Related Links: More Trouble, Less Support for Energy Dept's MOX Project MOX Reactor Fuel Said to Stir New Interest The Obama administration has taken the correct approach to the U.S. Dept. of Energy's $7.7-billion Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., which is to freeze the project at its current stage. The delays are endless, the dollars are flying out the window at an alarming rate, and there's no reliable way of knowing whether the end goal can be achieved. That could be said of other federal public works, but none isas potentially costly
Related Links: Safety Week Construction Deaths, Fatality Rate Climbed in 2012 Leaders of 31 major construction firms agree that safety should not be proprietary. They are offering their ideas about how to make the industry a safer place to work by launching the first annual "Safety Week" on May 4-10, and they encourage large and small contractors across the country to join them in elevating and celebrating safety.These firms belong to either the Construction Industry Safety Initiative or the Incident and Injury Free Executive Forum. The companies in the groups can be fierce competitors, but they also meet regularly and
Related Links: Sewer Job Battle is a Question of Arithmetic (subcription required) Miami Dade Procurement Webpage Description of the Cone of Silence The Miami-Dade County website makes a big deal about its procurement "cone of silence"—a term popularized by the old TV comedy "Get Smart"—which is meant to describe the county's system for preventing forbidden communications in response to requests for qualifications. When, this past summer, the county sought to hire a construction manager for a $1.5-billion sewer-repair program, a lack of specific language about communication while the so-called cone was in force engendered confusion more appropriate to a comically
Related Links: Reducing Engineering Project Complexity Sometimes the images from ENR's annual photo contest take you to completely different worlds in construction. You only need to reflect on a single week of work in any corner of the industry to appreciate that construction people come from many walks of life and carry out vastly different activities—and one activity can influence or affect another, even though there is apparently no direct connection between them. Similarly, there are fewstraight lines any more in getting a project or a program or a company or a career from one place to another. We must
Related Links: Editorial: Don't Allow Lawsuits Far From Projects Narcotic Painkiller Costs' Weigh Heavily on Workers' Compensation A palpable confidence has returned to the domestic U.S. construction market. Robust financial markets, rising home values and less-constrained spending by tightfisted American consumers all injected energy into what had been a languorous pace of recovery. Infrastructure megaprojects rolled forward in Denver and New York City. Budget pacts steadied a wobbly federal government. More construction workers walked through project gates than any of the past five years.Yes, there was trouble. The federal government sputtered as if it were an old gasoline lawn mower,
Related Links: New York Commuter Derailment Highlights Lack of Positive Train Control Investment L.A. Commuter Rail Line to Roll Out First Positive Control System Following the derailment that killed four commuters in New York City on Dec. 1, there are good reasons for reviewing the delays to the deployment of positive train control to our national rail system. There are also good reasons to refuse any rail operator further time extensions in implementing these safety upgrades. And then let's start discussing other safety weak points of therail system, such as grade crossings. They are an important part of the safety
Related Links: New Forged Bonds Discovered, with Mounting Losses How Tennessee Contractors Caught Forged Surety Bonds The forged Chubb bonds discovered this year provide evidence that the laws allowing individual sureties help criminals steal from the very companies individual surety is supposed to benefit: small and minority-owned contractors. More than 20 contractors have been defrauded of about $3 million by these bonds over an 18-month period, according to a new report on ENR.com.The alleged forgers didn't bother to show up in federal court in Florida, where Chubb Group has won a civil judgment against them. The two defendants represented themselves
No less a tribunal than the U.S. Supreme Court will try to clarify construction-industry conflict about where lawsuits between primes and subs are tried. Lower courts have disagreed about what to do, but the prevailing industry wisdom is that it is best to try prime-sub disputes near the project location. Yet some primes insist subs sign "forum selection" clauses, which require trials in the prime's home state—and subs continue to cave in and sign them. Neither action speaks well for the state of risk-management in the construction industry. Despite the forum-selection clauses, many subs will sue locally for money they
Related Links: The National Association of Insurance Commissioners Surety Fraud Probe Raises Question: Who is Melde Rutledge? State-level public works face different challenges than do larger federal public works when it comes to performing due diligence against surety-bond fraud. For federal contracts, prime contractors can require subcontractor bonds from Treasury-listed or A.M. Best-rated sureties and check the surety in a federal public database, which helps. State and local public works don't require the federal level of scrutiny,and contracts between primes and subs are private, so due diligence mostly involves meetings and financial record reviews.If a concerned contractor wants to search
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