Photo: Peter Reina Ian OKelly Travelers are long gone from London's vast, aging "Underground" metro in the early hours when Ian O'Kelly arrives at Chalk Farm station, now populated only by construction workers. As an implementation manager for the Tube Lines consortium, he oversees an average of $80 million a year of work progressively renewing 320 km of track. At the far end of Chalk Farm's platform, a huddle of men in the tunnel mouth have exposed an uncharted power line and are breaking out old concrete more slowly than usual. Tonight, that subcontractor's team of 25 workers will replace
Photo: Scott Judy Jim Croson still looks over his son Dave's shoulder at their $47-million plumbing business. Retiring to the sandy beaches of Hawaii might sound like heaven to some, but, like a character on the TV show Lost, Jim Croson thought it was more like hell. Just sitting on the beach and relaxing, he says, was "unthinkable," so he had his Ohio-based plumbing company ship him sets of plans for projects it was considering bidding, working up his estimates while sitting at a table on the beach. He still performed a significant amount of estimating—even in "retirement"—and he could
Photo: Stephen Durias/Triad Associates Erich Hiersche draws on nature and camaraderie to deal with the stress of precision measurements It is morning and this grassy field within view of Mount Rainier, 20 miles south of Seattle, is the antithesis of a construction site. Baby quail bounce through the long grass looking for their mother; a bald eagle soars overhead and Mount Rainier is brilliant white. Three hundred houses are to be built here and on this day the site belongs to the construction nerds, the surveyors. One of them is Erich Hiersche of Triad Associates, Kirkland, Wash. Even though he
Janice L. Tuchman/ENR National Stadium is already an attraction even to Beijing residents. Yan Wang rushes downstairs from the midrise office building where Parsons Brinckerhoff China has its Beijing office and makes a dash for the sedan her driver has pulled into the courtyard. Her client, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, has called a last-minute meeting at its headquarters in north central Beijing. Wang is the manager of urban and transportation planning in PB’s Beijing office, and she—of all people—knows it will take at least an hour to negotiate the city traffic. It is a beautiful blue
Robert Carlsen/ENR Stone (center), with DPR’s Saldana and Reiss, took on project management responsibilities soon after graduating from college. Project Engineer Becky Stone shows up at 7 a.m., an hour before the weekly owner-architect-contractor meeting at DPR Construction’s South San Francisco project office. Her first focus is on last week’s meeting minutes. Then she prepares the agenda. On a rotating basis, all of DPR’s project managers and engineers run an owner’s meeting. Now, it is Stone’s turn, after just six months on the job. DPR hired Stone, 23, last December after she graduated with a construction engineering management degree from
Thomas F. Armistead/ENR Connecticut project brings Williams (left) to the Northeast. Owners want to know that their contractors are fully committed to the success of their project. Brett Williams understands that. He and two of his key staffers sold their homes in Kansas City and bought in Connecticut, where Northeast Utilities is constructing one of the largest transmission projects in the U.S. That’s extremely rare in transmission construction, where crews routinely move several times per year. “We came to Connecticut and burned our ships,” says Williams. “We said we’re going to make this thing work.” As program manager for Kansas
Craig Barner/ENR Trump project brings out business brass and personal touch. Managing construction of a 92-story building in Chicago takes brass. In Tim Snyder’s case, brass is one of the qualities that got him the job. It was in September 2004. Overseeing the final stages of the 60-story Millennium Centre condominium in Chicago for London-based contractor AMEC PLC, he heard a voice message coming from the office of another AMEC executive. Andrew Weiss, executive vice president of New York-based Trump Organization was asking the AMEC executive for a candidate to manage the proposed Trump International Tower & Hotel for the
William J. Angelo/ENR Hasso discusses study findings with Vo (left) and Bernadin. Mark Hasso’s students come to school in baggy shorts, turned-around baseball caps and shaved heads. They’ll leave with marketable degrees, hands-on construction experience, great contacts and $60,000-plus job offers. The civil engineering and construction management professor at Boston’s Wentworth Institute of Technology knows what the industry wants and makes sure his graduates deliver. A day with the veteran engineer-academic shows how dedicated, involved individuals are changing the face of construction education. Sophomore Krystale Goodridge arrives at 8 a.m. to talk with Hasso, the school’s CM program coordinator, about
Aileen Cho/ENR Seal (right) and Prendeville finish inspecting a box-chord section. Michael Seal is geared up and ready to climb. The blond 29-year-old Columbus, Ohio, native sports a cornucopia of metal hooks, buckles, harnesses and belts on his athletic frame, topped off by a 600-ft-long rope that looks like a Brobdingnagian mop. On a beautiful June morning in Milwaukee, Seal stands in the quiet interior of Miller Park, the baseball stadium for the National League Central-leading Milwaukee Brewers, and chats with Michael Brockman, project engineer with the Sigma Group, Milwaukee. Seal, who leads a six-member climbing inspection team from Burgess
Nadine M. Post/ENR Marstellar shadows her auditor on the fabricator�s shop floor. She calls herself a steel geek. But “woman of steel” would be a more apt moniker for Bobbi Marstellar, for she breaks through barriers with apparent ease. The structural engineer holds the distinction of being the youngest vice president of the American Institute of Steel Construction Inc. And she is the only female vice president in the Chicago-based institute’s 86-year history: All that by age 32. Marstellar, now 35, is in charge of AISC’s fabricator certification program. “We want these companies to be better businesses,” she says. That
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