus Watson had joined the firm as U.S. chief operating officer. With Jacobs for the previous eight years, Watson most recently served as executive vice president and general manager for that firm’s Canada and U.S. East region. As COO, Watson—who’s based in Tampa—is charged with overseeing operational performance.

Watson sees plenty of opportunity for growth while addressing significant challenges. While noting the “high caliber of [WSP’s] leadership and the strength of its talent” in an interview with ENR, Watson said, “The opportunity to embrace a future-ready mindset—building for the future—was one of the things that brought me to WSP.”

While recognizing significant ongoing demand for major improvements across all types of infrastructure systems as a “big problem for us to solve,” Watson sees his new firm ready to address the challenges.

“WSP is pretty well poised to address all of these issues, whether it’s transportation, energy transition … data centers, environmental remediation, sustainability and defense,” he says. “We have the depth, the talent and the skill sets to help address all of these challenges.”

To that end, WSP describes its developing professionals network (DPN) as a program where employees can be “surrounded by experienced mentors, participate in cutting-edge projects and build a strong foundation for a successful career.”

Richard Sinz Lopez, a civil engineering consultant in WSP’s Atlanta office, says that the DPN network offers him real opportunities.

“The DPN allows you to really see and find those opportunities if you’re looking for them,” he says, adding that WSP’s size and scale facilitate a seamless transition to a new venture.

Sinz Lopez says that when he was looking for his first position after graduating from college six years ago, “What really sold me was the structure and the career opportunities that were being pitched to me back then that were so evident.”

Since then, Sinz Lopez, after seeing what similar programs are being offered by other companies, “I really came to realize that no other company has developed a young professionals network as robust, well-organized, well-structured as the DPN.”

With WSP’s broad focus on solving the big infrastructure challenges of today, keeping its employees engaged like this certainly can’t hurt.