Major oil-and-gas companies are dispatching battalions of scientists, engineers and marketers to squeeze profits from the tightest project margins, often against fierce competition.

Block Andrews, an environmental engineer with Burns & McDonnell, says the firm’s power-sector clients need services across a wide range of applications, including transmission, new planning, research, environment, decommissioning and more, as utility operations become more diverse.

Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of Canadian oil-sands crude production, was evacuated on May 5, when a wildfire swept through the city’s outlying forests and through the streets, destroying more than 2,400 structures.

Some specialized national contractors are seeing big results from new fiber-optic work aimed at the design and construction of superfast, gigabit-per-second broadband networks across the U.S.

Within the past year, both European and U.S. officials have investigated the cement industry for price collusion, anti-trust issues and other unfair business practices.

Just weeks after opening the new Gold Line Foothill Extension, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) hopes to expand that light-rail system again, along with many other projects.

In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7% chance of a magnitude-6.7 or higher earthquake, and the Pacific Northwest has a 10% chance of a magnitude-8 to -9 mega-thrust Cascadia subduction-zone quake, says the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The U.S. Congress’ House Committee on Natural Resources says the Environmental Protection Agency’s engineers don’t have the skills to manage mine remediation work because of Colorado’s Gold King Mine disaster in August, when 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater were spilled into the Animas and San Juan rivers during an EPA-led effort to reopen the mine.