Moffatt & Nichol

Moffatt & Nichol is a Long Beach, Calif., infrastructure engineering firm that John Moffatt and Frank Nichol started as a two-person shop in 1945. Eighty years on, it’s best known for ports and marine terminals, and ENR has ranked it the No. 1 marine and port facilities design firm. The practice also covers coastal and shoreline work, waterways, bridges and transportation, water resources, and climate resilience planning, with offices across the U.S. plus Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Australia. Resilience is where it showed up in today’s news. At Greenbuild, Moffatt & Nichol vice president Daniel Zarrilli, New York City’s former chief resilience officer, told designers that most existing buildings and infrastructure weren’t built for conditions already on the ground, arguing climate risk belongs in the first budget.

Seven service lines, and a company that still names its founders

Moffatt & Nichol organises its practice into seven service lines rather than regional divisions: ports, transportation, water, commercial, environment, architecture and landscape, and technology. The last of those is the newest and the least expected from a marine engineering firm. The company describes connecting data, systems and operations so that infrastructure owners can see deeper into asset condition and predict problems earlier, and it runs it as a named group, M&N Digital, rather than an internal tool.

The firm’s own account of its origins is about working habits rather than milestones. It began as a team of two, and it notes that founders John Moffatt and Frank Nichol stayed close to the drafting room as both leaders and practising engineers, so conversations moved easily between designers and partners. The five values it publishes follow from that: attract the best practitioners, work as a team, earn a fair return, respect employees and clients, and operate with honesty, integrity and decency.

The office network is the practical detail for anyone deciding whether the firm can staff a job locally. North American offices run from Anchorage through Baltimore, Boston, Bridgeport, Charleston, Charlotte, Corpus Christi, Houston, Jacksonville, Mobile, Morehead City, New Orleans, New York, Norfolk, Oakland, Philadelphia, Savannah, Seattle and Wilmington, plus Vancouver in Canada and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Europe and the Middle East cover London, Exeter, Farnham, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Madrid, Valencia, Algeciras, Rota, Vilnius and Abu Dhabi. Latin America covers Bogota, Panama City, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago and Sao Paulo. Asia Pacific covers Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Gold Coast and Singapore. The site marks several of those as virtual offices, which is a useful disclosure when assessing local presence.

There is a separate UK site at moffattnichol.co.uk, and the main site runs in US English, UK English and Spanish.

On governance, the firm publishes its policy set openly: anti-human trafficking and modern slavery, social value, anti-corruption and anti-bribery, whistleblowing, environmental commitment and a carbon reduction plan. For public clients running procurement checks, those are the documents usually requested. Sources: moffattnichol.com homepage and Who We Are page.