Sorba Engineering

Sorba Engineering is a woman-owned civil engineering consultancy based in Dulles, Virginia, working on site design, stormwater management, utility design and the permitting that goes with them across the Washington metropolitan area. The firm is civil engineer on the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts McGlothlin Wing II, a $261 million expansion and renovation in Richmond that adds roughly 173,000 gross square feet in a fifth-floor vertical addition and reworks about 45,000 square feet across the museum’s 1936, 1970 and 2010 wings. SmithGroup is architect and engineer of record on the project, with Gilbane Building Company as construction manager at risk.

The chancery renovation at the U.S. Embassy in Athens. The Wall of Remembrance at the Korean War Veterans Memorial. The Folger Shakespeare Library. The Cannon House Office Building. Sorba Engineering’s portfolio reads as a list of buildings that arrived with constraints already attached. The firm works out of 22365 Broderick Drive in Dulles, Virginia, and describes itself as a woman-owned small civil engineering consulting practice.

Sorba came into being through an asset purchase: its founders bought the Public Sector Division of Wiles Mensch Corporation in Reston, Virginia. Meredith McComas, PE, is president, overseeing the firm’s financial side and bringing private land development work to a portfolio otherwise weighted toward public projects. Matthew McComas, PE, LS, LEED AP, Tim Geraghty, PE, and Scott Miller, PE, complete the leadership. McComas is a Virginia Tech civil engineering graduate with close to two decades in development work.

Site design is the core discipline. The team handles grading, drainage, erosion and sedimentation control, water, sewer and dry utility routing, water network modeling, earthwork analysis, and hydraulic and hydrology studies, along with roadway, parking and pedestrian circulation improvements. Scope runs from feasibility studies through full construction documents. The firm treats fluency in federal and local entitlement and technical approval processes as a way to shorten permit procurement, which is often the long pole on a DC-area federal job.

Stormwater gets treated as a specialty rather than a line item. Sorba has designed hundreds of stormwater quantity and quality control facilities across the DMV region. In urban settings that has meant vegetated green roofs, sand filters, detention tanks, pipes and inlets, bioretention and microbioretention, rainwater harvesting cisterns and tree island reservoirs. In suburban and rural work it has meant wet and dry ponds, bioretention basins, infiltration trenches, conserved open space and grass swales. Staff present on the subject to regional industry associations.

The client roster skews public: the U.S. Department of State, the National Park Service, the Architect of the Capitol, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the General Services Administration, plus state and local governments, educational institutions and cultural facilities. Recent assignments include lead civil engineer for the Foreign Affairs Security Training Center at Fort Pickett in Virginia, utility relocations for the CSX Virginia Avenue Tunnel in Washington, and the first academic building at the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus in Arlington. Smithsonian work at the Arts and Industries Building also appears among project highlights.

The office can be reached at 571.771.0273.