In a remote corner of western Spain, the world’s biggest concrete-arch railroad bridge awaits the arrival of tracks and signaling for the planned high-speed corridor between Madrid and Portugal’s capital, Lisbon.
The Arenales Suspension Bridge in northwest Nicaragua now provides safe access to critical resources for a community that had been cut off from schools, markets, jobs and health care by the Esteli River, which floods for more than three months a year, making a simple walk to work or school life-threatening.
Fluor and Dow Chemical Co. relied on innovation and collaboration to bring on line a $1.5-billion ethylene production facility as the first new major ethylene facility to take advantage of the low natural-gas prices in the Gulf Coast’s shale region.
Industry veterans selected the winners of the Global Best Projects Awards as the most outstanding examples of the risks and rewards—and the hurdles overcome—of designing and building internationally.
The judges looked at projects in many markets and examined safety performance, innovations, challenges, and design and construction quality - with a special emphasis on the diversity of global project teams and their collaboration.