COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

Holmes & Narver Predates Quake: Employees at engineering and construction giant Holmes & Narver have little trouble remembering their firm’s anniversary.

That’s because the date was just nine days before the great quake struck in 1933, devastating Long Beach and nearby cities. The Orange-based company marked its 60th anniversary in a ceremony last month, sending out press releases detailing a diverse project history that includes schools, department stores, warehouses, breweries, an ICBM missile base, sewage systems, highway construction and air traffic control systems.

The firm, founded by James T. Holmes and D. Lee Narver, two engineers in Los Angeles, now has 3,000 employees with projects on all seven continents (In Antarctica, it provides operations and maintenance work for the National Science Foundation).

The quake, by the way, gave the company its first big project. It reconstructed 177 badly damaged buildings in Santa Ana.