When Gil Horrocks first founded Horrocks Engineers in 1968, he had a vision to serve communities by providing needed infrastructure that would improve quality of life for generations. Today, we honor our late founder’s legacy with a celebration on his birthday: our first Founder’s Day. To celebrate Gil’s life and legacy, we have created a brief history and video message (below).
Gilbert Horrocks
Raised in the small farming community of Arcadia, Utah, Gil Horrocks had developed a strong work ethic at an early age. Brought up in a two-room log cabin with no electricity or plumbing, Gil understood the hardship of living without reliable infrastructure and sought to improve people’s lives by providing that service through his own civil engineering firm. From the very beginning, Horrocks Engineers has championed Gil’s dream of making people’s lives better through the work we do each day.
Being a Part of Something Bigger
At Horrocks, what we do matters. As an engineering and professional services firm, Horrocks benefits the communities we live in by having a direct impact on our world, our culture, and the resources available to us.
As Gil once said, “We work in [a] profession that has a direct impact on people’s lives. The things we do affect them every day in a personal way: turning on the tap and getting good water, turning on the switch and getting light, driving on a safe highway, safe intersection, and safe bridges, [even] flushing the toilet and forgetting about it. Those are things that affect people’s lives directly, every day. So, I have always felt–excuse me–proud to be an engineer and in the engineering profession.”
Celebrating Founder’s Day 2022
As we kick off our inaugural Founder’s Day celebration, we invite you to learn more about Gil and what made his work meaningful by watching the video below.
Video Transcript:
And I’ve always liked to work, I … I like to see things accomplished, I like to see them completed, and yet I like to play. One of the most satisfying things, seven years after we put it in, I was out there, and a rancher flagged me down. And I stopped and talked to him, and he said, “You know, this water system’s changed our lives.” He said, “It’s the best water in the world.” He said, “And it doesn’t even streak the chrome.” [laughter] And I looked at his [laughter] calloused hands, and I just couldn’t help but smile…coming from him who said, “It didn’t even streak the chrome.” [laughter] And so those people’s lives have all been benefitted. And I think that’s the kind of things that we do and don’t even think about. It doesn’t matter what it is, it all fits into the big picture.”