The perennial problem of workforce shortages and worries about bringing a new generation into the construction industry are nothing new for Bob Bailey.

Under intense scrutiny from engineers, politicians and the public, Bruce A. Magladry, director of the National Transportation Safety Board office of highway safety, oversaw a 15-month probe of the 2007 I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, in which 13 people died and 145 were injured.

Dams have brought jobs, power, irrigation and development to the Pacific Northwest, but devastated migrating fish populations.

David W. Frable was a big part of history in the making last year.

Donald T. Resio, senior technologist in the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Miss., had an “ah-ha!” moment when he was trying to figure out how to plug a roaring levee breach: Use a big fabric tube floating in the flood, partially filled with water.

Elie H. Homsi will never forget the first day that his brainchild, a pile-driving, girder-launching gantry system, went to work on a $192-million contract to build the Washington Bypass, a six-mile alternative route to Highway 17 in North Carolina.

Contractors do not usually ask regulators to impose more restrictions, but a trend in fatal crane accidents last year prompted one industry insider to act swiftly to clean up safety lapses.

Many people serve to improve the construction industry every day. And each year, for 45 years, the editors of ENR have reviewed the stories they have written during the year and selected people featured in them for special recognition.

As a sweeper playing defense on North Carolina State University’s soccer team, Lewis E. “Ed” Link Jr. had a knack for pattern recognition and teamwork. “I could anticipate. I could see the pattern, the big picture, and go to where the ball was going to be,” he says. The National Soccer Coaches Association of America thought he had a special talent, too: It named him an All-American in 1967, his senior year. His success on the field, Link says, came from playing with the strengths he had, rather than from trying to shape his style after an inappropriate model—like some