With a population of 22,000 people, Geneva, Ill., is a typical Midwestern suburb. But inside city hall, officials are clamoring for more power–the electrical kind–and they have succeeded. Geneva is building a 29-Mw, natural-gas-fired plant that planners hope will bring energy independence to residents and businesses. Users hit hard by today’s erratic cost of transmitted energy are showing noticeable interest in meeting peak power needs with distributed generation (ENR 4/9/01 p. 44). But economics is not the only reason. Despite the high up-front investment, these pocket powerplants sited near the demand may gain even more popularity as users evaluate the
(Photo by Tom Sawyer for ENR) The question was a reflex: Is it terror? The power failure at the start of rush hour put tens of millions of people in the U.S. and Canada on edge. Radio and TV news reports soon allayed the fears, conveying comforting assurances from government officials. But they began to raise new questions as the disaster’s breathtaking scope became clear. The blackout of 2003 was the worst in North American history. On the afternoon of Aug. 14, a series of transmission lines in Ohio and Michigan gradually tripped off. As each line’s current was rerouted,
(Photo by Tom Sawyer for ENR) A system designed after an unprecedented 1965 blackout to assure electric reliability worked reasonably well for 37 years. On Aug. 14, it failed. As the lights came back on, officials already were probing the Northeast Blackout of 2003 and reliability again was becoming a key national priority. The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) was established after the 1965 Northeast blackout as a voluntary association of utilities. Members agree to follow common procedures to prevent cascading failures. "Either somebody broke the rules or we don’t have the right rules in place," says Michehl Gent,
Mike Wilson, a manufacturing supervisor at Dallas-based specialty contractor TD Industries Inc., doesn't hesitate to chide a fellow employee who might be doing something that's wasting company money. To Wilson, it's personal. "That's my profit sharing you're getting into," says the 16-year veteran who started as a tradesman helper and is now among 85% of TDI's 1,300 "partners" who have invested their own money in the company's future. At TDI, employee ownership is nothing new. The uniquely managed company, which has been in the Top 10 of Fortune magazine's 100 best companies to work for since the list debuted in
TOUGH SITE Lasers mapped foundations but cores still had to be bored. As final design work nears completion and construction of approach roads begins, planners are saluting the contributions of laser mapping and three-dimensional modeling. The technologies helped them steer a $231-million, 3.5-mile road and bridge bypass project at Hoover Dam through a thicket of engineering issues and an approval process involving two states, six government agencies and a highly energized public sector. "The ability to not only solve it technically, but present your solution and convey it to the public are just abject requirements when you’ve got a job
TIM SAKRY Safety Manager, Bauerly Cos. The accident that started it all happened on the evening of Oct. 2, 1997, in the northwest Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. A semi-end dump truck operator thought she could haul more loads of dirt per hour by running red lights at a quiet county road intersection. Each time she took the risk, her probability for a crash compounded. At about 11:00 that night, her luck ran out. Plowing through the intersection at full speed, the dump truck slammed into the side of a Geo Metro subcompact, pushing the car down the road sideways
FREQUENT FLYER Fredric Berger followed his father's path in building a global practice. (Photo by Micheal Goodman for ENR) Berger Group, the big design and development consultant known for working in poor nations, found itself in unusual company this spring when the Bush administration was picking reconstruction contractors to work in Iraq. In news stories identifying contenders for the contract, which Berger did not win, the company was referred to as one of the U.S.'s "Big Five." The other companies were Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton and Washington Group. That tickled Derish M. Wolff, the 68-year-old chairman of Berger Group, partly because
The world held its breath in 2002. Few had recovered from the year-earlier shock of the terrorist destruction of New York City’s World Trade Center complex. In addition, many were worrying about whether coalition military action in Afghanistan would escalate attacks on global political and economic targets. The uneasiness only grew by the end of the year, when the U.S. began ramping up for war in Iraq. Growing turmoil, heightened by the mysterious outbreak of the disease SARS that threatened to cut off key Pacific Rim commercial centers, caused a major halt in construction programs as the world watched and
After casting longing eyes at the booming off-shore oil exploration and drilling market in nearby Nova Scotia, one Maine general construction firm decided to snap up a contract to complete two oil rigs whose construction was hard aground in a bankruptcy along the Gulf of Mexico. Now, as work on the oil exploration rigs nears successful completion, Cianbro Corp. and the City of Portland, whose economy gained a boost from the work, are looking for more maritime-related business opportunities. Pittsfield-based Cianbro was competitively selected in spring 2002 by Petrodrill Engineering NV, Rotterdam, the project manager, to complete the two dynamically
ON THE RIGHT FOOTING Two diamond-shaped towers will rise 575 ft over river. (Photo courtesy of Rob Thompson/SCDOT) Charleston's Cooper River crossing is drawing on a flurry of advances in design and construction of cable-stayed bridges from around the globe. The project has captured the imagination of South Carolina's largest city, and the workers building it. "We have the greatest bridge in the world here," says a foreman standing on one of two 6,500-cu-yd rock islands at the base of what will be North America's longest cable-stayed span, at 1,546 ft. Above him, the legs of what will be a
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