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Earth Month In Action: For the Love of Engineering, SPU and Seattle 

Meet Eleanor Jackson, Design Manager for SPU’s largest capital improvement project.

Eleanor Jackson, SPU’s Design Manager for the Ship Canal Water Quality Project, is responsible for overseeing engineering quality—ensuring the project meets its requirements. She manages City staff and consultants to ensure all pieces of the $570 million project are well-designed investments in our planet and city. Her passion for quality goes beyond engineering—she’s focused on mentoring and service too.

She pursued engineering upon a high school teacher’s recommendation—she was good at math and liked to build and fix things. But that aptitude hasn’t kept Jackson at the City of Seattle for 36 years: “What got me into this work was the technical side. But what has kept me in it is the people side.” Jackson takes mentorship seriously, and enjoys helping and learning from her colleagues. She was mentored when she got to SPU, and says that “they taught me a lot. So now I’m giving back. I’m helping others build their careers.” She is deliberate about developing staff and loves seeing them succeed.

Jackson always loved working for the health and safety of her community and has worked on sewer and stormwater projects all over Seattle. Over the past two decades, as her work increasingly focused on projects that reduce combined sewer overflows, she has seen how SPU’s investments really are improving regional water quality. She is part of protecting Seattle’s waters, which is especially poignant given her deep roots in the city. Jackson grew up in West Seattle, six blocks from Lincoln Park. “During the summertime, if you were looking for me and my siblings, that’s where we would be. On the beach playing around.”

The Ship Canal Water Quality Project is the largest project Jackson has ever worked on. When completed, it will keep an average of 75 million gallons of polluted stormwater and sewage from entering water bodies each year. It is a major investment by Seattle and King County in our planet. And, for Jackson, it is a continuation of her dedication to quality engineering, delivered by dedicated staff in service to our region’s people and environment.

Learn more about how SPU is making everyday investments in our planet.