A Good Feeling

A midlife crisis can manifest itself in a lot of ways. Deepal Eliatamby’s was a doozy — “I started an engineering firm!” he says with a laugh.

Eliatamby — who left his native Sri Lanka at 17 with two bags, a backpack and a heap of ambition — took a civil engineering job at B.P. Barber & Associates after graduate school, then spent 14 years climbing the company ladder. By the time he went into business for himself in 2004, he was one of 14 shareholders in the $18 million firm.

In other words, he was already enjoying a successful career. He just wanted to do more, and he wanted to make a difference in his adopted home state — and so Alliance Consulting Engineers was born. 

With four offices in South Carolina and a fifth in Charlotte, the Columbia-based company now provides services to developers, local governments, school districts, health care districts and industry across the Southeast — from land planning and site design to construction services, road and railway design to water, wastewater stormwater and solid waste management.

This spring, at Alliance’s 20th anniversary gala, Eliatamby was feted for his accomplishments and the company he started was recognized with a resolution from the South Carolina General Assembly. 

“The business acumen is something I learned on the job,” says Eliatamby, civil engineering ’88, master’s ’89. “I’m probably doing everything backwards according to a business professor — somebody in the MBA program would probably go, ‘That’s not what you’re supposed to do!’ — but it’s worked.”

“Worked” is an understatement. Over the past two decades, Alliance has completed more than 2,500 projects with some pretty big partners: a $500 million facility for Marc Anthony Brewing (makers of White Claw) in Richland County, another $500 million facility for E&J Gallo winery in Chester County, a $1 billion carbon fiber plant for Toray Composite Materials America in Spartanburg County....

“Our brochure is somewhat dated,” he apologizes before detailing his firm’s biggest current project: an electric vehicle battery plant being built by the Auto­motive Energy Supply Corporation, a subsidiary of Nissan, in Florence, South Carolina. The $3.5 billion facility will ultimately supply batteries to the BMW GROUP Plant Spartanburg and BMW Mexico. 

In addition to their design role at the plant itself, Alliance is working with Florence County on approximately $100 million in related infrastructure projects including water and wastewater systems and roadways. 

The contracts pile up, but Eliatamby zeroes in on the economic impact. The Florence battery plant project promises to create 3,000 jobs, he says, at an average annual salary of $75,000.

“It will change the Pee Dee Region,” he says. “It will do to the Pee Dee Region what BMW, in 1992, did for Greer, Spartanburg, Greenville. I mean, if you went to Greer in 1992 and said, ‘We’re going to employ 12,000 people,’ they would have said, ‘We can’t find 12,000 people!’ But over 32 years, they’ve hired 12,000 people. And there’s now another 75,000 jobs in South Carolina related to automotive manufacturing suppliers.”

By his own quick estimate, Alliance’s combined projects to date represent approximately $45 billion in capital investment and 36,000 jobs. “And that’s really the impactful thing,” he says. “That 36,000 families are better off.”

Numbers like that strike a chord for the first-generation American. Eliatamby’s childhood in the newly independent Sri Lanka was punctuated by political unrest, Marxist insurrections and shortages of everything from bread to soap. He describes the system of high tax rates and wealth distribution as a disincentive to economic growth and a barrier to his own ambitions.

He also found himself in the crosshairs of ethnic conflict between the majority Singhalese and the minority Tamil populations. His family made escape plans in the event that the violence zeroed in on their home. And as the situation worsened in the early '80s, he and his family decided that he should look into colleges in the U.S.

It was among the best decisions of his life, he says. Compared to his experiences in Sri Lanka, the U.S. represented safety, opportunity and freedom. South Carolina, in turn, allowed him to see his hard work make a real-world impact. 

“I had no idea where South Carolina was. I had never heard of it. I knew of New York, Washington, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Los Angeles — and I knew of Texas. In fact, I had my hopes on UT Austin,” he says. “But the Carolina acceptance letter came two weeks before the letter from UT Austin.”

Choosing USC was another good decision, he says, and not just because of the education he received. 

Eliatamby attended his first Carolina football game at Williams-Brice Stadium in August 1984, shortly after arriving on campus, and he hasn’t missed a home game since. He married his wife in Rutledge Chapel on USC’s Horseshoe. He served 20 years on the Alumni Associ­ation’s Board of Governors, helped raise the funds to finance the $26 million Alumni Center and contributed the civil engineering design free-of-charge. 

And this past year, when he learned that the Alumni Association was close to retiring its debt on the center, he wrote the check to pay it off — which is his way of paying the university back.

“I love the University of South Carolina,” he says. “When somebody says, ‘Well, why’d you go here?’ I say, ‘I just had a good feeling.’”