The 112th Congress has not begun well at all for highway construction advocates. Infographic By Walter Konefal New House rule would open the door for highway and transit cuts below the amounts SAFETEA-LU authorized. On Jan. 5, the first day the new Congress was in session, the House, now under Republican control, approved a procedural rule that breaches a 13-year-old legislative “firewall” and lets House appropriators cut highway and transit spending below sums authorized in 2005’s Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: a Legacy for Users. “We are very distressed,” says Pam Whitted, vice president for government affairs for

Pittsburgh’s $528-million North Shore Connector project is now nearing completion on schedule, despite a month-long jam of a tunnel-boring machine in 2008. The Port Authority of Allegheny County says there are no claims or liquidated damages. Photo: Courtesy of Port Authority of Allegheny County New expanded light-rail station features preserved mural. The 1.2-mile extension of the city’s 25-mile light-rail system extends from downtown beneath the Allegheny River to the city’s North Side. The work involved three major components: construction of the twin-bore tunnels, reconfiguration of the existing Gateway Station and a new North Side station. In April 2008, the 500-ton

Ayear after shifting bridge bents halted work on the $217-million U.S. Route 20 project near Oregon’s coast, engineers are hoping for rain and a solution. Photo: Courtesy of ODOT Unstable soils have kept completion of an Oregon road section in limbo. While over 50% of the new 6.5-mile bypass is complete, four bridges up to 1,100 ft long sit partially constructed. Lateral load from adjacent fill and subsurface ground pressure may have caused two of the 20 bents on the 10-bridge project to shift as much as two inches. Since that discovery in February 2010, crews have been collecting data.

It will be late summer before drivers cross the longest cable-stayed bridge in the Western Hemisphere, yet for Frank Daams, the new bridge essentially was complete in early January when crews installed the last two 830-ft-long cables and stressed each of their 44 steel strands. “As far as I’m concerned, it is finished,” says Daams, project manager for Audubon Bridge Constructors, a joint venture of Flatiron Constructors Inc., Longmont, Colo.; Granite Construction, Watsonville, Calif., and Parsons Transportation Group Inc., Washington, D.C. “Now all we have are little details to get it open to traffic.” The John James Audubon Bridge crossing

An agreement between Suncor Energy Inc. and Total Exploration & Production Canada Ltd. is expected to restart construction of a stalled multibillion-dollar oil-sands production facility this year. Total will buy a 49% stake in the Suncor-operated Voyageur upgrader project, located near Fort McMurray. The $1.75-billion deal also includes Total acquiring 19% of Suncor’s Fort Hills mining project and Suncor acquiring 37% of Total’s Josyln mining project. Work on the upgrader, which upgrades bitumen mined from the oil sands into oil, was suspended in 2008. Work will resume once front-end engineering design is updated. Dany Laferriere, Suncor spokesperson, says the agreement

It’s a structure built to precise construction standards, in some cases to a tolerance of 1/16 in.—no small feat in a structure with 80 miles of piping, 170,000 cu yd of concrete and 35,000 tons of reinforcing steel. It’s also a building that could provide a use for spent nuclear-powerplant waste, help lower energy bills and even end nuclear proliferation. Photo: Courtesy of SHAW AREVA MOX SERVICES MOX complex includes 170,000 cu yd of concrete and 35,000 tons of reinforcing steel. Photo: Courtesy of SHAW AREVA MOX SERVICES Building walls are 10-ft-thick concrete, each with four rows of reinforcing steel.

Providing a financial incentive to Houston’s commercial building owners may help the city comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s newest ozone requirements. Houston Mayor Annise Parker last week announced a new citywide program that offers up to $200,000 to commercial building owners to retrofit their buildings to make them more energy efficient. Supported with funds from the Dept. of Energy’s Conservation Block Grant, which is part of the federal stimulus, the Energy Efficiency Incentive Program is Houston’s first such program for commercial buildings. An emissions inventory, conducted by several public agencies and published in 2010, showed that residential, commercial and

The U.S. Green Building Council says it is taking concerns about the exclusion of structural materials in the draft of the next version of its LEED green building rating system “very seriously.” Structural engineers are objecting to the absence of structural materials in credits for recycled content, regional materials and renewable materials, renamed bio-based materials in the draft. “It’s baffling to me,” says Mark Webster, a project manager with structural firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc., Boston, and chair of the working group on LEED within the sustainability committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Structural Engineering Institute (SEI),

A new agency in the Dept. of Interior should be created to oversee and ensure the safety offshore oil and gas operations, according to the report released on Jan. 11 by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. The call for the new agency—which would be completely separate from a Dept. of the Interior division that would oversee the leasing of offshore tracts for the U.S. government—was one of about 15 recommendations that the presidential appointed commission made in a comprehensive 398-page document examining causes of the April 20 spill, which left 11 workers

The Macondo well blowout on April 20 was avoidable, and occurred largely because of a series of bad decisions by the companies and personnel involved that did not take into account the proper risks, according to a partial report released Wednesday by the presidential oil spill commission. Related Links: Uncalculated Risks: Engineering License Exemptions and the Gulf Oil Spill “The well blew out because a number of separate risk factors, oversights, and outright mistakes combined to overwhelm the safeguards meant to prevent just such an event from happening.” “But most of the mistakes and oversights at Macondo can be traced