Picture this site in San Antonio: The project manager and supervising engineers are finishing a 16-story, 285-unit Embassy Suites Hotel, and they are huddled around an assortment of Windows tablets, iPhones and iPads. They all go online and open folders on their screens linked to a cloud-based shared file. They open a plan of the hotel’s 14th floor. Each person zooms in on separate rooms and creates their own punch list. They flag issues by dragging icons—coded by issue and trade—to the plan, from pallets on screen. Sometimes they hand-write notes and attach them. At any time the users can
When companies take work to the ends of the earth, communication reliability goes out the window, especially in areas struck by wars or disasters. For professionals determined to maintain contact, whatever the conditions, satellite data terminals are the ultimate backup plan. Photo: Tom Sawyer BGAN data terminals, which support voice calls as well as data, love a good view, like the sky to the southeast of Haiti. Related Links: Hot-Linked Sites Bring Data Home On a recent reporting trip to Haiti, I packed a BGAN Explorer 500 Satellite Data Terminal from Inmarsat. It was on loan to ENR so I
A new study of the largest owners of infrastructure, worldwide, shows 500 of the biggest owners hold fixed assets valued at $13 trillion; furthermore, 359 of them are in the private sector, having fixed assets valued at $9 trillion, or 69% of the total. The study was produced by infrastructure design and management software purveyor Bentley Systems Inc., Exton, Pa. Released on Oct. 20, it is the first of Bentley’s “Infrastructure 500 Top Owners” rankings. Greg Bentley, CEO, says the rankings are based on publicly reported values of net tangible fixed assets. Entities with a mix of government funding and
Infrastructure software experts say the Stuxnet worm that has disrupted many of Iran’s nuclear powerplants—and is designed to target industrial controls—escalates the data-systems protection battle. The malware is said to be the first “rootkit”-level virus coded to attack powerplants and industrial controls. “This provides a blueprint for how control systems can be exploited,” says Mark Weatherford, chief security officer for the North American Electric Reliability Corp. The NERC consortium has urged members to upgrade user policies and run system scans since researchers discovered the worm last summer. The malware is designed to target programmable logic controllers (PLCs), says Liam Omercu,
Seeing the chain of project communications breaking down, with subcontractors e-mailing questions to architects and responses going to everyone in blizzards of chatter, Chris Ross, an electrical contractor in Sacramento,Calif., decided to restore order. Photos By Tom Sawyer Mobile Plan Room, an iPad app that works in tandem with the BuilditLive site, provides access to the documents folder so that plans can be opened and viewed while users are out in the field. Related Links: Online Construction: Mobile Plan Room demo He created the project collaboration portal www.BuilditLive.com, which launched in late June with one major twist. “We are not
As scientists begin to assess the impact of the first tropical storm of the 2010 hurricane season on a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the fight to seal the leaking well and protect the coastline continues. Image Photo: Courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory Tropical storms are a wild-card factor in predicting the behavior of the oil still gushing from the site of a deeptwater-well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, shown here in a satellite view taken on June 26. Scientists want to improve their predictions of oil-spill behavior when slicks are assailed by major storms like
A hurricane is rising in the farmland of northwestern South Carolina, and it is going to stay there for the foreseeable future, ripping off roofs, driving rain through walls, shattering windows and shredding buildings. That’s the purpose of a $40-million building materials and assemblies test facility nearing completion in Chester County, S.C. It is designed to attack full- scale test structures with the swirling winds and rains of hurricanes, the pounding hail of severe thunderstorms, or the wind-driven embers of wildfires. The owner is the Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS), a Tampa, Fla.-based insurance industry group whose member
The beauty of the Web is its ability to build an audience for significant presentations, even after an event has ended. A June 8 panel discussion at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., on the state of seismic building codes, couched in presentations of lessons learned from recent earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, is a fine example. Photo By Tom Sawyer, Enr. In Haiti, building codes are often inadequate or ignored. Related Links: Building Codes Shakedown: Designing for Disaster The presentations—by David Applegate, senior science adviser for earthquake and geologic hazards at the U.S. Geological Survey; Michael J. Armstrong,
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is issuing an especially dire forecast for tropical storm activity in the Atlantic and Caribbean basins this hurricane season. Photo: NOAA Hurricane Ike, in 2008. NOAA is predicting an active, to extremely active hurricane season this year. In a report released May 27, NOAA said that it is expecting “an active to extremely active” hurricane season. For the six-month season, which begins June 1, NOAA is projecting a 70% probability of 14 to 23 named storms with top winds of 39 mph or higher. It predicts the named storms will include eight to 14
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is issuing an especially dire forecast for tropical storm activity in the Atlantic and Caribbean basins this hurricane season. Photo: NOAA Hurricane Ike, in 2008. NOAA is predicting an active, to extremely active hurricane season this year. In a report released May 27, NOAA said that it is expecting “an active to extremely active” hurricane season. For the six-month season, which begins June 1, NOAA is projecting a 70% probability of 14 to 23 named storms with top winds of 39 mph or higher. It predicts the named storms will include eight to 14
