New England’s Top Projects Meet the Moment

The ECU Module Project is this year’s ENR New England Excellence in Safety winner.

*Photo courtesy Cianbro*

Several ENR New England Best Projects teams contributed to efforts to battle COVID-19. The Siemens Healthineers’ Advanced Manufacturing and Research & Development facility in East Walpole, Mass., which won a Best Projects award in the health care category, is producing 30 million COVID-19 tests per month. Another team worked around the clock to build a 1,000-bed field hospital for virus patients in Boston, while a third retrofitted part of an existing warehouse and reconfigured a manufacturing facility to produce N95 masks. The latter two projects—Boston Hope Hospital and the Honeywell N95 Mask Production Facility in Cranston, R.I.—received awards of merit in the health care and manufacturing categories, respectively.

The judges also selected the King Open/Cambridge Street Upper Schools and Community Complex in Cambridge, Mass., as this year’s Project of the Year. The first school in Massachusetts to produce zero-net carbon emissions consumes no fossil fuels on site and features a high-efficiency design to reduce energy demand.

Overall, judges selected 18 winning projects in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. Project teams were judged on how well they contributed to the industry and community and overcame challenges. Judges had the option to determine the number of Best Project and merit award recipients.

Named to judge the main categories were Andrew Baker, senior vice president of marketing and development at JKS; Douglas McCutchen, vice president, national program executive at Keville Enterprises Inc.; Kent Collier, senior vice president at Greyling Insurance Brokerage, a division of EPIC; and Nik Middleton, founding senior partner/CEO at CUBE3.

This year’s safety judge—Kurt Dunmire, regional safety director at Clark Construction Group LLC—selected ECU Module Project to receive the region’s Excellence in Safety award. Programs such as last minute risk assessments and detailed activity plans for daily work and major tasks enabled the team to log more than 1.4 million work hours with no lost-time injuries. The project also won an award of merit in the energy industrial category. Dunmire also chose the Northeastern University ISEC Pedestrian Crossing and the Sunrise of Fairfield project for safety awards of merit. Northeastern’s pedestrian bridge also received an award of merit in the highway/bridge category.

Learn more about this year’s winners in the following pages. Join us on Nov. 20 for the virtual awards, preceded by virtual networking. For more information visit www.enrbestprojectsawards.com.