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September 2006

Richard Korman is an award-winning journalist and author and is senior business editor of ENR.com.

Foremen Who Don't Know How to Manage
By Richard Korman
September 22, 2006

I’ll get to the point. Many contractor foremen don’t know squat about how to manage or work with people. Neither do a lot of overpaid executives in $900 suits, but the subject today is construction foremen.

In general foremen graduate into their jobs without learning how to motivate, maximize resources and communicate. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence and plenty of reasons to change it. Not only is productivity on the jobsite at stake. Good first-line supervision helps get better workers and keep them.

An American Society of Civil Engineers’ journal article from all the way back in 1974 addressed the issue on union jobsites.

Demeanor, tone and fairness matter, the authors suggested.

The authors wrote that hazing and other harassment can produce a bad attitude and that foremen should eliminate these practices. Apprentices told the authors that they are turned off by bad interpersonal relations with other employees or supervisors, poor quality or unproductive work performed by their crew, unfair job assignments or the work itself. Skilled, experienced employees should teach the inexperienced workers in an encouraging, fair manner. And job assignments should be divided up equally and rotated where possible.
Recently, E. Michael Powers, an ENR correspondent, talked to some contractors about the same subject. A manager at a specialty contractor told Powers that foremen got enough training in the apprentice-journeyman system.

“Typically a journeyman craft worker will oversee several apprentices giving us an opportunity to see how he performs in a leadership role,” he told Powers. The company selects its foremen from the journeymen with the best track records as both performers and mentors and while the workers selected might lack formal education, they get plenty of hands-on leadership training through the apprentice system.

Another source told Powers about company-provided training.

Pradeep Tipnis of CH2M Hill Lockwood Greene said that Lockwood Greene used to have a leadership training program for its craft workers who hoped to become either foremen or general foremen.

Those who went through the program would be tested and could reach levels called “blue horse” and “thoroughbred.” On a series of four similar non-union sites in Mississippi, Tipnis said, CH2M Hill recently paid signing bonuses and completion bonuses to workers who received those certifications to come and work as foremen. “We got higher levels of productivity on sites run by blue horses and thoroughbreds,” he said. Their presence helped recruit the same repeat craft workers to all of the jobs despite a six-month lag between each job. “The craft came back because of the quality of the leadership on the jobs,” said Tipnis..

That helps, but there are still big gaps.

Rick Raef, a Willis safety specialist and e-mail newsletter columnist, explains it better than I can.

He says the lack of foremen training is so bad he’s pulling together a book on the subject (he’s starting to look for a publisher.)

“My idea behind the book is to fill the huge gap that currently exists due to the way we as an industry make someone a new boss. We essentially take the hardest-working guy on the crew, throw a set of plans at him and kick him out the door. No training, no mentoring, just ‘get with it – you’re already behind schedule.’”

“There are a million things that new foremen need to learn and yet for the most part we, as an industry, essentially set up for failure, the very people we depend on to build the work, make the money and hopefully not kill someone in the process,” says Raef. “True, most of these lessons are eventually learned over time and admittedly, some of the hardest lessons learned are those that are least forgotten. The problem is, when we take this default approach to teaching first-time foremen how to be a boss, we create hours of needless confrontation, turf battles of biblical proportions and imprint poor attitudes and egos that take a lifetime to change.”

Jeff Rubenstone is a recent graduate of the College of William and Mary, where he majored in history. He is pursuing a career in journalism and is based in Sparkill, N.Y.

A Half-Lifetime of Hanford
By Jeff Rubenstone
September 19, 2006

I hope more progress is made at the Hanford site in the next decade than in the last.

The Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State is one of the more infamous sites in the United States’ atomic history. Built during the Manhattan Project for the production of plutonium, Hanford played a critical role in the American nuclear program from the Trinity test well into the Cold War. Today, 54 million gallons of radioactive waste from those decades of plutonium production is stored in 177 underground tanks at the site. More than sixty of those tanks are known to be leaking into the surrounding soil. It is hardly a permanent solution.

Over a decade ago, the Department of Energy decided that the best way to reduce the leakage of waste was to build an onsite vitrification plant, where the toxic sludge could be converted into easily stored and transported glass logs. These would still be radioactive, but much less volatile and likely to leak into the environment. The actual construction however, has not moved along as planned.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers performed a budget assessment on the partially constructed Hanford vitrification plant, and estimated it would take $12.2 billion to complete, not including the fee for the contractor, Bechtel. The sheer size of this budget might cause sticker shock in the casual observer, but sadly it is only the latest pitfall in the troubled history of the Hanford vitrification project.

The plant was originally slated to be built by BNFL. But after a number of setbacks, including a revised budget projection of $13 billion, $6 billion more than BNFL’s previous estimate, the Department of Energy fired BNFL from the project back in 2000.

With a revised Department of Energy budget estimate of $4.3 billion in hand, construction giant Bechtel took over the contract. Complaints of cost overruns and internal discord about design safety soon built up, and earlier this year Bechtel had to halt construction in several areas due to design problems. Company whistleblowers revealed that much of the construction was taking place without finalized designs or blueprints, and that some of the foundations that had been lain were not designed adequately for potential earthquakes. Bechtel relented, and slowed construction to address many of these claims, but all that wasted time and money only added to the total cost. The end result of these and other setbacks is the Corps’ recent $12.2 billion price tag.

Aside from the sad irony of arriving back at nearly the same price after six years of haggling and construction, there are once again rumblings about a contractor pulling a bait and switch with the budget at Hanford, and the Department of Energy’s tendency to lowball the cost.

The Hanford plant seems destined to join the pantheon of the other troubled and stalled visionary public works and reconstruction projects of our day. In fact, it hardly feels premature to list it alongside Boston’s Big Dig, the rebuilding of New Orleans and the whole Iraqi reconstruction that never really got going. (I make no comment on the frequency of Bechtel’s participation in that list).

But unlike those other projects, Hanford isn’t just radioactive in the political sense. The environmental damage at Hanford has been documented for years, and if any significant amount of that leaking waste finds it’s way into the groundwater flowing into the nearby Columbia River, it’s game over. The Hanford site lost it’s luster as an achievement of the atomic age long ago and has become just another Cold War embarrassment, a scar on the landscape that the American public tries to forget. But there are greater things at risk here than politics, money and public opinion.

Aileen Cho, Editor Aileen is ENR's senior transportation editor.

Suspended Animation, to Go
By Aileen Cho
September 14, 2006

China has been terrible for my ego and even worse for my waistline. Being one of few Asian American journalists specializing in the coverage of transportation infrastructure, I enjoyed a dubious but sometimes special status as someone whom you could easily recognize in the crowd of just about any engineering conference (albeit sometimes as someone's wife or secretary). But it's very humbling to be in a country where you basically blend into a crowd of 1 billion people--just another Asian face. And after five days of non-stop Chinese banquets with endless dishes of savory vegetables and meat spiraling past me on a gourmand merry-go-round, I have definitely acquired a layer of fat around my waistline that probably looks like that on Peking duck. Even a trudge up the Great Wall's sometimes 2-ft-high steps, a workout to rival any Stairmaster, didn't burn it off. (A Chinese guy with a peg leg galloped past me, singing, then stopped for a smoke).

To boot, I have spent the past five days consistently disillusioning the natives with my inability to speak Chinese. Feeling a vague and unsettling sense of failing my heritage (my father came from a North Korean strain that ended up largely in China, where he was born and raised speaking the language), I tried to memorize the syllables for "I'm sorry, I can't speak Chinese." Attempting to verbalize doesn't convince the natives that I can't speak Chinese. It just convinces them I must be a retarded Chinese. But I am not in China for ego, diet or even cultural enrichment. I'm here to get a glimpse into the mind-boggling construction that is sprouting bridges and roads like hyperkinetic ivy. A junket sponsored by T.Y. Lin International was tricky because technically, I had to go as a tourist. I was not allowed to ride the elevator up one of the twin, uneven pylons of the Second Wujiang Bridge ( a cable-stayed crossing in Fulin) in part because women "tourists" are out of the comfort zone there.

China has begun to build long-span bridges like there's infinite tomorrows. They're zooming around the learning curve with an overachieving zeal. Engineers are learning to use epoxy-treated asphalt on decks to make them last longer, and apparently have been "inspired" by the new Bay Bridge self-anchored suspension (SAS) span to try a few long-span SAS structures themselves.

On Wednesday I saw one such SAS structure in Foshan, Nanhai District, about an hour outside Beijing. The $55.6-million Pingsheng Bridge, scheduled to open by October, crosses the Dongping waterway with a main span of 350 meters. That means that until the Bay Bridge SAS in San Francisco opens with a 385-m main span, this bridge will be the world's longest of the type. The irony, notes Man-Chung Tang, T.Y. Lin International chairman, is that his firm was hired as a consultant by owner Foshan Road and Bridge Construction Co. to review the design because the Chinese engineers figured they could learn from the Bay Bridge span construction. But as it turns out, this bridge was built in about three years while the Bay Bridge, buffeted by politics and delays, is just getting going.

Caltrans engineers recently visited the Foshan site to see what they could learn from it. They ? and I on Tuesday ? also visited the Nanhuan Bridge, with a 315-m-long SAS main span; that 750-m-long structure was completed in two years. It now awaits a brand new town to connect to and a lake to be created underneath it.

The steel orthotropic girders comprising the main twin spans of Pingsheng will each carry five lanes of traffic and a 3.5-wide pedestrian walkway. They are flanked by standard concrete box girders to create a total length of 680 meters. With heavy barge traffic beneath, the contractor, a joint venture of Beijing Municipal Construction Co. and Jiangyin Construction, used a launching girder plus 800-ton jacks to sequentially cantilever out the girders, which are approximately 21 m x 3.5 m deep. The bridge has a single 145-m-high pylon that consists of three columns tapering up to a square cap at the top. It's a strange-looking bridge because the backspan, supported on 50-m-deep concrete piles, has no hanger cables cascading down between main cable and deck. I hope it's not lost in translation, but the Chinese engineers seemed to convey that going with a concrete backspan saved up to 50% of the total cost. Apparently you either love or hate the contrast of half a total bridge being supported by suspension cables and the other half with broad daylight between the main cable and the deck from side view. I rather liked it. The day we visited, it was raining. So we opted not to climb the staircase leading up to the pedestrian walkway. Too bad, because I had another Chinese pig-out lunch awaiting. Including duck, of course.

Andrew G. Wright, Online Editor Andy is managing senior editor of enr.com. He lives in Manhattan.

Voices of Reason
By Andrew G. Wright
September 8, 2006

Harry Shearer is an accomplished actor, writer, comedian, blogger and satirist. He co-wrote and played Derek Smalls in the classic 1984 rock ‘n roll mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap . He does a number of voices on the The Simpsons, including: Rev. Lovejoy, Principal Skinner, Wayland Smithers and my personal favorite, megalomaniac billionaire nuclear power developer C. Montgomery Burns.

Shearer also puts his voice to good use on a weekly radio broadcast aired by WKCR, a National Public Radio station in Santa Monica, Calif. “Le Show” is widely syndicated, critically acclaimed and streamed online. It’s available for free through the iTunes. store.

Each episode runs about 45 minutes to an hour and Shearer typically and deftly skewers pomposity in public life, with free-form commentary, occasional sketches, recaps of the news and a funny feature called Apologies of the Week. Frequent targets: Big Media, silly celebrities and since Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers. Shearer is a native of Los Angeles but he also lives part-time in New Orleans, so his knowledge of the city is more than casual. The bulk of the Aug. 27, 2006, edition of Le Show consists of a lengthy conversation with Ivor van Heerden, the deputy director of the Louisiana State Hurricane Center. Van Heerden is an outspoken South African who developed a hurricane model used in a 2004 disaster simulation for Hurricane Pam, a theoretical storm that proved to be eerily similar to Katrina. He has also been rather pointed in his criticism of the Corps' levee design process. The entire file is worth listening to, but if you want to jump to Van Heerden, he starts at about 7 min. and 30 sec. Shearer's funny, Van Heerden's serious. Both are worth listening to.

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