A dam on the Green River in western Washington state remains one of the nation’s most unsafe, despite $15 million of work that has been completed over the past year. But the Army Corps of Engineers told local officials on March 18 that an additional $44 million in upgrades is needed to lower the structure’s failure risk to acceptable levels.

“We can manage the risk at the dam, but doing so puts those downriver at risk. That’s what makes this dam unique,” says Mamie Brouwer, program manager for the Howard A. Hanson Dam.

The dam was opened in 1962 to ease flooding in the Green River valley. But it is one of a handful in the U.S. that are classified at the highest risk because of the potential loss of life combined with the economic consequences should the dam fail. The Hanson dam is one of 12 Corps dam projects the agency has classified “urgent and compelling and unsafe.”

In January 2009, after heavy rains and a high-water event in the reservoir, officials in the Corps’ Seattle District noticed seepage and depressions in an abutment of the earthen-engineered dam. The Corps immediately lowered the reservoir and initiated improvements to shore up the abutment, which is the result of a 10,000-year-old landslide.

With money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Corps granted a $13-million contract to Nicholson Construction, Cuddy, Pa., to install a 450-ft-long grout wall, consisting of two 10-ft-thick walls. An additional $1-million contract was awarded to Jensen Drilling, Eugene, Ore., to improve a drainage tunnel in the abutment.

The dam is critical to industry downstream on the Green River. Since the earthen dam was built, local residents have become accustomed to living and operating in the floodplain without risk, says Dana Hinman, a spokeswoman for the city of Auburn, Wash. The area, near Tacoma and southwest of Seattle, has grown into one of the nation’s largest warehouse and goods distribution centers, with an estimated $4-billion value.

Even with the fixes finished last month, the area faces the risk of flooding of up to 10 feet in a one-in-25-year storm event. The planned $44-million project would provide protection for up to a one-in-140-year storm event by extending the grout wall 650 ft to the east and deepening the entire 1,100-ft wall another 200 ft. It is now from 90 ft to 170 ft deep. A Corps official says the agency’s report and recommended solutions will be presented to Congress by June. If funding for the additional work is approved, the job will be let for competitive bid. A permanent fix, likely to include a concrete cutoff wall and possibly costing up to $500 million, is now being studied.

Firms looking to boost sagging bottom lines and gain more-robust public-sector construction markets generated a record attendance of more than 550 at this year’s federal and military workload briefings, sponsored by the Society of American Military Engineers on March 18 in Alexandria, Va. Traditional pockets of “milcon” work–such as in base closure and housing–are winding down, officials said. But overseas expansion and new initiatives in energy conservation and facility “quality of life” upgrades are boosting work for the short term, just as new conference attendees were boosting their profiles.

The SAME event preceded by one day testimony from Defense Undersecretary Robert F. Hale, who noted DOD’s $18.7-billion milcon request for fiscal 2011. He said it was down 20% from the previous year, due to $5.2 billion less requested for base realignment and closure, a program set to end in fiscal 2011. But excluding that, he said, the request is up 8.4%. “We’re in a growth industry inside the gates, even though there is a recession outside,” said Brig. Gen. Al T. Aycock, deputy commander of the Army Installation Management Command.

The Army has 700 projects worth $15.7 billion to execute this fiscal year, said Robert Slockbower, military programs director for the Corps of Engineers. Robert Silver, Naval Facilities Engineering Command director of military construction, noted that its FY11 milcon budget of $3.9 billion is “a historic high.” But he noted that recent “robust” budgets will level off. “We’re running on the red line now, but this will trail off to more normal levels,” Silver said.

For now, however, the Navy is gearing up a multibillion-dollar building program on the island of Guam to accommodate the planned transfer of thousands of Marines and others from Okinawa, as a result of a treaty with Japan. But its speed and breadth may depend on how the administration responds to concern over the buildup’s impact on the island’s fragile environment and strained infrastructure. The Navy spent $50 million to study the impacts, but negative reaction to its conclusions from U.S. environmental regulators and others may require White House mediation. President Obama was set to visit Guam on an Asian trip cancelled by last week’s passage of health-care reform.

Military officials cited statistics of expedited procurement and the hiring or rehiring of thousands of contract specialists. They also said the services would continue to embrace design standardization, adding that more joint basing would improve the processes. But executives say there are still major discrepancies in project delivery approaches among the services and that strategies such as “adapt-build” are not uniformly favored by base commanders. Please click here for link to briefing slides presented.

While President Obama signed the health-care reform legislation into law at a jubilant White House ceremony on March 23, grim-faced Republicans geared up for a battle in the Senate over a “reconciliation” package that amends the bill just signed into law. Riding with that reconciliation measure is the fate of a provision that has divided the construction industry.

That provision, sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), was in the Senate-passed version of the bill and thus is now law. It requires construction companies with more than five full-time employees and a payroll of $250,000 or more to offer health-care coverage to their workers or pay a penalty of $750 per employee. The threshold for other industries is 50 full-time workers.

The reconciliation package pending in the Senate would delete the provision, and some construction groups have been blasting the Merkley language and want to see it go. These organizations say the provision singles out the industry that has been hit the hardest by unemployment. “It’s a slap in the face to construction employers,” says Eben Wyman, the National Utility Contractors Association’s vice president for government relations.

Organized labor lobbied hard for the provision and wants it to stay. Jacob Hay, a spokesman for the Laborers International Union of North America, says, “We believe that the health-care legislation has some positive reforms, but to fully impact and benefit construction workers, it needs to include Senator Merkley’s provision…because 65% of construction businesses employ less than five people.”

Republicans planned to raise “points of order” with the Senate Parliamentarian to remove portions of the revisions package that do not relate to budgetary issues. Stanley Kolbe, director of government affairs for the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association, says one item targeted by Republicans is the Merkley language.

If the Senate makes changes in the reconciliation measure, it would have to go to the House for another vote.

Republicans want to go even further. They are vowing to try to repeal the newly enacted health-care measure in its entirety. GOP lawmakers also are pledging vociferously to make health care a central issue in the November elections.

The landmark legislation will provide health coverage to an additional 32 million Americans and cut the deficit…

A 70-story, folded, creased and curved stainless-steel curtain wall on an 867-ft-tall apartment building has been called “Gehry only on the outside,” as if the building is a fake Frank. It’s true that, when it opens next year, New York City’s tallest residential tower won’t be an internationally acclaimed cultural icon, as is the architect’s now-12-year-old Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain. The 76-story high-rise is not as colorful, whimsical and structurally innovative as the nearly decade-old Experience Music Project rock ‘n’ roll museum in Seattle. The new tower is not as description-defying inside and out as the six-year-old Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. But that building was torturous to build: There were 10,000-plus requests for information (RFIs), and it was $174 million over budget and the subject of a dispute that ended in a $17.8-million settlement.

Draping Lower Manhattan’s Beekman Tower, Frank Gehry’s creases may only be skin-deep, but the depth of the building team’s accomplishment–producing a budget-driven, speculative apartment tower with the signature of the “king of swoopy” all over it–is not superficial.

The job, topped out and clad to the 51st floor, is under budget and on schedule, discounting a three-month work hiatus related to the Great Recession, says the local developer, Forest City Ratner Cos. FCRC says there are no claims to date and only 100-plus RFIs on the entire job, including the seven-faced, 319,000- sq-ft drape on all but the south face–hands down, the architect’s most ambitious facade ever.

This project is “Frank Gehry demystified,” says Joseph A. Rechichi, an FCRC senior vice president.

Bruce Ratner, FCRC’s chairman, had a Gehry “sculpitecture” in mind from day one. But he also wanted an economical and constructible Gehry, with minimal process pain. Initially, “we were concerned about [the curtain wall's] constructibility, and long-term use,” Rechichi says.

The facade’s success relied on several strategies. One was the development of a traditional unitized curtain-wall system for the wall’s air-and-water barrier, with an outer rain screen for the wild shapes. Unitized systems are unusual for residential towers, especially rental ones. “For the size and scale of the project,” however, it had to have a unitized system, says John Bowers, Gehry’s project manager.

Unlike a stick-built system with costly field labor, a unitized system is shop-fabricated. Workers can install finished units quickly, without expensive staging.

On Beekman Tower, a floor plate can be completely enclosed in four to five consecutive working days, says Bowers. “The greatest advantage of a unitized wall system is in the schedule,” he says.

“Our ability to divorce the wall from the balance of the building was huge,” adds FCRC’s Rechichi.

A key move on FCRC’s part was to engage the curtain-wall supplier early under a design-assist contract. Another key factor was the use of sophisticated digital tools, including building information modeling (BIM) and computer-numerically controlled (CNC) cutting tools. Automation has “enabled me to bring buildings of architectural quality to fruition,” says the Los Angeles-based Gehry.

FCRC also used veterans of Gehry’s past projects for the facade and the reinforced-concrete superstructure. Curtain- wall supplier Permasteelisa North America (PNA) worked on the Disney concert hall and Manhattan’s 10-story Interactive Corp. headquarters–Gehry’s only other unitized curtain wall. Concrete contractor Sorbara Construction Corp., Lynbrook, N.Y., built Interactive.

The 1.1-million-sq-ft Beekman is a mixed-use development with a sculptural tower–a fat “T” in plan–that will…

Prices for diesel fuel, structural steel, lumber and gypsum-wallboard products started to stir during the first quarter, but most increases were coming off dismal lows in 2009 and were not strong enough to break the stranglehold the recession has on construction costs. Eleven of 15 major industry cost indexes tracked by ENR showed costs falling below a year ago. These drops included year-to-year declines of 5.8% for warehouse construction, 4.7% for office buildings and 1.7% for school construction, according to the U.S. Commerce Dept.’s January cost indexes. The agency also reported in January another 3.6% decline in homebuilding costs during the same time in 2009. This decrease marked the third consecutive year the Commerce Dept. cost index for new homebuilding has declined, following drops of 3.2% in 2009 and 2.6% in 2008.

The deepest cost declines were measured by selling price indexes, which reflect the stiff competition between subcontractors and their dwindling margins. Among commercial price indexes, one issued by Turner Construction Co. fell 0.5% this quarter and 7.7% for the year. The Rider Levett Bucknall selling price index also fell 0.5% for the quarter and is down 7.3% for the year.

Most of the deflation in construction cost indexes can be tied to subcontractors slashing bids, despite some growing pressure from rising commodity prices. As the homebuilding market shows some signs of bottoming out, lumber, plywood and gypsum-wallboard prices are starting to bounce back after years of depressed levels. The average mill price for softwood framing lumber–tracked by the Eugene, Ore.-based pricing specialist Random Lengths–was $312 per thousand board-ft in February. That price was up 56% from last year’s low but is still 26% below the peak of February 2005.

Likewise, the Random Lengths composite index for panel prices in February rebounded 20% from last year’s low point but is 44% below its previous peak.

The rebound in gypsum-wallboard prices lags behind that of lumber, but price increases are starting to pop there as well. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) February producer price index for gypsum wallboard rose 1.1%, the biggest monthly increase since August 2008, says Armine Thompson, building-materials analyst for forecasting firm IHS Global Insight, Washington, D.C. But he believes it will take most of 2010 for the wallboard market to shake off the effects of the recession. Wallboard prices are likely to end this year with an overall 6.7% decline before turning up 4.6% in 2011, followed by another 4.5% gain in 2012, according to Thompson.

Another rebounder that is not having the impact on overall costs it once did is diesel fuel. The BLS producer price index for diesel fuel jumped 11.5% in January, which lifted it 41.4% above 2009′s level. This increase is coming off low levels. Six months ago, the diesel fuel index was running 60% below 2008′s level.

Nevertheless, Thompson says that asphalt paving prices cannot ignore higher oil prices for long. She predicts prices will end the year 5.1% higher, after dropping 12% in 2009.

Other price increases for commodities such as copper and aluminum may be temporary blips. “Copper and aluminum prices have moved way ahead of market fundamentals,” says John Mothersole, a IHS Global Insight principal. “We don’t think the end markets, especially in the U.S., are strong enough to accept these kind of price increases, and weak demand will start pushing back during the next two quarters,” he says. “Our top-line inflation forecast remains very muted.”

The recession in the non-residential building market in 2009 has made short work of steel-price spikes in 2008. Structural-steel prices now are hovering around their 2004 to 2006 levels, according to John Anton, IHS Global…