Jasmin Chana, EIT, is a Water Resources Engineer here at Binnie. Jasmin’s journey at Binnie started when she was a grad tech/student. She gradually became an EIT 14 months later.
As an Engineer in Training on our Water Resources team, Jasmin enjoys working in the office and interacting with other engineers daily to discuss how to tackle a problem or receive feedback on work. Depending on the project, she works with other team members who specialize in highways, development, or infrastructure.
Jasmin’s days at Binnie vary quite a bit. Sometimes she gets to go out into the field and help with culvert condition assessments, figuring out the existing drainage on site, or installing a water level logger. On other days she works on designing drainage for a highway project, delineating a catchment with QGIS, sizing a culvert, creating a pipe network in Civil 3D, or helping with a PCSWMM model. Her role is definitely a hybrid of both on-site and off-site!
One of Jasmin’s favorite projects at Binnie was the culvert assessment for the City of Burnaby. Using the AASHTO culvert condition assessment guideline, other Binnie inspectors have helped document the conditions of over 200 culverts in Burnaby to date. Today, they are working on providing maintenance and capital work recommendations to the City. A few of the culverts were actually in Jasmin’s neighborhood, but they were hidden, so she hadn’t realized they were there until she started working on this project! Jasmin grew up in Terrace, BC, where she explored the outdoors by hiking on Terrace Mountain, sailing on Lakelse Lake, and skiing on Shames Mountain. Her experiences in Terrace sparked her curiosity about science, which led her to study Civil Engineering at BCIT. After graduation, she joined Binnie where she recalls feeling very “welcomed and supported.”
Currently, Jasmin is working towards attaining her P.Eng and enjoys being part of the Canadian Water Resources Association. She most recently participated in their “Stream Flow Measurements” course last year, which taught her about river safety and different types of measurements in streams for flow, velocity, temperature, and sediment transport.
If you were to ask Jasmin what the most rewarding part of her job is, she would tell you that it is getting out into the field, figuring out how site drainage works, installing water level loggers, or completing culvert assessments. As she gains more design experience, she looks forward to learning about construction inspections when some of the projects she has helped with are built.
When Jasmin isn’t working, she enjoys walking and hiking. Her advice for anyone in her field is to check out the Canadian Water Resources Association, which has a lot of interesting webinars and courses for anyone curious about water resources.