Bankruptcy Rebuttals I am writing to express my disappointment in the reporting offered concerning Schwing America and our Chapter 11 proceedings. As a longtime ENR reader and advertiser, I had respected your publication for getting facts correct and telling the whole story. This was not up to your standards. Wells Fargo presented objections to our motion for the continued use of cash collateral in the Nov. 27 filing, which you reference in your article. This motion was to be reviewed in Federal Bankruptcy Court on Dec. 2. Schwing America strongly disputed the logic used by Wells Fargo in its objections
Arthur Gensler, the architect of Shanghai Tower, on its way up to 632 meters, refers to the 5.5-million-sq-ft supertower as a vertical city. The tower is designed as a series of stacked, 14-story communities, separated by podiums, or town squares, filled with coffee shops and other amenities. Taken to a greater extreme, a vertical city’s hamlets could have doctors’ offices, schools, clothing shops, movie theaters, grocery stores, restaurants, cobblers, a post office, bookstores and more. The idea is to mass each supertall building into discrete blocks of occupancies, whether office, hotel or housing, with each block virtually self-sufficient. The elevator
This past year has been a tough one for U.S. construction, with the value of new project starts down by a quarter from 2008 and industry unemployment standing at 19.4%. Still, that amounts to $419 billion in starts, and nearly six million people working on meaningful projects. Many more will be needed soon. All recessions eventually end, and when this one does, the industry must once again struggle with the issue of how to attract people into construction and keep them there in rewarding careers. Photo: Alissa Hollimon Submitted by: Jen Jonas, Zachry Holdings Inc., San Antonio, Texas Manuel Anselmo-Arroyo
This year, for the first time, ENR will not be mailing out printed copies of the ENR Top 100/400/500 survey forms. The surveys will be online and can be completed through our interactive online form. Survey participants already on our mailing list will receive a letter containing the company ID and password needed to complete the online form. Others also can file online or download and print out the survey from ENR.com in .pdf format or as a zipped set of .doc files. If you need a company ID and password or have other questions about the survey process, please
Some big banks that received huge federal government bailouts have been paying the money back, largely to escape the increased federal scrutiny of operations and restrictions on executive pay and bonuses that the government imposed. In December alone, Bank of America paid back $45 billion, CitiGroup agreed to repay $20 billion, and Wells Fargo Bank said it would redeem $25 billion of preferred stock issued to the U.S. Treasury to cover the bank’s “toxic” assets. So far, more than 50 of the 737 institutions that received funds have squared the books. Rather than signaling a turnaround of fortunes in the
Some older American cities are sick and dying. Often strategically located along waterways and important transportation infrastructure, they evolved over centuries to support U.S. heavy industry, which largely has disappeared. Also disappearing with those businesses were jobs, opportunities and people. But they left behind the wreckage of residential, commercial and industrial structures that no longer have a purpose. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore and Camden are struggling to reinvent themselves and start anew, but they are burdened with thousands of abandoned or deteriorated structures that breed crime, drugs and violence and form a barrier to progress. The opportunity for such
For China watchers, it comes as no surprise that China is rapidly undergoing an industrial revolution. What Europe and the U.S. did in 75 to 100 years, China has done in about 25 years. Despite the global economic downturn, the economy is still booming. However, with the slowing of exports, the Chinese economy now is being driven mainly by domestic and foreign direct investment. HOENIG Companies wanting to participate in the massive growth soon realize China is a complex and often contradictory business environment for both foreign and domestic players. When they arrive and set up operations, foreign companies, in
Don Resio, a senior technologist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineering Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, Miss., had an “Aha!” moment in 2008 when he conceived of a way to plug roaring levee breaches using fabric tubes partially filled with water. Tested at 1:4 scale on a real breach, the device rolled into place with the water current and sealed the gap in 12 seconds. Resio believes the principals are completely scalable, and the only thing needed to plug larger breaches, like the typical 40-ft to 60-ft levee gaps in a Mississippi flood, is a larger fabric sack
The fast rise of green construction technology is encouraging, particularly during this time of economic uncertainty. Green projects—mostly in the form of energy-efficiency building retrofits—lately have been working their way into the market as funds for new projects have evaporated in the credit crisis. However, many of these systems are not performing as touted, especially cleverly hyped geothermal heating systems that are plagued with inflated savings claims and deficient designs. These deficiencies have been slowing acceptance of a basically sound and environmentally sensitive approach to design and construction. Photo: Stantec Related Links: As More Buildings Go Geothermal, Project Teams Are
At the end of each year, I receive a new calendar from Hoffman Construction Co., Portland, Oregon. It features simple pictures drawn by employees’ young children depicting how to work safely on construction sites. The calendar is a terrific way to communicate how the ramifications of safety and health practices extend beyond jobsites, projects and companies to families and future generations of workers. GAMBATESE Sustainability principles incorporate a similar perspective on the value of life. The World Commission on Environment and Development describes sustainable development as a project approach that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability
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