Hold on to your employees for dear life. Burgeoning markets and corporate growth across the construction industry are turning a once-loyal work force into an endangered species. As job opportunities and salaries soar in a people-strapped business, firms are more hard-pressed these days to keep their employees, particular managers, in place. Some companies claim staff turnover rates are still under control, but others say the cost impact is growing and not just for those at the very top. To slow the flow of expense and erosion of the corporation's knowledge and client base, firms are taking more creative and deliberate
+ click to view a map of ongoing work The Jobsite: 169 Miles of Damage Repair June 1 is Judgment Day for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That's when the world's most powerful organization of civil engineers has pledged to deliver on its promise to restore the hurricane protections defeated last fall when Hurricane Katrina inundated an estimated 151 sq miles of New Orleans and neighboring parishes. Models. Corps' mock-up of New Orleans 17th Street Canal and lakefront fills a hanger above, while sample of its levee gets ready for a twirl, below.(Photos by Tom Sawyer for ENR) The
The complete Top 500 Designers list with revenue and market data is free to ENR subscribers but can also be purchased for only $14.95 Want the entire Top 500 Design Firms list, with a special supplement showing subsidiaries and what countries the Top 500 work in, in an electronic format? Click here for more information. click here to view firm rankings>> The U.S. economy is strong and so is the construction market. No one knows this more than designers who are at the leading edge of the boom. But just as the recent recession brought new issues and concerns to
It’s a race against time to get the $6-billion San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge built before the next Big One. From spiral reinforcement column cages to steel hinges, the bridge showcases the latest seismic-resistance techniques. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake heavily damaged the eastern span of the old Bay bridge, a double-deck truss. A portion of the upper deck collapsed, killing one person and closing the bridge for a month (ENR 10/18/90 p. 36). Under performance-based criteria, a “lifeline” bridge is to be serviceable after a major quake. The 1.5-mile-long segmental concrete box girder Skyway section comprises 60% of the new
Zipper. Test of vertical member between upper floors to improve post-yield response was run at three separate labs. ( Images courtesy of Georgia Tech/NEES) Broadband communications and faster computers are changing the way seismic engineering research is done. The combination enables simultaneous collaboration not only between individuals, but also between ever more sophisticated physical and computational experiments at simulation labs across the country. Such linking is letting researchers get closer to analyzing the complex response of systems in seismic events than ever before. “We have very good tools for elastic or linear modeling and decent tools for mildly non-linear modeling,
A new national web of research labs for studying materials and assemblies under complex seismic loading is beginning to revolutionize earthquake engineering research and deliver on sophisticated promises. The George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), launched in late 2004, coordinates and administers National Science Foundation research grants. It has 15 “equipment sites” at universities around the country and a supercomputer center and management center at the University of California at San Diego. The “network” comes into play with NEES’s next-generation Internet data links that tie the labs’ monitoring systems together. That link lets researchers grab live
Though its structural designs are often firsts, Magnusson Klemencic Associates has had relatively little difficulty convincing building officials in seismic Seattle that its performance-based skyscraper frames meet the objective of the prescriptive code. Sources credit the engineer and the buildings department for that. MKA is “certainly a leader” in this area and “Seattle does a very good job managing the process,” says Joe Maffei, a principal with San Francisco-based Rutherford & Chekene, which reviewed Seattle’s two MKA “performance” projects. Braced. Skyscraper is first in U.S. with buckling-restrained braces. (Image courtesy of Magnusson Klemencic Associates) The most recent review was for
When it comes to earthquakes, about the only sure thing is that the first century of seismic strides won’t hold a candle to upcoming third-millennium milestones, thanks to high-octane techno-tools. The marvels of supercomputing are already catapulting quake prediction, protection and preparedness efforts from the era of enlightenment to the era of empowerment, and it is only 2006. Quake experts, not knowing when a forceful temblor will strike, aren’t sitting around waiting for any seismic utopia. On the contrary, they are using the centenary of San Francisco’s April 18, 1906, cataclysm to call for bigger bucks for bigger efforts to
Seismic bridge engineering used to be more of an “art” and less of a science—but it’s making progress as the latter, says Frieder Seible, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Through lessons learned from real quakes and advancements in computer modeling, “we’re developing a scientific approach” to retrofits. The approach informs continuing research on seismic behavior of bridges. “The most recent seismic events...have influenced code changes that are still being implemented today,” says Mark Christensen, engineer with TRC Imbsen, Sacramento. Colleague Shin-Tai Song adds that evaluation of recent quakes “indicates that the
The risk, time and stress associated with obtaining approval for a performance-based skyscraper design in highly seismic California is diminishing, even compared to a year ago. The long-suffering protagonists for “extreme” seismic engineering of tall buildings are nearly jumping for joy. And it’s not only because performance-based highrises 240 ft and taller can cost less and take less time to build than those designed to prescriptive code provisions. It’s because the performance design approach, which relies heavily on peer review, can result in higher-quality highrises. “The biggest impact of all this, from a 40,000-ft level, is significantly improved tall buildings
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