Women in Construction Week 2025: Emma Almy
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Sometimes the oldest and most complicated road projects in the City of Madison are paired with some of the most passionate, sharp and energized engineers eager to understand and help create solutions. City of Madison Engineering Division Street Designer and Engineer Emma Almy is exactly that engineer—she’s not shy about taking on one of Madison’s oldest and complicated intersection projects.
“This is a big intersection—there's all sort of stuff in the ground and lots of conflicts,” Almy said.
Almy is a street designer and engineer on most projects, but on the King, Wilson and Butler streets reconstruction in Summer 2024, she was in charge of understanding the not-so-obvious, everything below the surface.
“My role with this project was as an inspector,” Almy said. “I was out here day to day, actually watching them putting in the sewer pipes, putting in the storm pipes, curb and gutter, everything.”
The King, Wilson, Butler project was complicated and impacts a highly traveled artery to downtown with a lot of history.
“With this being downtown Madison, and the oldest part of Madison, you have a lot of existing old utilities and people have been trying to put new utilities – so you’re working around existing old stuff—clay pipes from the 1900s.”
Almy grew up in Rockford, Ill., graduated from Southern Illinois University Carbondale with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, and it seemed like the perfect fit. However, it wasn’t always her first choice.
“When I was little, I wanted to be a garbage truck driver. I loved water. I loved big machines,” Almy said.
She started her first semester in college studying Forestry, but then took some advice from her dad, a civil engineer.
“My dad was like, ‘why don’t you switch?’ And I was like huh, I’ll switch! And I ended up liking civil engineering—I just love big machines. I love excavators and dozers,” Almy said. “He always knew I liked to know where everything is, where everything goes, knowing a lot about an area, so civil engineering makes sense for that—you get to know just about everything in the ground.”
Some things haven’t changed in that respect, Almy is learning as much as she can about construction inside and out—even if she’s the only woman on job, which she said is often in construction, but it does not phase her for a moment.
“If you’re a woman on a project, you’re the only one on the entire project. That’s how it usually is,” Almy said.
Almy said if other women are looking into a career in construction, they shouldn’t let the idea of being the only woman on the job deter them from following what they enjoy.
“Don’t be afraid to get in there—there are times I’d just go right up to a trench or a pit—and they don’t know who I am and I’m like, ‘oh hi!’” Almy said. “Do what you want to do. You’ll figure out, just get in there.”
Whether it be driving around with her dad learning about infrastructure firsthand…
“...he would show me – ‘I designed this roundabout,’ or ‘I was on this bridge—Emma!’ In Rockford, there’s the Kishwaukee River, it’s a huge bridge that goes over the Rock River,” Almy said. “[Emma’s dad] he’s like ‘I should get you in there –you should go inside the bridge with me.”
...Or finding an old set of plans from 1955 that explains why there’s few utilities along the northern side of Wilson between Butler and Hancock (there’s coal chute under the road).
“I'm most proud of all the research I did on this project,” Almy said. “...and figuring out that when the sanitary goes underneath, it goes through the steam tunnel, that was a big thing.”
Big things don’t seem so hard when you have a great attitude in the construction world, and if you happen to come across an engineer as eager and smart as Emma, consider yourself lucky that you get to work with someone who appreciates the complexity and impact of a project, on the surface and underground in construction and life.
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