2006: The Year in Construction
As ENR closes the year with its fifth annual construction photography contest issue, the improving quality of the submissions is quite noticeable.
Roy Stevens
Photographer: Roy Stevens
Submitter: White Photography
Roy Stevens, who owns White Photography, took this shot of workers with Kubricky Construction and supplier Dimension Fabricators positioning rebar for the $12-million Lime Kiln Bridge over the Winooski Gorge in northern Vermont on a spring morning. He says he was inspired by the green patina against a blue sky with golden elements and the dramatic angle.
Eric Pelletier
Photographer & Submitter: Eric Pelletier
Ironworkers from Frederick, Colo.-based S.N.S. Iron Works Inc., connect a roof beam for an expansion of Littleton Adventist Hospital, Littleton, Colo. Pelletier, S.N.S. owner, says he shoots on all company jobs because "it is a big source of pride" for his workers.
Victor Davila
Photographer: Victor Davila
Submitter: Figg Engineering
Davila, a Figg segmental geometry manager, took this photo of the $150-million, 5,910-ft-long Susquehanna River Bridge, Pennsylvania's first concrete segmental crossing, while standing on a jet-ski in the river. "I wanted to illustrate that the bridge is in harmony with the river by showing the symmetry created by the bridge and its mirror image in the calm river waters. For this reason, I wanted a perspective from the water, which meant using my jet-ski to find the perfect angle."
Merle Prosofsky
Photographer: Merle Prosofsky
Submitter: Merle Prosofsky Photography Ltd., Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Backlighting diffused by early-morning fog dramatizes the beginning of the five-hour erection of a 310-tonne vacuum distillation tower. The 37-meter-long, 8.5-m-diameter tower will extract oil for OPTI Nexen's $3.6-billion Long Lake steam-assisted gravity drainage project from northern Alberta's oil sands.
Stephen C. Foster
Photographer: Stephen C. Foster
Submitter: Cianbro/Reed & Reed, LLC
Workers guide a roof down for a pylon top on the Penobscot Narrows Bridge and Observatory in Verona, Maine. Foster, a supervisor with Pittsfield, Maine-based Cianbro, scaled a tower crane to grab the shot. "These guys are 430 feet in the air and they move with the ease of being in a living room," Foster says.
Nicholas Manente
Photographer & Submitter: Nicholas Manente
This shot of the $1.5-billion, Xanadu sports complex project in East Rutherford, N.J, for the New Jersey Sports and Exhibition Authority, captures a sprawling scene of excavation activity. As project manager for New York City-based owner's representative Tishman Construction Co., Manente says "there are always photos of the completed project, but I think the most interesting shots are during construction."
Joseph Blum
Photographer: Joseph Blum
Submitter: People & Work Photography
An ironworker installs rebar into a pier column cage for the $6-billion San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The completed pier lurking in the background provides a sense of what the image in the foreground will ultimately become.
Stephen Sette Ducati
Photographer: Stephen Sette Ducati
Submitter: SSD Photo, Somerville, Mass.
Ducati has spent a lot of time taking pictures on the Big Dig project in Boston. He and many of the equipment operators are friends, but CAT 365 operator Jack Foley was still surprised when Ducati started taking pictures of his boots, until he realized his 100th Anniversary Redwings had caught Ducati's eye. "I love my Redwings," Foley said. Ducati says construction jobsite details intrigue him.
Brian Fulcher
Photographer & Submitter: Brian Fulcher
"I have a passion for underground photography," says Brian Fulcher, of J.F. Shea Construction Co., Walnut, Calif. A tunnel construction enthusiast, Fulcher took this shot of workers on the Gotthard Base Tunnel, Sedrun, Switzerland, a Bilfinger Berger-led joint venture. The crew is installing steel support ribs which, with the shotcrete applied to the tunnel's forward wall, prevent collapse. This portion of the tunnel was bored through "squeezing ground, which pushes in on the tunnel walls," Fulcher says. "It's very dangerous work."
John Blair
Photographer: John Blair
Submitter: Traylor Bros. Inc., Evansville, Ind.
The shift over, "rodbusters" head for the bus that will carry them to their cars offsite, capturing the end-of-day feel of worksites everywhere. Traylor is building a $282.4-million, 1,200-ft lock to replace two smaller ones at McAlpine Lock, Louisville, Ky.
Maryanne Caruthers
Photographer: Maryanne Caruthers
Submitter: Kristen Ivory
Walsh Construction Co.'s long-time artist-in-residence captured a worker with elevator-core reinforcing steel against a gray sky at The Strand Condominiums at RiverPlace in Portland, Ore. Caruthers, also a painter and illustrator, says this picture clicked because of the strong lines, the silhouette and the worker's gesture.
Arash Parham
Photographer & Submitter: Arash Parham
Parham snapped this image of workers from Bethesda, Md.-based Clark Foundation Group LLC installing a rock bolt into a tunnel wall on a $232-million project to build an automated people mover at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. As project manager, Parham often takes his camera along to shoot construction progress. This time, he says, it was teamwork that caught his eye. "I like this because it shows the effort that goes into this kind of work," he says.
Roy Meddings
Photographer & Submitter: Roy Meddings
Meddings, also one of last year's winners, is into quality photography for Andersen Construction in Corvallis, Ore., where he works in quality control. The photo froze a moment as Meddings did a safety walk-through at a steel-framed parking garage for Providence Hospital in Medford, Ore. The ironworker setting the castellated beams "would appear and reappear in the openings," says Meddings, who "sooner or later" wants to quit his day job and shoot landscapes for a living.
Mike Manoski
Photographer: Mike Manoski
Submitter: Dottie Hutchins
Manoski, working for Cianbro Corp., a Pittsfield, Maine-based steel erector, snapped an "in-spire-ational" photo of ironworkers cladding the $30-million U.S. Air Force Memorial in stainless steel. The three-spire concrete structure, which looks like contrails from a split plane formation, was completed in October. The energetic sculpture, which stands 270 ft in Arlington, Va., was designed by the late James Ingo Freed.
Chris Shinn
Photographer: Chris Shinn
Submitter: TIC—The Industrial Co.
An ironworker erecting steel at the second level of a powerplant expansion is entirely focused on the work in front of him at the Santan Expansion Project Unit 5, in Gilbert, Ariz. TIC, performing structural, mechanical, piping and electrical and instrumentation work on the $42.7-million, 525-MW gas-turbine combined-cycle generation unit for the Salt River Project, emphasizes its attention to safety.
Thiel Harryman
Photographer & Submitter: Thiel Harryman
When Harryman saw a worker from Tank Builders Inc., Dallas, installing a staircase on the side of a fuel tank at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, he knew it had the curiosity factor that can make an interesting shot. Harryman, an avid photographer, is a project engineer for Underground Construction Co., Benecia, Calif., contractor on the $13-million tank-construction project for owner, Southwest Airlines. "He was building what looked like a stairway to heaven with nothing supporting it," Harryman says.
Rick Hunter
Photographer: Rick Hunter
Submitter: Zachry Construction Corp.
Inverted fabric-filter hoppers at Nebraska City Station No. 2 called Egypt's pyramids to mind for photographer Rick Hunter. Zachry, Black & Veatch and Gilbert Industrial Corp. in joint venture are constructing the 660-MW coal-fired powerplant for Omaha Public Power District under a $214-million contract, scheduled to be completed in 2009.
Joseph A. Blum
Photographer: Joseph A. Blum
Submitter: People & Work Photography, San Francisco
The first pile casing for a tower anchorage on the $6-billion San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge gets a pre-dawn lift on Oct. 7. "I am in close contact with those guys," says Blum. "They said they were going to do the first casing at 5:54 a.m., so I was there."
Leah C. Palmer
Photographer & Submitter: Leah C. Palmer
The scaffolded "village green" of the recently completed St. Coletta School charter school in Washington, D.C., felt like the belly of the beast to Palmer, who is an assistant project manager with construction manager Advanced Project Management. Palmer, who studied architecture, is fascinated by the framework of buildings. More than a dozen of her frozen-in-time fascinations adorn the walls of APM's offices in Chantilly, Va.
Shelly Anderson
Photographer: Shelly Anderson
Submitter: DYK Inc., El Cajon, Calif.
Like stringing a bow, DYK workers throw their weight into bending cables to create a flexible anchorage for the walls of a 400-million gallon concrete water tank for the Valecitos (Calif.) Water District. On another tank, the design was credited with reducing fractures in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and keeping the water flowing. Project manager Anderson took the shot at the suggestion of an ENR editor, who advised her to look for shots of people hard at work.
Thiel Harryman
Photographer & Submitter: Thiel Harryman
As this worker scraped asbestos off a tank on a $6-million upgrade at the Anheuser Busch brewery in Los Angeles, Harryman, a project manager for Brighton Engineering, Santa Clarita, Calif., used a zoom lens from several hundred feet away. In keeping a safe distance he avoided distracting the subject and caught his natural expression. "I liked the determination in his eyes," he says.
Jeff Callow
Photographer & Submitter: Jeff Callow
Callow, an engineer with Thornton Tomasetti Inc., caught ironworkers bolting the field splices of the upper 100 ft of a 300-ft-tall steel mast that sits on the 52-story New York Times Building in Manhattan. Callow gave up his Saturday to witness and record the Nov. 11 topping out of the giant taper, which is 8 ft in diameter at its base and 8 in. at its tip.
Paul E. Knapick
Photographer: Paul E. Knapick
Submitter: BBL Construction Services, Albany, N.Y.
Scott McFee, left, and Samuel Alleshouse, ironworkers erecting steel for a $9-million cinema in Schenectady, N.Y., receive a surprise delivery on a hot day. "Somebody on the ground, seeing the sweat on their faces, must have thought, 'these guys could use it' and they just sent it up to them," says Knapick. "The expression on their faces was great!"
Paul E. Knapick
Photographer: Paul E. Knapick
Submitter: BBL Construction Services, Albany, N.Y.
With the sun in his lens, Knapick, BBL's photographer, says he realized it was "time to break some rules" when he saw this ironworker directing a lift on a $9-million cinema project in Schenectady. "Holy cow, he looks great, and he's tied off," he says.
Jason Reece
Photographer: Jason Reece
Submitter: Centex Construction, Dallas, Texas
Reece, a project engineer, took this shot of workers atop a 240-ft-high glass atrium during construction of the $45-million National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va. "This caught my eye because the workers are preparing to rappel down the side of the atrium like mountain climbers," he says.
Peter Radice
Photographer: Peter Radice
Submitter: L.P.R. Construction Co., Loveland, Colo.
Project Manager Radice says the site of the Arabelle at Vail Square, in Vail, Colo., is so hemmed in by buildings and geography that he had to get a crane to swing him up to get shots. Here, a supervisor hands out paychecks on a Friday morning. Workers tote lunchboxes, but also five laptops for 3D visualization for steel on the $165-million condominium project.
Timothy J. Gattie
Photographer: Timothy J. Gattie
Submitter: Washington Group International, Boise, Idaho
The $330-million Otay River Bridge in Chula Vista, Calif. rises into the morning mist. "As the sun peeked through the fog, I couldn't make out the bridge," says Gattie, area engineer for Washington Group. "So I put the sun behind the columns, and the picture came out." The State Route 125 project took years to get going. "Literally and figuratively it came out of the fog," Gattie says.
Trevor Wrayton
Photographer: Trevor Wrayton
Submitter: Potomac Crossing Consultants, Alexandria, Va.
Crews cut out a 2,000-ft section of the old Woodrow Wilson Bridge as traffic waits on the new $2.4-billion replacement. "I was standing on the roof of an apartment building," says Wrayton. "It was 12:30 in the morning and pitch-black. Forty percent of the bridge was gone in one fell swoop."
Stephen C. Foster
Photographer: Stephen C. Foster
Submitter: Cianbro/Reed & Reed, LLC
High up on a tower crane where he also snapped the photo on page 33, Foster took this shot of fog cloaking the $85-million Penobscot Narrows Bridge and Observatory project in Verona, Maine, after hearing tower crane operators talking about the view. "I ran to my office, grabbed my camera, and climbed as fast as I could," he says. "It kept getting more dramatic as I went up."
Dan Miller
Photographer: Dan Miller
Submitter: Bonnie Temple
The Albuquerque International Balloon festival brightens desert skies every fall. In October, joint venture contractor PCL/Triad was working on a $161-million water treatment plant for the city at a site three miles from the launching area. The photographer captured a turtle floating close to the job's Manitowoc crawler-crane jibs.
Lynne Wilkinson
Photographer: Lynne Wilkinson
Submitter: HNTB/California Dept. of Transportation
Photographer Lynne Wilkinson says "there is lots of adventure" in her job as assistant to the principal Caltrans engineer on the replacement of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. While at the top of the existing bridge's steel truss superstructure, she snapped a view between her boots showing construction of the Skyway segmental portion of the replacement bridge.
Joseph A. Blum
Photographer: Joseph A. Blum
Submitter: People & Work Photography
Reflections off the window of a heavy-lift barge crane working on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge capture the world of the operator at that instant, including the image of the photographer in the lower right corner. But Blum says the thing he really likes about this shot is that it puts the operator right where he belongs-at the center of everything.
James Panter
Photographer and Submitter:James Panter
"I took (the picture) for me and my crew so we'd have something to remember it by," says Panter, foreman of the line crew replacing a 230-kV conductor on the 6,300-ft Tacoma Narrows crossing in Washington state for Henkels & McCoy Inc. He framed the shot to show the background from the 475-ft-high tower.