Related Links: Construction Industry Needs to Coordinate Its Work Force Solutions You Actually Found Some Skilled LaborNow What? Faced with what could be an unprecedented labor shortage as the economy picks up, construction professionals are uniting to rebuild the pipeline of young workers that once flowed into the industry from vocational and technical programs across the U.S."Somewhere in recent decades, our country made a collective decision that everyone should attend college. The robust workforce and technical education programs that once existed in our high schools disappeared in favor of college-track programs," says Brian Turmail, executive director of public affairs for
Photo by AP/Wideworld Only charred steel and scaffolding remain after a San Francisco construction-site fire. Photo by AP/Wideworld Related Links: California Crews Scramble To Repair Busy Route After Fire Sandy Blamed for Boardwalk Fire at the New Jersey Shore A five-alarm fire at a construction site in San Francisco pulled in over 150 firefighters on March 11. The crews battled flames spewing from a 172-unit apartment complex owned by BRE Properties and successfully prevented the fire from jumping to other construction projects in the growing Mission Bay area of the city.Though, immediately afterward, the site remained too dangerous for investigators
Photo Courtesy of National Corvette Museum Crews formulate a plan to recover eight classic American sports cars that fell into a massive sinkhole that opened up on Feb. 12 under the showroom floor at the Corvette Museum. Related Links: Drones Inspect Sinkhole at National Corvette Museum Time Lapse Video of Corvette Museum Skydome Work The Corvette Museum, where eight collector cars were swallowed suddenly by a sinkhole, now has another large hole—this time in the side of the atrium housing the cars, so a crane can go in and retrieve the vehicles.Construction, engineering and geological experts have been at the
Photo by Atlantic Archives Project team erected the Savannah, Ga., building atop an existing underground parking garage. Related Links: 2013's Best of the Best Projects Winners Modern Office Rises Over Historic Savannah Initiated by the General Services Administration's need for new space for the Office of the United States Attorney, Southern District, the biggest challenge facing the contractors erecting Savannah's Cay Building was to overcome the downtown site's development history.Prior to this project, the owners of the site, John Cay and Whitaker Street Associates, had granted the city of Savannah the right to construct and operate a 1,000-space, below-ground parking
Related Links: Racking Up Big Points for Prefab FMI Says Modular Construction Set to Grow In the late 1960s, Texas general contractor H.B. Zachry Co. built a 500-room, 21-story Hilton hotel in downtown San Antonio for the city's HemisFair global exposition, and ended up creating a benchmark in modular construction.To get the Hilton Palacio del Rio Hotel built by HemisFair's April 1968 start, the contractor—now called Zachry Construction Corp.—built the rooms eight miles off site and placed them in the hotel's steel skeleton. The completed room units included plumbing fixtures, lighting, beds, TVs and even ashtrays. A crane hoisted the
Related Links: The Spanish Conductor Orchestrating Hochtief's Makeover Elbphilharmonie Website Video: Hamburg's White Elephant With shimmering facades and roofs soaring 110 meters above the River Elbe, Hamburg's philharmonic concert center will create a maritime landmark for the city's old-harbor redevelopment when it opens in late 2016. By then, the Elbphilharmonie project will be some six years late and, at $695-million, more than double the original cost.The north German city's officials and the project team agree that hasty procurement led to debilitating hostility between the main parties. Converting the construction contract to design-build project delivery a few months ago put the
Related Links: Green Light for Proposed Record-Tall Modular Building at Atlantic Yards Two New York City licensed trade groups have sued the city's Dept. of Buildings (DOB) over the agency's approval of work on prefabricated building units for Atlantic Yards' B2, a 32-story modular residential tower under way in Brooklyn.The groups—the Mechanical Contractors Association of New York and the Plumbing Foundation City of New York (PFCNY)—charge that off-site work done in a factory without supervision of DOB-licensed master plumbers and fire-suppression contractors violates core Construction Code requirements. The suit, filed on July 8 in the state Supreme Court, New York
Construction workers in Rio are busy building thirty-one 17-story towers for the 2016 Olympic Games, and the crews are employing a special strategy to deal with the tight schedule.