Thalle Construction Co., Inc.

Thalle Construction Co., Inc. is a heavy civil general contractor founded in 1947 and headquartered in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with regional offices in Alvarado, Texas and Wellington, Florida. The firm self-performs most of its work across dams, locks and reservoirs, water and wastewater treatment plants, roller-compacted concrete, marine and sheet pile construction, mass earthwork, landfills and highway and bridge packages. Thalle holds the downstream monolith contract on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Kentucky Lock Addition, awarded in 2021 at a $167 million base and expanded to roughly $380 million, and passed 1.5 million work hours on that package without a lost-time incident. It is also part of the Thalle-Bauer joint venture on the Rough River Dam safety modification in Kentucky. Thalle has been a member company of the Tully Group since 2012.

The operating model at Thalle turns on labour flexibility as much as equipment. The company staffs projects from trained workforces in both union and non-union markets, which is what lets it chase multi-discipline, schedule-driven work across state lines without renegotiating its delivery approach each time. Bidding runs through a formal estimating group and a SmartBid portal, with a separate partner programme for subcontractors and suppliers.

The origin story is more specific than the founding date suggests. In 1947 Guido Pacchiana left one of the Northeast’s largest road contractors to start the company in New York with his brother Anselmo and Joseph Thalle. Early work was modest, ranging from landscaping to sewer projects. Guido’s son George Pacchiana pushed the company into construction material production, tunnelling and progressively harder civil work. Expansion into the Southeast came in the 1990s, and the Hillsborough headquarters was formally established in 1999.

Current workload

The published project board gives a clear read on scale. Contract 11B of the Central Everglades Planning Project sits at $2.87 billion and is shown as work in progress. The Brushy Creek raw water intake carries a $224 million award and is under construction. The Midlothian Balancing Reservoir, a $143 million package, is complete. On 21 July the Thalle-Bauer joint venture joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Louisville District and state and local partners to break ground on Phase 2 of the Rough River Dam Safety Modification Project, an effort estimated at $665 million to strengthen the dam foundation and improve downstream flood protection.

Markets that rarely appear on a general contractor’s list show up here as standing capabilities: coal combustion residual handling and remediation, CCR impoundment closure, municipal and CCR landfill construction, and emergency response and recovery work.

Safety is treated as a measured programme rather than a slogan. Thalle reports against Experience Modification Rating and Total Recordable Incident Rate, states that both outperform industry benchmarks, and folds safety performance into the annual review process for managers and supervisors on the reasoning that good behaviour has to be recognised and rewarded, not just enforced.

Career materials are published in English and Spanish, and the company runs recruiting through career fairs alongside its own openings portal.