The ancient Inca built a complex system of roads that span some 20,000 miles and range in altitude from sea level to 14,000 feet, all without the benefit of special tools or even a formal writing system.
Following Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 attack on New Orleans, the best minds in the international water-resources industry began seeking innovative ways to rebuild the city’s storm-surge defenses.
Gary Fore, a now retired vice president of the National Asphalt Pavement Association (NAPA), Lanham, Md., leads a voluntary partnership of asphalt-paving industry organizations that is researching and recommending ways to cut down the amount of silica dust generated by asphalt-milling machines in advance of federal safety and health regulations.
Dwayne Smith, a senior engineer at URS Corp., San Francisco, is a geotechnical program manager on a levee enlargement project in New Orleans that is shaving a decade off the time it normally takes to build and consolidate such a structure.
Thanks to a quick-thinking bridge construction crew, a nearby crane and a brave man in a harness, a woman’s life was saved after the boat she and her husband were in slipped over a dam and left her trapped in a raging boil.
Turning 50 years of talk, stalled projects and storm wreckage into a $15-billion design and construction program that has rapidly built monumental storm-surge defenses around Greater New Orleans can only be achieved with smart, steady, determined and gutsy leadership.
Contractor Jeffrey D. Wagner calls the $84-million AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre “far and away the most challenging” job in his 21-year career.
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