Imagine working under 200 tons of structural steel being hoisted by two cranes. One operator has the skills to safely operate his crane. But the second operator, untrained and unskilled, accidentally drops the load on the 22-ft-high crib pile where you are standing. The first operator struggles to maintain the load, but his boom starts to buckle. You realize you've lost control over whether you will live or die. Major construction failures in recent years have cost many lives and millions of dollars in property damage. Collapses not only killed three friends of mine last July at Miller Park stadium
If politicians really want to solve California's current energy crisis, they must undo the artificial shortage created by unions and project labor agreements. More than 10 years ago, many nonunion and some union contractors began complaining about a new tactic that forced power producers to use only union contractors. At that time, Thomas R. Adams, an attorney in San Mateo, Calif., and Thomas J. Hunter, business manager of District Council 51 of the plumbers' and pipefitters' union, pioneered the use of environmental protests against projects as a way to bargain for union-only project labor agreements on them. Previously, PLAs had
Half-baked designs seem especially prevalent in underground construction, as I know firsthand. During the past 45 years, my company, Tri-State Drilling, has drilled tens of thousands of shafts into the ground. We know that no matter how many test borings or investigations are done, you simply can't foresee the tremendous variety and bizarre combinations of variables in the subsurface. Let me give you an example. We were asked to install drilled shaft foundations for a large power transmission tower in the Midwest. Drilled shafts are great foundations for these towers. They're relatively straightforward to design, and we've installed hundreds of
Last month, details of a federal probe into alleged environmental data fraud by a Texas laboratory were splashed across the front pages of the national press (ENR October 2 issue p. 12). Prosecutors said the possible faulty data by Intertek Testing Services Environmental Laboratories Inc. could affect thousands of waste sites. The story didn't have any particular impact on me. I don't own a lab company, and I don't work for one. But as a long-time business consultant in the environmental services industry, it pains me to see some of the ill-informed or wrong-headed reactions to this incident. Some impressions
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