Richard S. Weeks, 73, Set Standard for Lifts and Growth in Marine Construction

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, acquisitions were key to growth and market expansion. These included M.P. Howlett in1983, Healy Tibbitts in1989, American Dredging Co. in 1993 and T.L. James in 1998. Weeks Marine also purchased McNally Construction, a leading Canada-based tunneling and marine contractor, in 2011 and entered the aggregates business in 2016, creating North American Aggregates. The unit was sold last year to building materials giant CRH plc.

Building A Project Legacy

Weeks Marine and its units worked with contractor Kiewit International on North American infrastructure projects, including the Willis Avenue Swing Bridge in New York City; the Euclid wastewater-stormwater storage tunnel in Cleveland; the Toronto-York Spadina subway extension tunnel in Ontario and key projects for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Weeks Marine also was on the team replacing the more than eight-decade-old Goethals toll bridge connecting Elizabeth, N.J., and Staten Island, N.Y., in 2017-18.

See tribute page here. 

Other important projects include construction of the Little Island park on the Hudson River in Manhattan, work on the Tappan Zee and Gov. Mario Cuomo Bridges north of the city and the Pearl Harbor outfall in Hawaii. During Weeks’ tenure, the company also responded to emergencies such as the cleanup following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, Hurricane Katrina devastation in 2005, Superstorm Sandy impacts in 2012 and intact recovery of the US Airways Flight 540 airplane after its 2009 forced landing on the Hudson.

Weeks Marine used the Weeks 533 crane for that particular extraction, one of the largest rotating maritime cranes in the eastern U.S., with a 248-ft-long boom that could lift up to 500 tons.. The team’s plan to lift the plane intact for further study by federal investigators won it the job over contractors that proposed to disassemble it first, company officials told ENR at the time. “No one [had] ever recovered a jet lost in water. We didn’t know how structurally sound it would be,” one said.

The retrieval was completed after a marathon 22-hour effort, when competitors had said the operation would have taken at least a week. “We resurrected it from the dead,” Weeks told ENR, adding that the company at the time had performed over 2,000 heavy lifts without accident.

The CEO eventually oversaw Weeks Marine’s sale to Kiewit, which took effect Jan. 1, 2023, for an undisclosed amount. “Our strengths are complementary,” Weeks told ENR at the time, adding that the company was “well capitalized” and had a succession plan in place. “It’s a good deal for both sides,” he said.

“Ultimately, they didn’t want any other company to buy it except Kiewit,” said Eric Ellefsen, who succeeded Weeks as president and CEO and remains in the role. “We come from similar cultures and our core values align.”

Mentor and Role Model

Weeks was a past president of Dredging Contractors of America and of the industry heavy civil professionals group the Moles, which along with professionals group the Beavers recognized him for his outstanding achievements in construction. He also was inducted into the National Academy of Construction and was a board member of The New Jersey Marine Science Consortium, New York Maritime Association and Waterfront Alliance. 

Weeks also was a major supporter of the Rutgers University School of Engineering, to which his father, Richard N. Weeks, a company alumnus who died in 2025 at age 97, donated $6 million for a 106,000-sq-ft advanced engineering building and endowed a $10-million undergraduate engineering scholarship—the largest in Rutgers’ history at the time. 

At the time of his death, Richard S Weeks. also had been participating in a clinical trial of daraxonrasib for advanced pancreatic cancer “as a chance to help others who might one day face the same devastating disease,” said the family obituary.

Having started his career working alongside company employees, Weeks understood operations. maintained strong ties with workers and was regarded for his mentoring skill with young people. 

“One time when we were aboard a huge dredge working in the Mississippi River outside of New Orleans, everyone just called him Rich, he was one of the guys, not the owner of the company. That was impressive,“ says a longtime peer, Robert Alger, former president and CEO of The Lane Construction Corp. and now a division president at AtkinsRealis.

Tributes from current and former employees, some now in executive roles at other firms, describe him as “a force of nature and pillar of Weeks Marine,” as a “guiding light for the organization” who “sparked the entrepreneurial spirit,” as someone “never bigger than the person next to him,” and as “a true legend in the industry.”  

A New Jersey native, he earned a joint BA-MA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

A celebration of Weeks’ life is set for Sat. Oct. 24, 11 a.m. at The First Presbyterian Church of New Vernon with a reception to follow at the Basking Ridge Country Club. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in his memory to either the Music Fund of the First Presbyterian Church of New Vernon or the Newark (N.J.) Boys and Girls Club.