Daryl Wurster's passion for what he does goes deep.

"I love looking at rocks," said the Kentucky native.

Wurster, a civil engineer, took his interest in all things underground and turned it into his own business 20 years ago. His company, Wurster Engineering and Construction, did not build the Liberty Bridge over the Reedy River in downtown Greenville.

But his foundations are keeping it up.

The Greenville resident founded his geo-structural business — that is, a specialist shop in stabilizing structures from beneath — 20 years ago. Today, his company's reach extends to a five-hour driving radius around Greenville, includes an office in Asheville, N.C., and will soon add a satellite office in Charleston.

"It's like the drilling business where we reinforce the ground in different ways," Wurster said. "We install piles that hold up a structure. Almost all of it involves grout and reinforced casing. We can hold up bridges, parking garages, anything."

The company also does shoring work, necessary when a hole in the ground needs help keeping its walls from caving in.

"We start at the top and work our way down," Wurster said. "We anchor as we go."

Wurster is doing foundation work for the gateway project at Interstates 85 and 385. His company also is working on the new JHM Hotel project at Spring and Washington streets in downtown Greenville. Stabilizing the relatively soft soil at the hotel site required reinforcing it with steel and concrete, he said.

"We did three kinds of work there," Wurster said. "Shoring, auger-cast piles and micro-piles." 

Wurster's path to this work was slow — he was in his 40s before he started his own firm.

He said a University of Louisville recruiting trip got him onto engineering initially when he was still in high school. He started talking to Louisville students and liked how he could see and relate to their work. 

"I said, 'Is this hard'?" he said. "They said anyone can do it if they are willing to work. So I signed up and got in."

A year into college Wurster had to decide what kind of engineer he would be. He knew he did not want to work in a factory. ("I'd probably love them today," he says now). He had also been hanging out with "a bunch of hippie types" who spent weekends kayaking and backpacking. 

So Wurster settled on civil engineering, a field that would keep him outside, and specialized in geotechnical civil engineering — a niche that solved the problems of structures intersecting with earth.

"I wanted something more like art — free form," Wurster said. "It was a new field, and people were jumping into it. It was a combination of geology and engineering. If you knew where soil came from, you'd have a good idea what you were getting into, what the problems might be."

His became a vocabulary of clays and rocks, sinkholes and bad soils, grouting, laggings, pilings and variations of concrete.

"I can tell you what pretty much any rock is," said Wurster, who turned 60 this year.

Wurster's first job out of school was at a mine-consulting firm in Pittsburgh, but he left in 1981 when the economy took a downturn. His next stop was Knoxville, Tenn., where he went to work for another consulting firm. While there, he heard about BMW coming to South Carolina and so asked to transfer to the firm's Greenville office.

"I knew there would be a lot of work in this area," Wurster said.

By 1997, he said he wanted some thing different.

So he quit his consulting job without a plan.

"I didn't know what I was going to do. Just not what I was doing," Wurster said. 

He started doing some independent consulting work out of his house and took out a couple of ads in the Yellow Pages offering solutions for retaining walls and foundations.

"I just started it. It was just an idea," Wurster said. "It's a hard way to start a business. I didn't have anything to go by." 

Wurster had consulted on scores of construction jobs, but he had never built anything.

"People were asking me to do construction," Wurster said. "They would call and say they needed something fixed, rather than that they needed an engineer. The opportunity presented itself."

Wurster took this market demand and turn it into a niche — a consulting engineering and construction firm rolled into one.

"Give me a set of drawings, tell me what you want to build, and I'll give you a price," Wurster said. "We are an office full of design engineers. We like people to call us with a problem. We can walk on the site and show you how to fix it."

Customers, Wurster said, like that.

"They can call me on the engineering side, and they won't get a bill for that," he said.

Within a six years of starting his firm, Wurster landed the Liberty Bridge job in downtown Greenville. Brought in as a general contractor, he was in the bridge's job trailer when he overheard a team of German engineers describing how they would use drilled piers on the job. He challenged their plan, pointing out that their piers were going into rocks too unstable and close to the surface. Wurster prevailed, got the design and construction job, and his pilings today are 70 feet deep, anchored into bedrock under the Reedy River itself.

"Everywhere that thing touches the ground is our foundations," Wurster said of the bridge.

The Carolinas have provided plenty of geo-structural jobs for his firm, Wurster said, and he counts himself fortunate to have been at the right place at the right time.

Wurster has also evolved over the years. He said he listens to customers and vendors, has joined the Deep Foundations Institute, among other professional groups, and regularly attends construction and concrete trade shows to learn about the latest techniques, tools and materials in the industry.

This year, Wurster joined forces with a German firm called Betterground Inc. to start offering a new service: ground improvement. Using the so-called "vibroflot" technique, his crews reinforce, vibrate and compact poor-quality soils so that structures built over them do not settle and crack. This is cheaper than the traditional alternative: digging up poor soils and carting them away. 

He also uses drones to map and measure sites, an improvement over guys dangling tape measures over precipices. And he recently purchased a machine that sprays shokrete at job sites. Previously, his guys had to hold a hose that kicked back violently whenever the flow of shokrete started.

"Now you just work a joystick," Wurster said. "It's faster and there's less chance of people getting hurt."

Wurster started his business with just himself working 60-hour weeks. He now has 35 full-time employees, and five of them are stockholders in the company. The company is growing fast, he said, with multiple people pushing the business these days.

He is even considering retirement.

"You have to know when the opportunity walks in front of you," Wurster says of his company's success. "You also have to prompt it along. Somebody who isn't looking for it — the opportunities are right in front of them, and they don't even realize it."