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GX Editor's Blog
John Trotti is the Editor of Grading and Excavation Contractor magazine.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013 3:06 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As the age of municipal plumbing systems passes the century mark, planners find themselves faced with the thorny issue of whether to replace, renovate, or go to Plan C, whatever that might be. No matter what the choice, the chances are that it involves excavation work of some sort as part of the process. Two of Grading & Excavation Contractor ’s sister publications— Stormwater and Water Efficiency —are directly involved with the situation, and another— Erosion Control —is involved, if only tangentia... More...
Tuesday, May 07, 2013 11:16 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Earlier this year I used this column to address the subject of leadership "…at this moment in our nation’s history, where unbridled change threatens to rip apart the bases of our relationships with one another and, indeed, the very roots of civilization. So this is not a time to reward mediocrity or narcissistic political ambition. Rather it is a time to seek out and advance those for whom achievement is a driving force." I concluded the piece with a listing of the 14 qualities Marine Corps doctrine rec... More...
Tuesday, April 30, 2013 1:08 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Years ago I introduced you to the impact Master Gunnery Sergeant Daly, our nearly monosyllabic drill instructor, had on our recruit platoon. Well, let me add another from my nearly inexhaustible list of “Sir-Yessir” memorabilia. There we were, 30 well-shorn, skinny, worn-to-a-frazzle, not-yet Marines, lined up for a junk-on-the-bunk inspection, when Sir-Yessir informed us that instead of the coziness of our washed, waxed, and groomed barracks, we were going to spend the next three hours groveling ... More...
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 12:57 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Things change, but the rate at which things that marked the days of my life have disappeared makes many of my accomplishments seem trivial...which in the grand scheme of things, of course, they are. Still, as a one-time fighter pilot I can’t help feeling a sadness for the passing of manned aviation as symbolized by the increasing reliance on remotely piloted vehicles and the all but certain demise of the US Navy’s Blue Angels flight demonstration team. So allow me to set my sense of loss in this memory ... More...
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 12:49 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
My hot tip of the week: If you’re addicted to your smart phone, keep it away from water. The day before I was to head for the World of Asphalt in San Antonio this past month, I managed to spill a glass of water on my iPhone, which gave up its ghost right there and then. “Maybe it will come back to life if I let it dry out for a while,” I thought, so after what I figured was enough time for nature to take its course, I punched the ON button and realized by its blank stare, the little bugger had gone on t... More...
Tuesday, April 09, 2013 1:20 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
It was last October that Ken Gray, global product manager for large hydraulic excavators for Caterpillar’s Excavation Division, introduced the hybrid version of the company’s high production 336E excavator to the US press, stating that details of the machine’s innards would be available at a later date. Well, that date was last week. Not only were the details presented, but I, along with other members of the press, was offered the opportunity to operate and compare it with the standard model. Now as any... More...
Tuesday, April 02, 2013 3:14 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Computers continue to make their presence felt in construction, but their impact for the most part mirrors what has been taking place elsewhere in the business world. The changes they have wrought—stunning as they seem—have been evolutionary in nature, allowing for a greater degree of control over the same sort of data that had been used in decision making for decades. But beneath the surface, seemingly unrelated forces have been at work—high-definition positioning systems, electro-hydraulic equipment c... More...
Tuesday, March 26, 2013 3:44 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Two days before old man winter gave way to spring, I arrived for this year’s World of Concrete with its host city, San Antonio, TX, sweltering in 93-degree heat. Two days later I was at Volvo CE’s North American headquarters and production hub in Shippensburg, PA, in time for a bit of snow, followed by a wind-exacerbated 27-degree outdoor dedication ceremony for the inauguration of the company’s just completed $100 million expansion to the facility, whose production will initially start for the L60-L90 ... More...
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 11:50 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
How would you like to see not only the dirt you’re working on at the moment, but also what the site is supposed to look like when the job is done? Watch any TV show on modern fighter aircraft and see what magic resides in the systems at the pilot’s fingertips and in some cases even beyond his conscious control. Look at the wealth of information available for call-up on a multifunction display or even the aircraft’s windscreen or canopy. While the aircraft is waffling around in the dark of night, or plun... More...
Tuesday, March 12, 2013 1:05 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
One of the problems in coming to grips with the GHG situation has been the confusion not only in the interpretation of climate data by various experts, but often in the data themselves. Lulled by such uncertainties, many have adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude, thinking perhaps that this, too, will go the way of most doomsday pronouncements. But forget that. The carbon train has left the station, and already we’re hearing the rumblings of increased regulatory activity and the promise of expensive mitigat... More...
Tuesday, March 05, 2013 4:48 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
We received an e-mail telling us to get off the dime and “Tell it like it is,” a challenge suggesting that we’re hiding something from our readers. I only wish it were so, since I could take this hidden knowledge to the bank, or at least Las Vegas, and turn it into cash. But, sadly, I’m along for the same ride he and the bulk of the world’s populace have been taking for more than half a decade. I am the recipient of a dozen or so newsletters and “confidential” briefings each week, each purporting to be ... More...
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 6:04 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Just this last week I received the results of a study that included the best and worst of state education performances. Though there were some instances of superior performance, for the most part the results painted a rather dismal picture. While I have no mind to intrude my thoughts on activities best left to teachers, I find myself drawn to question the bases on which many of our systems reside. The problem emanating from the “no failure” system is more than just one of degraded performance. Given the... More...
Tuesday, February 19, 2013 1:05 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In last week’s newsletter web log I pointed out that “While there is no doubt that technology systems—particularly the software—have undergone incredible improvements over the past year, what is even more important is that attendees recognized their relevance to productivity and were eager to see how they fit their needs.” Every issue of Grading & Excavation Contractor contains at least one technology article, and often we have used machine control as its entry point into more detailed discuss... More...
Tuesday, February 12, 2013 12:53 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Want to know where the attendees were? In the west half of Central Hall, scrambling to get a look at the latest software and productivity equipment on display. While there is no doubt that technology systems—particularly the software—have undergone incredible improvements over the past year, what is even more important is that attendees recognized their relevance to productivity and were eager to see how they fit their needs. Such events as World of Concrete, World of Asphalt, and next year’s ConExpo ar... More...
Tuesday, February 05, 2013 12:04 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
If you’re not up-to-date on stormwater regs, practices, and management systems, you’ll want to check out Forester University’s stormwater webinars this month. In partnership with our sister publication, Stormwater magazine, Forester University is offering two webinars during the month of February that will provide you with a lot of good information and may even keep you out of the regulatory sauce. Voodoo Hydrology—Pitfalls of Urban Hydrology Methods & What You Need to Know Presenter: Andy Reese, P.... More...
Tuesday, January 29, 2013 3:05 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
It’s been a year since I wrote a blog about drug and alcohol abuse in the workplace, admitting at the outset that we don’t like to think about it. The concerns that prompted it have not changed, so let me repeat them: * Workers’ Compensation: 38% to 50% of all Workers’ Compensation claims are related to substance abuse in the workplace. Substance abusers file three to five times as many claims. * Medical Costs: Substance abusers incur 300% higher medical costs than non-abusers. * Absenteeism: Substance ... More...
Tuesday, January 22, 2013 12:56 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Foremost of the three great lies is the line, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” which as I see it is in no danger of surrendering its ranking. So every time I hear word that there are public works inspectors (or from OSHA, IRS, or Animal Control, for that matter) wandering around the area, I find myself getting edgy. After all, of the dozens of possible outcomes from such visits, not one of them leaves me an iota better off than I was before their arrival. Yet these people exist for a... More...
Tuesday, January 15, 2013 1:01 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent a good part of my first life in the Marine Corps, whose principal ethos is rooted in Leadership. From the instant a young recruit or officer candidate steps foot on Marine Corps soil, he or she is propelled down a path whose milestones are carved in the continuous pursuit of leadership skills. It’s a journey measured not by approval of those in high places, but in the willingness of others to follow. While the Corps’ structure is hierarchical, its ability to perform its mission unrolls from the ... More...
Tuesday, January 08, 2013 12:21 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Thursday, January 24, 2013 at 2:00 pm [EST]; 1 hour; 1 PDH / 0.1 CEU Join Phil Dybing and Scott Kanne to explore how to drastically reduce your fleet’s fuel consumption and related CO 2 emissions, run quieter, increase productivity, and improve truck uptime. In this webinar prepared for Grading & Excavation Contractor’s stable mate, MSW Management, by Forester University, Dybing and Kanne will discuss fleet opportunities available with smart hydraulic solutions and how to implement these solutions i... More...
Wednesday, January 02, 2013 12:01 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
At a recent party I found myself regaling a group of people on the tremendous advances technology was making in construction, stating that it was now possible to address and display nearly every aspect of the construction process digitally with the ability to massage, analyze, modify, format, and transmit these data whenever and wherever they’re needed. Elements composing the digital job site include: * software for connecting all the dots from initial concept to the completed and billed project; * tele... More...
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 11:21 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
This is my last web log for 2012, and you will be relieved to know I have neither the talent nor inclination to try and put the year into some sort of perspective other than that it seemed to lack the balance most of us might have preferred. But as we go about summing the plusses and minuses, let’s spare time to consider the balance sheets of the men and women serving in our behalf throughout the far-flung reaches of our planet, separated from family and loved ones not only by distances measured in mile... More...
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 12:17 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As a professional magazine serving the construction industry, we pay attention to what you’re doing and what you’d like to see from us by conducting regular readership surveys. These surveys reveal much about who you are, what you’re working on now, where your future focus will be, how we can best serve your needs, and how well we’re meeting your expectations. With the year’s end just around the corner, we thought you might be interested in what we found out from and about you in our most recent readers... More...
Tuesday, December 04, 2012 10:45 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
If there’s one thing to learn from our sister publication, Municipal Solid Waste Management , it’s that there is a very direct connection between prosperity and waste…a vision about as startling as any that would prompt my kids to say, “Well, duh !” During the good times of the last decade it was relatively easy to relax our vigilance and concentrate on where we thought the big money was. If you remember those days with clarity, give yourself an A-plus for mental acuity and a D-minus for not focusing on... More...
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 6:01 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
It doesn’t much matter where you or I may stand on climate change, or destructive weather, or tectonic madness, or solar mass ejections…or the extent to which our behavior affects these activities, since Mother Nature doesn’t pay attention to opinion polls. Moreover, the fact that we’ve studied ad nauseam (and then compiled magnificent records) on every kind of disaster imaginable has shown no signs of protecting us from being caught up short in our preparedness. Why? Well, for certain, nature wields a ... More...
Tuesday, November 20, 2012 2:33 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As many of you probably know, at its recent meeting in Southern California the Association of Equipment Manufacturers joined with a consortium of national business leaders in setting the nation’s debt as its top priority. The board called for immediate bipartisan action to comprehensively solve our nation’s debt crisis by adopting a balanced approach that addresses entitlement and discretionary spending, as well as revenue, while making wise investments in infrastructure and education. As you consider t... More...
Tuesday, November 13, 2012 11:52 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent much of last week in Las Vegas at Trimble Dimensions, a biannual event I’ve come to view as a window into the direction and pace of change in the construction industry. On the drive home, much to my surprise I found myself thinking of the impact our essentially monosyllabic drill instructor, Master Gunnery Sergeant Daly, had on our recruit platoon more than two-thirds of my lifetime ago. There we were, 30 well-shorn, skinny, worn-to-a-frazzle, not-yet Marines, lined up for a junk-on-the-bunk ins... More...
Tuesday, November 06, 2012 12:53 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As you are reading this, I am in Las Vegas at Trimble’s Dimensions, a supersized look at the company’s knapsack full of technological wizardry that impact all of Forester Media’s magazines, starting with Grading & Excavation Contractor , where precision measuring and communications systems have gone from gee-whiz novelties to the backbone of job-site productivity in little more than a decade…not that the possibility hadn’t been there for far longer. Only now their reach is far greater, their applica... More...
Tuesday, October 30, 2012 4:38 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In my previous column, I made reference to Caterpillar’s 336E H Hydraulic Excavator, saying that I would get back to it in subsequent weeks. So here, just in time for Halloween, is a peek beneath the skirt of the tent. As you can well imagine, an excavator, for all of its various systems, is first and foremost a hydraulic machine, swinging, dipping, ingesting, lifting, swinging, and expelling its contents in response to a series of commands issued by an operator who communicates his wishes through a lab... More...
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 10:31 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
No, I’m not talking about a video in your pickup. Instead it’s what you could do the next time you’re in Peoria, IL, where 50 or so of your best friends can go in, grab a comfortable seat, and enjoy a high-tech presentation while seated in the bed of a Mining Truck…or a room the size and configuration of one. It’s just one of the many features of Caterpillar’s brand-new Visitor Center, which is crammed basement to roof with machines and displays—many of them interactive—guaranteed to delight kids o... More...
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 10:28 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Kickoff time: 2 p.m. EDT / 11 a.m. PDT Keeping its winning record intact, our mighty team is poised to take on arch rival, Crumbling Roadway Potholes, led by our All-American faculty member, David Hein, P. Eng., vice president of transportation and principal pavement engineer at Applied Research Associates (ARA). Hein is recognized internationally for his expertise in pavement performance modeling, pavement evaluation, mechanistic-empirical pavement design, paving materials, mix design, and life cycle c... More...
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 2:16 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
From our very first issue, we’ve focused on those areas we feel are most important to the long-term success of your business, chief among which are safety, regulatory compliance, technology, and human resource development. Partly because it is the nature of the medium, but also because it’s the way we’ve approached information throughout our lives, the majority of our articles present these elements as separate entities, only occasionally ganging two or three together under the same banner. In general, ... More...
Tuesday, October 02, 2012 11:05 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Though it’s still a month away, I’m already looking forward Trimble’s Dimensions 2012, which will take place at The Mirage in Las Vegas on November 5–7. For those of you who have been to the event in the past, my guess is that you’re looking forward to this year’s revival as much as I am. If you’re on the fence about attending, you should visit www.trimbledimensions.com and check out the agenda. However, if you haven’t been before and have no intention of attending this year, allow me to tell you a litt... More...
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 4:51 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent last week in Japan, in conjunction with our sister publication, MSW Management , looking at a variety of energy-from-waste facilities, followed by a visit to a disaster debris management project dealing with wreckage from last year’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami at Ishinomaki, Miyagi, the city closest to the March 11, 2011 earthquake epicenter. It was the most intensive remediation program imaginable, with scores of excavators, front-end loaders, and trucks working at breakneck speed to process wh... More...
Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:28 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Every issue contains at least one technology article, and often we have used machine control as its entry point into more detailed discussions of the digital job site. This was not, as you might suspect, by accident, because we wanted to root the grander subjects in something that made obvious and immediate sense—a blade, bucket, or compactor wheel in your favorite environment…dirt. No surprise that the management process begins and ends a total understanding of what the project is about, but less than ... More...
Tuesday, September 11, 2012 11:53 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
If not you, who? In addition to Grading & Excavation Contractor , we publish five infrastructure-related publications— MSW Management , Erosion Control , Water Efficiency , Stormwater , and Distributed Energy —for professional audiences, a situation that gives us a unique insight into the common denominators and barriers existing between and among their focus areas. You may find it a stretch to believe that such disparate areas as water handling, transportation infrastructure, waste handling, and en... More...
Tuesday, September 04, 2012 10:14 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Mention the word “theft,” and at least nine out of ten of us will envision a high-buck piece of equipment heading off to parts unknown, where some other contractor will likely become more competitive for his participation in the process. At the very least, it’s a frustrating experience that will involve reports and paperwork along with time and effort spent replacing the item. Even if your insurance picks up the majority of the replacement cost, you’re bound to come up short in the process, but that can... More...
Tuesday, August 28, 2012 5:06 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I can’t let Neil Armstrong’s death pass by without paying tribute to a man who set so many standards, perhaps the greatest of which was his genuine humility in an age redolent with self-congratulatory high-fives for even the most trivial of accomplishments. In the slightly more than 43 years since what he proclaimed as “…a small step for a man,” Armstrong steadfastly resisted all attempts to make him the center of attention for his accomplishments. According to him, he did his job, took a small b... More...
Tuesday, August 21, 2012 12:51 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Who among us has not had a hair-raising encounter with a mudslide in our travels? Nothing can be more harrowing than to round a bend in the middle of a downpour and find yourself skating on a flow of boulder-studded slime. Too late to stop or even slow to below hydroplaning speed, all too often you find yourself along for the ride, unable to maintain enough control to pick your way through the muck. If as motorists we are concerned by such chance encounters, how much worse is it for you and your people ... More...
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:43 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I arrived at Chu Lai, Vietnam in 1969 for my second tour along the South China Sea, but since there was no room in any of the F-4 squadrons I was given the job of base development officer, which sounded a lot more important than it was. Almost immediately, however, the air group S-4 officer for whom I worked had to go home on emergency leave, sticking me with his responsibilities, which were many. Just in case you may not have played military games, the staff positions in an air group were as follow: S-... More...
Tuesday, August 07, 2012 11:33 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Curiosity is not unique to us. Watch all manner of species (including crows and monitor lizards) in action applying themselves to the world around them, and you get the feeling that we’re no great shakes in that department and that clearly it is not what distinguishes us from our planet mates. So when you look at the latest Mars Rover, Curiosity , that made its soft-landing debut on Gale Crater this Sunday following a 352 million–mile voyage that began November 26 last year, you have to revisit what it ... More...
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 10:43 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I work with a colleague who has gone bonkers for brain studies, many of which conclude that we aren’t as smart as we think (no big excitement there). While I tend to look on such ethereal pursuits with some amount of skepticism, he got my attention with some pretty pertinent stuff that I intend to try and digest over the next several weeks. I find this brain stuff pretty daunting since I grew up in an age that barely understood how the thing worked, so as far as I was concerned it was a wrinkled glob of... More...
Tuesday, July 24, 2012 5:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
One of the problems in coming to grips with the GHG situation has been the confusion not only in the interpretation of climate data by various experts, but often in the data themselves. Lulled by such uncertainties, many have adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude, thinking perhaps that this, too, will go the way of most doomsday pronouncements. But forget that. The carbon train has left the station, and already we’re hearing the rumblings of increased regulatory activity and the promise of expensive mitigat... More...
Tuesday, July 17, 2012 12:44 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
StormCon 2012, August 20–22, Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, Denver, CO I can think of few terrors matching that of being in the path of a rampaging wildfire, but one of them is having deal with the aftermath, as those who have had to do so will attest. Fire damage and debris management; human desolation and confusion; displacement of people, families, even entire communities; health and safety concerns in the face of water and sanitation challenges; and then the granddaddy of them all, the ... More...
Tuesday, July 10, 2012 6:10 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I doubt that the subject of drug and alcohol abuse is any dearer to your heart than mine, and that’s part of the problem. We don’t like to think about it. So why talk about it here if the subject is not high on our list of favorites? How about: * Workers’ Compensation —38% to 50% of all Workers’ Compensation claims are related to substance abuse in the workplace. Substance abusers file three to five times as many claims. * Medical Costs —Substance abusers incur 300% higher medical costs than... More...
Tuesday, July 03, 2012 10:57 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The Federal highway bill passed last week at the 11 th hour, but not without the help of a couple of unrelated riders, an extension of federally subsidized student loan rates, and the flood insurance program. The student loan measure will keep interest rates at the current 3.4% rate, which was set to double to 6.8% on Sunday. During negotiations this week, legislators decided the revenue to pay the $6 billion cost should come from changes to the way companies fund pension programs. The deal would also l... More...
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 11:08 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
LiDAR stands for “light detection and ranging,” a technology able to create an interactive topographic map by scanning the earth with lasers. It is similar to sonar in that it measures distance by the time it takes for the laser to reach the ground and bounce back to the source. While laser scanning is routinely done from ground-based locations, aircraft are being used more and more to increase coverage. As a supplement to field surveys, LiDAR is useful in planning for corridor projects such as road con... More...
Tuesday, June 19, 2012 11:21 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I’m getting ready to go to Pittsburgh this next week to attend the American Public Works Association’s Sustainability Conference, and to tell the honest truth, I wonder if I will return home with any significant dent in my IQ (read that as Ignorance Quotient). Yet, somewhere in its mysterious innards resides an area of activity that deserves our attention. Similar in nature to green , sustainability is one of those iconic terms that has wormed its way into both the lexicon and conscience of government o... More...
Tuesday, June 12, 2012 5:23 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The 2012 primary elections have passed into history, allowing some small measure of sanity to creep back into our lives…at least for a few days…while the survivors gird their loins for the November free-for-alls. You don’t have to be anywhere close to the Potomac River to recognize the symptoms of sincerity: red, white, and blue bunting; smiling faces at the podium; promises of deliverance from each and every one of the nation’s woes at the mere cost of your vote. In the midst of the bombast, it’s tempti... More...
Tuesday, June 05, 2012 10:16 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Maintaining situational awareness in the face of all the dangers lurking in our daily lives is hard enough, but doing so on a job site is often more difficult because of booby traps we have installed in the name of safety—notably, such things as head and hearing protection. Lord knows how many deaths or serious injuries are prevented each year by hardhats. Neither is there doubt that earplugs and Mickey Mouse muffs have been godsends in preventing hearing damage, but they come with price tags: distracti... More...
Tuesday, May 29, 2012 6:31 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As the age of municipal plumbing systems pass the century mark, planners find themselves faced with the thorny issue of whether to replace, renovate, or go to Plan C, whatever that might be. No matter what the choice, the chances are that it involves excavation work of some sort as part of the process. Two of Grading & Excavation Contractor ’s sister publications— Stormwater and Water Efficiency —are directly involved with the situation, and another— Erosion Control —is involved, if only tangentiall... More...
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 1:48 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Volvo Ocean Race fleet’s in-port stopover in Miami was an opportunity for the company to announce its record-breaking construction equipment performance—a 111% increase in North American sales during the first quarter of 2012. “Demand for construction equipment in North America jumped 35% during the first three months of the year,” said President and CEO of Volvo Construction Equipment Pat Olney at a press conference attended by journalists from around the globe. “This shows us that the recovery that be... More...
Tuesday, May 15, 2012 10:32 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
According to Ken Simonson, the Associated General Contractors of America’s chief economist, “Contractors caught a bit of a break on major input costs in April, enabling some firms to make up for recent price spikes. However,” he continued, “workloads remain uneven by segment and geographical region, leaving many firms very vulnerable to unexpected price hikes for key materials.” Leading the league in cost decreases were diesel (0.9%), wallboard (1.9%), and copper and brass, which decreased 2.7% and 11.4... More...
Tuesday, May 08, 2012 2:56 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind and lose sight of the fact that dirt-moving notwithstanding, our business is mainly about people. Obviously, we wouldn’t have our jobs were it not for the people who hire us to provide a needed service; certainly, our customers whom we serve define our tasks, but in the final analysis—and this may to some seem at first blush to be politically incorrect—it’s the people in our organization on whom we depend to accomplish those tasks who deserve our full and un... More...
Tuesday, May 01, 2012 12:48 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
“Jumpin’ Jehosaphat!” Gramps bellows across time and space from his perch within the Naval Air Safety Center. “Any dad-burned idiot knows you can’t fly with the wings folded!” That, along with a thousand more rants, was leveled by the salty curmudgeon for more than 20 years, and though they had an effect on the naval aviators of the day, it paled by comparison to NATOPS, the six-letter acronym for the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization launched in 1961 to increase combat readine... More...
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 1:04 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I am known for a whole bunch of grievous faults, but none so terrible as my response to the innocent question, “How are you?” “Neat, keen, peachy, swell, fine, good, jolly, etcetera,” is my standard reply, not necessarily because I feel that way, but because without any more cost than the portion of a breath it takes to complete the litany, I’m biased down a path of expanding rather than diminishing possibilities. How about my daily victims? Well despite their grimaces, groans, and heavy-duty eye-rollin... More...
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 2:45 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
If you turn on the news tonight—something I sincerely hope you won’t—you’ll be treated to the usual litany of darkside fare ranging from death, destruction, mayhem, and villainy, graciously brought to your living room through the generosity of the makers of medications for afflictions you didn’t know you had and that offer side-effects easily matching the ills they’re designed to cure. It’s little wonder a great number of us feel that things are going to hell in a hand basket, especially when attractive... More...
Tuesday, April 10, 2012 3:07 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
When I was a kid, my brother and I used to run string between a pair of tin cans as our backyard versions of walkie-talkies. One of us would shout into his can while the other strained to capture a sound wave or two at the other end, but the truth was that the cans got in the way. The normal talking voice was far superior. Of course, that didn’t stop us from investigating other communications practices, like the time our Cub Scout den tried our hands at smoke signals, setting up our base of operations o... More...
Tuesday, April 03, 2012 1:36 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Time and again, our companion publications, Stormwater and Erosion Control , present horror stories of installations gone wrong—horribly awry—and would you care to know who gets to eat the cost of replacing these failures? The general contractor?…Rarely. The developer?…Sometimes, but only when nature has outdone herself and loosed biblical torrents of rain. No, folks, more often than not it’s the installer who takes the hit, and you know who that is. We hear a lot about the fines various agencies dole o... More...
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 1:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Hollywood’s enduring vision of a fighter pilot is that of the daring loner who single-handedly clears the sky of the bad guys. It makes for great box office, where the likes of Marion Morrison and Tom Mapother (a.k.a. John Wayne and Tom Cruise) reign supreme, but in the sky—where chance writes the script—teamworkers get the leading roles. The same is true in construction, where accidents continue to raise havoc despite all the regulations and dollars brought into the fray. Even where science and industr... More...
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 12:25 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The post-show review summed it up pretty impressively: 6,500 attendees (a show record) from 50 states, six Canadian provinces, and 50 countries traversing the nearly 3 acres of floor space (another record) occupied by more than 400 exhibitors (yet another record) over the three-day event. While many sat in on a variety of presentations, the majority of those with whom I spoke were there taking note of the myriad goods and services on the show floor, heralding what we all pray is the beginning of a long ... More...
Monday, March 12, 2012 2:52 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Mention the word “theft,” and at least nine out of ten of us will envision a high-buck piece of equipment heading off to parts unknown where some other contractor will likely become more competitive for his participation in the process. At the very least, it’s a frustrating experience that will involve reports and paperwork along with time and effort spent replacing the item. Even if your insurance picks up the majority of the replacement cost, you’re bound to come up short in the process, but that can ... More...
Tuesday, March 06, 2012 12:36 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In last week’s web log, I passed along information about the International Risk Management Institute Inc. (IRMI) and the wealth of risk and safety information available through it, passing along the institute’s explanation of the 811—Know What’s Below, Call Before You Dig system. Allow me then to point you again at IRMI’s website with further examples of the wealth of information you’ll find there…here again on underground construction. More Tips—Some Best Practices To avoid construction accidents... More...
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 1:56 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
While I was doing research on underground utility safety, I happened on a website for the International Risk Management Institute, Inc. (IRMI), providing risk and insurance information to business, legal, risk management, and insurance professionals and was struck by the wealth of information it contained on a broad range of risk and safety subjects, including that for which I was searching. To give you a flavor of what’s there, allow me to whet your appetite with some examples. Know What’s Below, Call ... More...
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 12:28 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I, who have fallen prey to more off-the-wall electronic gadgets in my lifetime than most nerds with rich parents, was a card-carrying cynic when it came to the introduction of the iPad in the dirt-and-crunch world of the job site. But after a rather impressive demonstration of its capabilities in showing real-time changes to a site plan while a dozer blade turned “will-be” to “is-now,” I was forced to upgrade my resistance to one of mere skepticism, when what I really questioned was its ability to stand... More...
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 3:55 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
How about you? I spent last week in San Antonio, TX, at a workshop hosted by the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME, pronounced sammy ) and the International Facilities Management Association (IFMA), looking into how in the world the US military, the nation’s largest consumer of energy (among a host of other commodities) is going to carve a whopping chunk out of its energy budget. In the early 1970s, Congress began mandating reductions in energy consumed by federal agencies, primarily by impro... More...
Tuesday, February 07, 2012 1:23 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Foremost of the three great lies is the line, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” which, as I see it, is in no danger of surrendering its ranking. So every time I hear word that there are public works (or, for that matter, OSHA, IRS, or animal control) inspectors wandering around the area, I find myself getting edgy. After all, of the dozens of possible outcomes from such visits, not one of them leaves me an iota better off than I was before their arrival. Yet these people exist for a r... More...
Tuesday, January 31, 2012 1:11 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The final tallies of exhibitors and attendees have yet to be posted, but in my humble opinion they are far less important than how these groups felt about the event and its value to their respective businesses. So here goes my quick-and-dirty summary of WOC 2012. While I heard tale that the show was larger than either of the last two years, it didn’t seem that way to me. Rather it felt a tick down, both in floor space and attendance, but before you take those as negatives, allow me to put them into persp... More...
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 7:00 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
World of Concrete (WOC) is usually among the first events of the year, and as such is often where we get to take a peek under the tents at new offerings from the hundreds of exhibitors who have made the annual trek to Las Vegas, so you know where I’ll be this week. While concrete is the star attraction of the show, WOC is for all intents and purposes a somewhat downsized version of ConExpo Con/Agg that gives roughly 2 million square feet of Nevada’s premier watering hole something to yell about every th... More...
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 6:33 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The new year is upon us, which means my dining room table is awash with scraps of paper and tally sheets that are the tax significant detritus of 2011…may it rest in peace. It is also time for me to unleash the mighty visions of my personal band of prognosticators to find out what 2012 holds in store for us. With me again this year are the likes of: Madame Natasha, whose four separate clairvoyance parlors put her close to the top of the town’s wealthiest citizens; Ace, my barber, whose network of well-c... More...
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 4:07 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Safety can be many things with a multitude of faces, but while at its core it’s an individual mindset, it must be accepted by all who share a set of risks in common for it to be effective. I don’t know about you, but I somehow managed to stumble all the way through my teenage years with absolutely no appreciation for the people I put at risk by some of my bonehead actions much less the number of bullets that somehow missed me in all my ignorance. In fact it wasn’t until I arrived at flight school in Pen... More...
Tuesday, January 03, 2012 3:15 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Even before the birth of computers and the introduction of a seemingly endless array of high-tech controls, success depended as much on your sales and negotiating skills as on how deep a bite your bucket took, so in one sense what we’re seeing happen to the industry is nothing new—only different and maybe a little more treacherous for the unwary. For decades, the introduction of new equipment meant “bigger” or “stronger” or “faster,” expressed in units of size, power, or performance. While the improveme... More...
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 11:36 AM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent last week in Las Vegas at PowerGen, which takes advantage of its year-end setting to toddle between coasts where purveyors and customers of power-related ware can meet in relative comfort to prepare for the next year’s challenges and opportunities. Four of our six magazines— Distributed Energy , MSW Management , Water Efficiency , and Stormwater —have obvious connections with the expo…but what’s this have to do with construction? you ask. “Not much,” I’d have to say…unless you have need of gense... More...
Tuesday, December 13, 2011 6:14 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
A recent study on equipment theft showed that while most aspects of heavy construction have suffered during the downturn, equipment theft has continued unabated…clocking in at its annual average of $1 billion. And that’s just the amount based on reported thefts. According to statistics, more than two-thirds of equipment owners have fallen victim to a crime that shows no sign of abating on its own, so if you believe it’s time to do something about this, maybe a good place for us to start is by opening ou... More...
Tuesday, December 06, 2011 6:15 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
When you consider all that has happened in the last decade, it’s tempting to say that everything has changed. But has it? Yes, there have been startling leaps in the equipment and the systems that allow us to wring ever-greater productivity from them. Yes, we’ve witnessed wholesale changes in the regulations that define so many of our actions. For certain we’ve seen a significant turnover in our work force in terms of age and background. So here we come to the end of another year still enmeshed in a str... More...
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 6:16 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
You may have caught the TV ad for a bicycle simulator that allows the rider (or racer) to train for any of a number of world-class events—the Tour de France for instance—at home. The participant has merely to select the course and even the section he or she wishes to run, and then start pedaling. The computer provides the feedback. Let me own up to the fact that while I really like simulators, bicycle racing is well outside my area of interest. Given my military aviation background and the role simulato... More...
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 6:16 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The EPA’s Potential for Reducing Greehnouse Gas Emissions in the Construction Sector , (http://www.epa.gov/sectors/pdf/construction-sector-report.pdf ), initially released in 2009, is a worthwhile primer on the contribution of construction activities to the overall situation. Among the many points the report makes, the following are particularly worth considering: * The construction sector has the third highest GHG emissions among the industrial sectors, contributing roughly 6% of the total…three-fourth... More...
Tuesday, November 08, 2011 6:32 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Years ago, the forever youthful actress Zsa Zsa Gabor did a series of advertisements for Aamco Transmission in which she toyed with the sponsor’s business by referring to “transmixers” while flirting with the company’s mechanics. Now I’ve always been a stick-shift guy, so her vamping approach wasn’t going to land Aamco any business from me, but I suspect the ad campaign was successful, since I still remember them, her, and the term “transmixer” after 30 or so years. hello Which brings me to the point of... More...
Tuesday, November 01, 2011 6:35 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
A while back I had lunch with a social media guru…an impresario of the arcane reaches of the Twitter/Tweet/In-Your-Facebook phenomenon that has taken over a significant chunk of the universe with the use of tools that can get lost in your shirt pocket and cost little more than a meal for two at a mediocre diner. Still, after I returned to the familiarity of my untidy desk, I was no closer to an understanding of the situation than before, yet convinced that while the promise of something big is there, an... More...
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 6:35 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
From our very first issue, we’ve focused on those areas we feel are most important to the long-term success of your business, chief among which are safety, regulatory compliance, technology, and human resource development. Partly because it is the nature of the medium, but also because it’s the way we’ve approached information throughout our lives, the majority of our articles present these elements as separate entities, only occasionally ganging two or three together under the same banner. In general, ... More...
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 6:36 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I figured that if I didn’t take Jorge—my contractor/neighbor—up on his invitation to go fishing with him, I’d never hear the end of it. So, with great reluctance, I agreed to throw on my woolies and meet him by my mailbox well before the cows and roosters in the area began to get restless. Maybe, I told myself, the fish will be so impressed by this show of enthusiasm that they will line up to take my bait . . . but I knew better. After all, in the thousand or so hours I’d spent in the company of hook, l... More...
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 6:37 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I’ve asked Janice Kaspersen, editor of our companion publication, Stormwater , to provide a snapshot of SPARROW, USGS’s online decision support tool for modeling nutrient transport. Here’s her report: A new tool from the US Geological Survey aims to help those dealing with excess nutrients in surface waters—specifically, helping them find regional models that describe nutrient transport. Excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus can lead to algae blooms, oxygen depletion, and dead zones like the one... More...
Tuesday, October 04, 2011 6:38 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I don’t know how much of our national wealth has been squandered in the past several years seeking first to obscure a host of looming crises and then to apply a few useless bandages to stanch the bleeding of activities whose basic flaws left them well beyond repair or recovery. My guess, however, is that when historians 100 years hence total up the damage, it will be in the multiple trillions of dollars range, making the bailout figures that our legislators and administrators have owned up to date look ... More...
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 6:39 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The week before last, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers announced the winners of its Picture a Better America photo contest. The contest, part of AEM’s “I Make America” campaign, was intended to call attention for the need to invest in US infrastructure improvements and to encourage public investment in infrastructure . The contest featured four categories. “One Bumpy Ride” sought photos of decaying roads or bridges, and the winning photo, by Julia Hoskins of Oregon, showed Hawaii’s Pi’ilani Hi... More...
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 6:39 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Just these past several weeks, the State of Georgia’s education system has been rocked by back-to-back scandals, one involving the fabrication of student achievement records by an inordinate number of school officials, and another regarding the extraordinarily high failure rate of high-school students on statewide math tests. Of course these could be isolated occurrences, but even if so, aren’t they symptomatic of a malaise brought about by not distinguishing between excellence and mediocrity…or worse? ... More...
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 6:40 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I don’t imagine I’m the only one to get a hee-haw every time the list of the latest finalists for the prestigious Darwin Award comes out. Routinely in line for the highest honor are the guys who don’t bother to check whether the bungee cord is attached to anything before launching off from the bridge, or the would-be armed robbers who shoot themselves instead of their intended victims, but I’d like to nominate anyone who locates a worm hole into the afterlife by climbing into an unshored trench for spec... More...
Tuesday, September 06, 2011 6:41 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As you have might have noticed, we’ve added a regular department focusing on training, and as you might guess, much of the discussion is on simulators and in-depth classes on software and maintenance subjects. For certain, these are vital issues, but they deal with the specialized areas of your business, not the day-to-day stuff of a well-rounded training program. You may not think of it this way, but for better or worse, training is a part of everything you do or say in front of your people. What you d... More...
Tuesday, August 30, 2011 6:42 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
LiDAR stands for “light detection and ranging,” a technology able to create an interactive topographic map by scanning the earth with lasers. It is similar to sonar in that it measures distance by the time it takes for the laser to reach the ground and bounce back to the source. While laser scanning is routinely done from ground-based locations, aircraft are being used more and more to increase coverage. As a supplement to field surveys, LiDAR is useful in planning for corridor projects such as road con... More...
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 6:42 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
You might recall several months back that I wrote about running into Jorge—a contractor neighbor of mine—whom I hadn’t seen for what seemed like a coon’s age. We chuckled for a bit about “the good old days” before dashing off our separate ways promising to “…get together soon,” a polite way of producing in advance an excuse for the next several years of absence. But not so Jorge’s wife, Mary, who called a week later, asking me over to dinner. In addition to my hankering for some of Mary’s great cooking,... More...
Tuesday, August 16, 2011 6:43 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
StormCon 2011 begins next week in Anaheim, as many of you who are attending are aware. For those sitting on the rail, there is still time to sign up for many of the events. Among the highlights that are open to all attendees: Panel Discussion At the Opening General Session on Tuesday morning, August 23, five panelists from various areas of stormwater management will discuss “Changing the Rules: How Will New Stormwater Regulations Affect Municipal Programs?” The panel includes • Paul Crabtree, P.E., pres... More...
Tuesday, August 09, 2011 6:44 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” — Pres. Kennedy, May 25, 1961 before a joint session of Congress Today’s pundits would have you believe that President Kennedy’s challenge to the American public was grandstanding rhetoric to get us to heat up the cold war. But to me, as an eager young Marine aviator sitting in the ready room, the gauntlet our Commander-in-Chief tossed do... More...
Tuesday, August 02, 2011 6:45 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
After a substantial period of Beta Testing to uncover and subdue the host of obligatory electronic monsters laying in wait—boy howdy, are they there, ready to go for the unwary throat—I’m really stoked to announce the commencement of Forester University, the electronic education arm of Grading & Excavation Contractor ’s parent, Forester Media. While it’s unlikely that Forester U’s athletic program will ever be in line for national championships, you have only to check out the achievements of its nat... More...
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 6:46 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Let me begin this by venting. Recently I went to a convention at which the plenary speaker –a self-professed economist—tried for an hour to explain the rationale behind the bailout of the very entities and practices that led the way into our present morass. I don’t know how much of our national wealth has been squandered in the past year seeking first to obscure a host of looming crises and then to apply a few useless bandages to stanch the bleeding of activities whose basic flaws left them well beyond ... More...
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 6:46 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Your primary concern in these discussions has to do with the efficiency with which you are able to marshal your resources of leadership, knowledge, people, and equipment to move dirt…and ultimately to prosper. That’s where our focus will continue to lie, and that’s why you’ll want to check in with our Technology in Construction feature in every issue. But there’s another matter here that is all too often overlooked, or if considered, apt to be regarded as pretty much a regulatory matter—soil conservatio... More...
Tuesday, July 12, 2011 6:47 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Three years ago, when the economy went into the tank, the caretakers of our nation reacted with brave promises of spending programs to drag us back to health. At that time, though I was not in favor of writing checks our children would have to cover, I commented that to the extent these monies were applied to correcting our long-neglected infrastructure, at least they would realize some benefit from the process. Little did I know that the monies I thought bound for this purpose would instead go to reward... More...
Tuesday, July 05, 2011 6:48 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Some years ago I found a wonderful piece of property near the town of Weed, CA, and following the dictates of my heart rather than my head, I went ahead and bought it with no certainty as to my ability to develop a secure source of water without drilling clear to China. After receiving the assurance of the two top engineering firms in the area that China might indeed be my best bet, I decided to suspend my natural skepticism toward what I assumed to be the world of the occult, and went to see a water wit... More...
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 6:48 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Things I once knew as blazing fact seem to fall by the wayside as I age, leaving me with the queasy notion that if I keep after it long enough I will reach a point of terminal ignorance—the reverse of the old mechanic’s adage, “If you take it apart and put it back together enough times, eventually you’ll have two of them.” For the most part, this problem lies at the feet of this beast we call The Paradox, a two-headed creature with bad breath and even worse timing, who has this awful habit of showing up ... More...
Tuesday, June 21, 2011 6:49 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As the age of municipal plumbing systems passes the century mark, planners find themselves faced with the thorny issue of whether to replace, renovate, or go to Plan C, whatever that might be. No matter what the choice, the chances are that it involves excavation work of some sort as part of the process. Two of Grading & Excavation Contractor’s sister publications—Stormwater and Water Efficiency—are directly involved with the situation, and another—Erosion Control—gets into the act at least tangentia... More...
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 6:50 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Time and again our companion publications, Stormwater and Erosion Control, present horror stories of installations gone wrong—horribly awry—and would you care to know who gets to eat the cost of replacing these failures? The general contractor?…Rarely. The developer?…Sometimes, but only when nature has outdone herself and loosed biblical torrents of rain. No, folks, more often than not it’s the installer who takes the hit, and you know who that is. We hear a lot about the fines various agencies dole out,... More...
Tuesday, June 07, 2011 6:51 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Granting the top spot to the ongoing economic upset, perhaps the second most challenging situation we face today—and one that will become even more critical in the future—is the evolving makeup of our work force. Nationwide, nearly two-thirds of our construction workers do not have English as their primary language, and in many cases do not speak, read, or understand English at all. Technology can and will help us adapt to the situation, but that’s only a small part of the answer. The solution lies with ... More...
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 6:51 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
e talk about technology a lot throughout the year, and nowhere more than in our June issue, devoted in its entirety to the subject. Yet, even there, what comes through loud and clear is that despite our growing reliance on the wonderful tools coming into the field with increasing velocity, the key to your profitability lies in the hands of those who put them to use. So that’s why we think training is so important that it’s not only a feature article in the technology issue, but will become a staple in t... More...
Tuesday, May 24, 2011 6:52 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
A while back, I spoke of the results of our most recent survey and one of the surprises it turned up—that 40% of our readers are involved in paving. The more I thought about it, I came to realize that the real surprise was not in the discovery itself but it the fact that we had not asked the question before. This was borne out in conversations I had during the past couple of weeks at visits, first to Volvo CE’s Road Institute and new plant at Shippensburg, PA, and then at Trimble’s Dimensions at Las Veg... More...
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 6:53 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent last week in Dallas at WasteExpo, and while the event doesn’t hold a candle to ConExpo in terms of size, it is in its own realm an indicator of its industry’s—and by association—the nation’s economic health. Waste is a wonderful reflection not only of the economy in a broad sense, but how people feel about it, which is different and often a leading indicator of business cycles. Even before Wall Street sent clear-cut signals that we were in for tough times, waste receipts had begun to fall … part... More...
Tuesday, May 10, 2011 6:55 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
You may remember a wonderfully quirky TV series hosted by James Burke titled Connections that presented the tenuous relationships between obscure starting points and a series of off-the-wall events leading to a startling conclusion. These episodes were most often tongue-in-cheek great fun with more than enough spice to make you look forward to the next, so its demise leads me to wish that Burke would resurface to chronicle the emergence of connectivity in the construction world. But if you can’t wait fo... More...
Monday, May 02, 2011 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
There were two major themes at ConExpo this year: For the product and services providers, it was, “We’re listening hard to what our customers are telling us,” while from contractors, the focus was on getting a better handle on both the equipment and productivity systems…in essence, “Give us access to training.” And what was clear throughout was that both sides were getting their messages heard.
In interview after interview with exhibitors about what they were he More...
Monday, April 25, 2011 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As some of you may remember from my column a decade ago, I have a friend, Jorge, who owns a small construction firm in my neighborhood. As happens all to often, our lives drifted apart over the years, so when our paths happened to pass at the supermarket this past weekend, it was with both joy and sorrow that we brought each other current on our activities.
“Annie’s the same as ever,” he announced a little sheepishly. “I don’t know why she still puts up with me aft More...
Monday, April 18, 2011 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”—President Kennedy, May 25, 1961, before a joint session of Congress
Today’s pundits would have you believe that President Kennedy’s challenge to the American public was grandstanding rhetoric to get us to heat up the Cold War, but to me—an eager young Marine aviator sitting in the ready ro More...
Monday, April 11, 2011 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Simply put, Moore’s Law, the basis for which was proposed by Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper, says that the number of transistors that can be economically put on a computer chip will double every two years. While it wasn’t until 1970 that the hypothesis was accorded the status of “law,” its performance has shown such incredible durability clear to the present that it forms the basis for financial projections by many of the leading industrial and governmental organi More...
Monday, April 04, 2011 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Years ago, the forever youthful actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor did a series of advertisements for Aamco Transmission in which she toyed with the sponsor’s business by referring to “transmixers” while flirting with the company’s mechanics. Now I’ve always been a stick-shift guy, so her vamping approach wasn’t going to land Aamco any business from me, but I suspect the ad campaign was successful, since I still remember them, her, and the term “transmixer” after 30 or More...
Monday, March 28, 2011 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
If there was one thing that stood out at ConExpo 2011 last week, it was the recognition by equipment and product suppliers of the need to close the gap between the technologies they have unleashed over the last several years and their acceptance by potential users. Those of you who were among the 120,000 attendees to the event can attest to the heavy focus on training evident throughout the 2 million square feet of displays guaranteed to batter into submission the legs of all but world-class marathoners. More...
Monday, March 21, 2011 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
From our very first issue, we’ve focused on those areas we feel are most important to the long-term success of your business, chief among which are safety, regulatory compliance, technology, and, most importantly, your workforce.
Partly because it is the nature of the medium but also because it’s the way we’ve approached information throughout our lives, the majority of our articles present these elements as separate entities, only occasionally ganging two or three together un More...
Monday, March 14, 2011 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Grading & Excavation Contractor’s newest family companion is Forester University, offering online courses and classes on subjects pertinent to our various publications’ areas of interest.
Among the early presentations will be a class titled Designing With Nature. It’s a compost BMP design webinar for green infrastructure and low-impact development, featuring content on:
* Understanding the current state of stormwate More...
Monday, March 07, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Perhaps you might want to think again.
If you’ve been to ConExpo in prior years and have already made your plans to attend this month’s event (March 22–26) then the rest of this editorial will be old hat. But for those who haven’t, allow me to suggest that you make up your mind and secure your reservations today rather than later when you may find yourself bedded down in Pahrump because everything else in Las Vegas is booked solid by your contemporaries.
More...
Monday, February 28, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Time and again our companion publications, Stormwater and Erosion Control present horror stories of installations gone wrong—horribly awry—and would you care to know who gets to eat the cost of replacing these failures? The general contractor?…Rarely. The developer?…Sometimes. But only when nature has outdone herself and loosed biblical torrents of rain. No, folks, more often than not it’s the installer who takes the hit, and you know who that is.
More...
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Considering the startling events taking place today throughout the entire Arab world, we appear to be on the cusp of monumental upheaval resulting from the almost certain—perhaps drastic—decrease in the production and therefore availability of petrochemicals of all sorts. Depending on the how precipitous the drop in production may be, it could take months—even years—for the regulating valve of pricing to kick in and stabilize the supply versus demand situation, so the main concern More...
Monday, February 21, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I don’t know about you, but given a choice between putting my ignorance on display or sidestepping issues, my temptation has been to lean toward the latter. It’s what I refer to as my Mach-Zero (out of airspeed) tendency that has on occasion allowed me to cry out, “Lord, I don’t mind dying, only don’t let me look stupid in the process.”
Nor did this lunacy go away after I retired from combat flying. Indeed it got a whole new lease on life when I was surveying More...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
ConExpo is just around the corner, bringing to mind the changes that have been wrought in an industry certainly more noted for its conservatism than forays into the ragged edge of the technological envelope. You have to wonder what got into the equipment designers’ thermos bottles at the dawn of the new century, giving rise to a tsunami of technological change that boggles the mind. When will this slow down and allow us to catch up? My suggestion…don’t hold your breath.
More...
Monday, February 07, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Foremost of the three great lies is the line, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” which, as I see it, is in no danger of surrendering its ranking. So every time I hear word that there are public works (or OSHA, IRS, or Animal Control for that matter) inspectors wandering around the area, I find myself getting edgy. After all, of the dozens of possible outcomes from such visits, not one of them leaves me an iota better off than I was before their arrival. Yet these More...
Monday, January 31, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Along with Grading & Excavation Contractor , we publish five infrastructure-related publications— MSW Management , Erosion Control , Water Efficiency , Stormwater , and Distributed Energy —for professional audiences, a situation that makes us acutely aware of the common denominators and barriers that exist between and among their focus areas. You may find it a stretch to believe that such disparate areas as water handling, transportation infrastructure, waste handling, and energy resource management... More...
Monday, January 24, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Winter for us is the silly season when it comes to conferences, trade shows, field days, and site visits. As such, I can count on living out of a suitcase roughly half the time for the next three months. Admittedly, such a schedule is a pain in the tail, all the more so in light of the senseless aggravations imposed by knee-jerk airport security measures…but that’s a story for another day. Luckily, however, the rewards for the time, expense, and effort are many, and in some cases—such a More...
Monday, January 17, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
There’s the story about the man who goes to church every day to pray that he might win the lottery. In the final hour of the fateful selection, with the kitty lapping at the gazillion-dollar level, he prostrates himself before the congregation cries out in a loud voice, “Lord, Lord, please let me win the lottery.” A hubbub arises as fellow parishioners turn to each other in consternation, but then fall into stunned silence as the very walls tremble with the thundering response, “S More...
Monday, January 10, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
You may have seen this before, but it’s still as valid today as when I wrote it in 2008.
When I began my military flying career in 1959, the Naval Aviation’s accident rate stood at 0.66 per 1,000 flight hours, which meant that the odds favored my turning my aircraft—and quite possibly myself—into a pile of rubble at 1,500 hours of flight time. Surprisingly, my contemporaries and I followed the lead of several prior generations of Naval Aviators and accepted this as the w More...
Monday, January 03, 2011 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Recently I went to a convention at which the plenary speaker—a self-professed economist—tried for an hour to explain the rationale behind the bailout of the very entities and practices that led the way into our present morass.
I don’t know how much of our national wealth has been squandered in the past couple of years seeking first to obscure a host of looming crises and then to apply a few useless bandages to stanch the bleeding of activities whose basic flaws left them well More...
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent last week at the 2010 Power Gen Electric Power Show in Orlando, FL, looking for information affecting at least three of our publications in addition to Grading & Excavation Contractor. The others are Distributed Energy, MSW Management, and Water Efficiency, whose readers are or soon will be affected by Tier 4 Interim—followed shortly by Tier 4 Final—emissions standards.Given that the information I gleaned is less than a week old, and the deadlin More...
Monday, December 13, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Have you ever sat down and figured how much time (and money) you spend each year dealing with regulators, explaining how what you’re doing meets their standards on one project, and then having to go through the whole exercise again with somebody else on your next project? Ditto when it comes to fielding complaints and doing make-good work.
Then there’s the safety connection. As you look back over your company’s accident record, how many of them really reflect a lack of clear-c More...
Monday, December 06, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
IVBSS (which takes just as long to say as the full-featured program for which it stands) is a five-year, $32 million cooperative agreement between the US Department of Transportation and a group of partners to test an integrated system of crash-warning technologies for different types and classes of vehicles. Partners for the heavy-truck category include Eaton Corp., International Truck and Engine Corp., Takata Corp., Con-way Freight, and Battelle. Oversight and analysis work for the program has been per More...
Monday, November 29, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Just a flicker in the job market...certainly nothing to haul out the champagne for, but at least the October construction job market saw a small uptick during October as reported by the Labor Department. This expansion is a continuation of a trend of ups and downs in construction employment over the past year. As Ken Simonson, the Associated General Contractors Association’s chief economist puts it, “Considering that most states adding construction jobs in October had shed workers in Septembe More...
Sunday, November 21, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Excavation work has begun on the Westinghouse-designed Vogtle Nuclear Plant near Augustine, GA. Not only is it destined to be the largest reactor ever built in the US, it is also the first to enter construction since the 1970s.
I was alive at the dawn of the nuclear age, and if you had told me in 1960 that we would be no further down the road in taking advantage of its enormous potential for good than we are 50 years later, I’d have said you were nuts.
Today only 20% of the nati More...
Monday, November 15, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
A while back, I spoke of the results of our most recent survey and one of the surprises it turned up—that 40% of our readers are involved in paving. The more I thought about it, I came to realize that the real surprise was not in the discovery itself but it the fact that we had not asked the question before. This was borne out in conversations I had during the past couple of weeks at visits, first to Volvo CE’s Road Institute and new plant at Shippensburg, PA, and then at Trimble’s Dime More...
Monday, November 08, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
With midterm elections over and done and 2010 winding down, it’s still not clear whether we should rejoice or moan…but I’m opting for the former.
It was not too many years ago that Econ-1 classes made the clear distinction between “free goods”—air, water, and dirt—and everything else, under the assumption that the former did not fall into the province of supply and demand. There were plenty of those, of course, who knew better—or at least doubted More...
Monday, November 01, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I’m writing this blog on November 1, so by the time you read this, the mid-term elections along with the hoopla, vitriol, and fervent promises that tend to emerge at the 11th hour will have passed into history, allowing some small measure of sanity to creep back into our lives…or at least I hope so.
After all, you don’t have to be anywhere close to the Potomac River to recognize the symptoms of sincerity: red, white, and blue bunting; smiling faces at the podium; promises of d More...
Sunday, October 24, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I’m looking forward to attending Trimble’s Dimensions 2010 that will take place at The Mirage, Las Vegas, November 8–10. For those of you who have been to the event in the past, my guess is that you’re looking forward to this year’s revival as much as I am. If you haven’t been before and have no intention of attending this year, allow me to tell you a little of what you will be missing.
For starters, attendees not only have to pay for transportation and accom More...
Monday, October 18, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Back in 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore proposed that the number of transistors that could be economically put on a computer chip would double every two years. While it wasn’t until 1970 that this hypothesis was accorded the status of “law,” its performance has shown such incredible durability clear to the present that it forms the basis for financial projections by many of the leading industrial and governmental organizations worldwide, and the model for other technological proje More...
Monday, October 11, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent much of last week in New Orleans at the Water Environment Federation’s annual conference and exposition, soaking up the latest water industry intelligence. On one hand, you could say that there are no great surprises in terms of the water and wastewater infrastructure, much of which is at or past the critical stage. Estimates of these ranged from $500 billion to more than $1 trillion that must be addressed in the next couple of years, so not surprisingly a good portion of discussion centere More...
Monday, September 13, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As I’ve said in this column several times in the past, while I’m not a great fan of deficit spending—face it, the appetite for funds only grows larger with stimulation—if we’re going to resort to it, then focusing on badly needed infrastructure repair and upgrade is the proper venue, since the folks who will still be paying for it long after we’re gone will derive some benefit from our prior neglect. So when the administration embarked on what it termed its American Re More...
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
OK, so now they call it skills-based education, but the goals are the same as they were before some politically correct word-mongerer got involved.
Somewhere along the line from between when I was in school (slightly this side of the Pleistocene) and today, many education systems got taken over by educators who believed that dirt or grease under the fingernails were sure signs of a misspent youth and an unrewarding future. The sky’s no longer the limit,” they felt—not entirely More...
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
We’ve just sent our September/October issue off to the printer, and while the event may not rate champagne corks bouncing off the ceiling, there’s a sense of cautious celebration in the air. Why?
Because it experienced a pronounced increase in ad pages…the highest in nearly two years. Is this a harbinger of things to come in the construction industry? While it’s too soon to tell for sure, there are reasons for hope.
Other signs that things may be headed i More...
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
This morning as I wove my way the 32 miles from Ojai (Oh Hi) to my office in Santa Barbara, enjoying the peace and freedom brought to perfection by the sibilant purr of motorcycle in the dark of night on a deserted mountain road, nothing was further from my thoughts than the blockbuster awaiting me in my cache of e-mail. But there, right on top of the stack was a sponsored message posted by Transport Topics, headlined “Daimler Trucks North America”: To the Trucking Industry: We had a decade to prepare f... More...
Monday, August 02, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
What seems like about 100 years ago, I ran for the board of an exceedingly small school district and was elected by a majority of perhaps one. It was a woeful mistake for me, the district, and most of all for the kids, who like mine were eager to be the recipients of a first-class education. Unfortunately, we were all about to run headlong into the rollout of California’s behavioral objectives approach to education that has manifested itself in today’s “no failure” system, which s More...
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In the past week or so, several reports have come across my desk suggesting that the economic worm may be turning. Being a card-carrying skeptic, I have yet to experience any overwhelming desire to rush down to the mall, but there are some subtle indicators to recovery, nonetheless.
We’re all used to seeing or hearing about this person, or that business that has gone belly-up in the wake of the downturn … situations truly fraught with sincere drama and despair. Rarely the focus of r More...
Monday, July 19, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Well, it seems that the first great stimulus program has run its course, with less to show for it than the “shovel-ready” hyperbole associated with its promise of significant funding boosts seemed to imply. Much was said of funding for long-overdue infrastructural upgrades, but I have to wonder just how much of the money went (and who got the contract) for signs proclaiming action instead of going to where it is really needed. The idea of more and more deficit spending is not something I favo More...
Monday, July 12, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
From the word go, we’ve focused on those areas we feel are most important to the long-term success of your business, chief among which are safety, regulatory compliance, technology, and human resource development. Partly because it is the nature of the medium but also because it’s the way we’ve approached information throughout our lives, the majority of our articles present these elements as separate entities, only occasionally ganging two or three together under the same banner. In ge More...
Monday, July 05, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In February 2009, the EPA released its Potential for Reducing Greehnouse Gas Emissions in the Construction Sector, which can be found at www.epa.gov/opispdwb/pdf/construction-sector-report.pdf. It’s still there and still a worthwhile primer on the contribution of construction activities to the overall situation, and what you might consider to be a reliable roadmap to where regulatory activities are More...
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Those old enough to have seen episodes of the early TV years’ blockbuster, Dragnet, will recognize the title as a recurring line used by Sgt. Joe Friday trying to get the story straight from a witness to a crime.
The same admonition applies to us as we assess the soundness of our operations, where even the newest, most powerful accounting suite on the planet, will lead to faulty conclusions if we don’t have good data with which to work.
This in turn leads to the r More...
Monday, June 21, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As some of you are already aware you now have a choice: You can get the magazine in its digital edition instead of—or in addition to—the printed copy.
This doesn’t replace the content you’ll find here on www.gradingandexcavating.com; all the articles will still be available here, along with readers’ comments and additional Web-only content. The digital version is simply an exact reproduction of the printed magazine More...
Monday, June 14, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I was a late bloomer when it came to paying attention to wakeup calls, but somehow my personal angel saw me through in spite of my penchant for writing checks my skills couldn’t cover.
Luckily, I began to get the picture bit by bit as I progressed through flight training, where the demand for situational awareness becomes obvious…or you pack up and go into another line of work. Similarly, on construction work sites with their legions of perils, the need is just as great though somet More...
Monday, June 07, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Our most recent issue—the June Buyers Guide—provides an overview of the incredible impact technology has had on construction in recent years. Under the banner of “The Future Is Here,” the issue grouped together the once disparate elements of the dirt-moving business, showing how they are now coalescing into an integrated fabric we (and others) call “The Connected Job Site.” But as far More...
Monday, May 31, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Key to your organization’s success is the efficiency with which you are able to marshal your resources of leadership, knowledge, people, and equipment to move dirt. That’s where our focus will continue to lie, and that’s why you’ll want to check in with our “Technology in Construction” column every issue. But there’s another matter here that is all too often overlooked, or, if considered, apt to be regarded as pretty much a regulatory matter: soil conservation, t More...
Monday, May 24, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Years ago, the forever youthful actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor did a series of advertisements for Aamco Transmission, in which she toyed with the sponsor’s business by referring to “transmixers” while flirting with the company’s mechanics. Now I’ve always been a stick-shift guy, so her vamping approach wasn’t going to land Aamco any business from me, but I suspect the ad campaign was successful, since I still remember them, her, and the term “transmixer” after 30 o More...
Monday, May 10, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The impact of technology on all facets of construction has grown throughout the last decade, reaching the point that every aspect of a project is accessible and describable electronically…and that’s what our upcoming issue is about. It’s a primer on where we stand today and a guidepost for where we’re headed. It is, in my humble opinion, the most important issue we’ve ever produced, and a landmark publication for the dirt-moving community.
What’s been most in More...
Monday, April 26, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent last week in the Southeast, where I visited a couple of landfills in connection with our sister publication,MSW Management. As most of you are aware, today’s landfills are a far cry from those sites we used to call “dumps.” Instead, they are as painstakingly designed, engineered, plumbed, and operated as any construction job site you can imagine, but with the proviso that the project is ongoing…for decades or even generations.
One of the sites—Wast More...
Sunday, April 11, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
When I was a kid, my brother and I used to run string between a pair of tin cans as our backyard versions of walkie-talkies. One of us would shout into his can while the other strained to capture a sound wave or two at the other end, but the truth was that the cans got in the way. The normal talking voice was far superior.
Of course that didn’t stop us from investigating other communications practices, like the time our Cub Scout den tried our hands at smoke signals, setting up our base o More...
Monday, April 05, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In one of my Web logs last month, I talked about training and the importance of your setting the standards. But there’s more. Now more than ever, the importance of human resource development—a long-winded way to say training—cannot be overstressed.
In our June issue, we will be talking about high-end training—the use of simulators and other hig More...
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent time yesterday getting a status check on business—A “Hi, how are you,” approach rather than a deep “What’s your balance sheet look like?” assessment—and while the returns were mixed, I’d say they showed an up-tick over what I’ve heard over the last 20 months. Perhaps the most positive remarks came from George Smith, Topcon’s director of communications services.
“There is definitely a positive surge in the global market fo More...
Monday, March 22, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In my first Newsletter Web Log for 2010, I reported the following relating to the Senate’s year-end surprise for smaller construction firms:
In case you thought the there was not much more your government could do to you in 2009, without debate or advance notice, the Senate added a last-minute amendment to its health care legislat More...
Sunday, March 14, 2010 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Hollywood’s enduring vision of a fighter pilot is that of the daring loner who single-handedly clears the sky of the bad guys. It makes for great box office where the likes of Marion Morrison and Tom Mapother (a.k.a. John Wayne and Tom Cruise) reign supreme, but in the sky—where chance writes the script—teamworkers get the leading roles. The same is true in construction, where accidents continue to raise havoc despite all the regulations and dollars brought into the fray.
Even More...
Monday, March 08, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
One of the focus areas of our upcoming technology issue in June is training, and as you might guess, much of the discussion is on simulators and in-depth classes on software and maintenance subjects. For certain these are vital issues, but they deal with the specialized areas of your business, not the day-to-day stuff of a well-rounded training program.
You may not think of it this way, but for better or worse, training is a part of everything you do or say in front of your people. What you do, More...
Sunday, February 28, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Simply put, Moore’s Law, the basis for which was proposed by Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper, says that the number of transistors that can be economically put on a computer chip will double every two years. While it wasn’t until 1970 that the hypothesis was accorded the status of “law,” its performance has shown such incredible durability clear to the present that it forms the basis for financial projections by many of the leading industrial and governmental organi More...
Sunday, February 21, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
We’re beginning to stitch the pieces together for our June Technology issue—The Digital (Connected) Jobsite—and I find myself becoming increasing excited by the picture that’s emerging … so much so that I called a contractor friend to tell him about some of the new and wonderful surprises in store for him and for you. As my enthusiasms came nigh to overwhelming my iPhone’s circuitry, the friend stopped me cold with the thesis question, “Just how much technology d More...
Sunday, February 14, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
We are hard at work on our June issue, which will focus solely on the various technologies that are coming together to creates what amounts to the digitally conceived, planned, organized, managed, and administered job site. The pieces are all here, there are people working hard to knit them together, and if you aren’t paying close attention to what’s going on, you’re going to find yourself having to play catch-up or, worse still, on the outside looking in.
For years, construct More...
Monday, February 08, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I haven’t seen the final figures on exhibitors and attendees, but I have to believe both were off a tick from 2009. For certain, booth space was pared substantially as many exhibitors showed off their wares in a reduced footprint, but the smaller show floor area made it difficult to determine how the foot traffic compared with prior years.
That said, from the people with whom I spoke—attendees and exhibitors alike—the show was far from a bust. Most seemed pleasantly surprised More...
Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
During lunchtime a while back, a demolition crew took down a nearby three-story building with a wrecking ball and lots of brute force, and over the next few days, even after the major excitement was over, I made it a practice to watch the continuing saga as a half-dozen separate crews tackled a variety of below-street-level tasks.
At one end of the street-corner plot—the entire construction site taking up an area no more than an acre, including the curbside lane of one of the intersecting More...
Sunday, January 17, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Even before the birth of computers and the introduction of a seemingly endless array of high-tech controls, success depended as much on your sales and negotiating skills as on how deep a bite your bucket took, so in one sense what we’re seeing happen to the industry is nothing new—only different and maybe a little more treacherous to the unwary.
For decades, the introduction of new equipment meant “bigger” or “stronger” or “faster” expressed in un More...
Sunday, January 10, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
How would you like to go through an entire year without any regulatory hassles, without spending your valuable time fielding complaints, without having to go back and redo work you’ve already completed? “Fairy-tale stuff,” you’re probably thinking. Still, a pretty nice thought, isn’t it, and maybe it’s not so far-fetched, particularly if you consider that many of your troubles are rooted in a lack of standardization.
As explained by the International Organiza More...
Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In case you thought the there was not much more your government could do to you in 2009, without debate or advance notice, the Senate added a last-minute amendment to its health care legislation that saddles small construction firms with a harsher burden than it imposed on any other industry. While elsewhere the majority of employers with fewer than 50 workers that do not offer health coverage are exempt from fines that apply to larger employers, under this union-instigated provision construction firms e More...
Sunday, December 20, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”—President Kennedy, May 25, 1961, before a joint session of Congress
Today’s pundits would have you believe that President Kennedy’s challenge to the American public was grandstanding rhetoric to get us to heat up the Cold War, but to me—an eager young Marine a More...
Sunday, December 13, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent the better part of last week in Las Vegas at Power-Gen 2009. Though smaller in footprint than its equivalent construction expos, Power-Gen is their equal in importance to the power industry, but similar to other events this year, last week’s Power-Gen was markedly smaller, both in exhibit space and attendance, than its recent predecessors. Even more obvious was the list of prime exhibitors who gave this year’s show a pass … General Electric, Caterpillar, and Generac, for example More...
Sunday, December 06, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
A decade or so ago, a New Yorkercartoon showed a group of department store shoppers standing in line at what was placarded as the INFORMATION DESK. A harried-looking lady attendant was fielding questions from a heavily bearded man dressed in robe and sandals asking her the likes of, “How do we cope with all our problems?”
I wish there were a desk where the answers to the riddles of the universe lay in wait, but sadly it’s too much to ask of clerks, experts, politician More...
Monday, November 30, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
My November/December 2009 Editor’s Comments (at the printers at this moment), entitled “GHG Emissions: Cows, Cars, and Construction,” serves warning of broad range of initiatives on the horizon waiting to descend on us under the threat of “global climate change.” In it I extend the following thoughts: One of the problems in coming to grips with the GHG situation has been the confusion not only in the interpretation of climate data by various experts, but often in the data themselves. Lulled by such unce... More...
Sunday, November 22, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
It seems like an eternity ago we were treated to action-oriented promises of significant funding boosts for long-overdue infrastructural upgrades, led by such exciting hyperbole as “shovel-ready.” The idea of more and more deficit spending is not something I favor, but if we’re going into hock for another 3 or 4 trillion bucks, at least let’s put it into areas that will benefit the nation in the long run. But is this what’s happened? You tell me. Two of Grading & Excavation Contractor's sister... More...
Monday, November 16, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
One of the problems in coming to grips with the GHG situation has been the confusion not only in the interpretation of climate data by various experts, but also, often, in the data themselves. Lulled by such uncertainties, many of us have adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude, thinking perhaps that this too will go the way of most doomsday pronouncements. But forget that. The carbon train has left the station, and already we’re hearing the rumblings of increased regulatory activity and the More...
Sunday, November 08, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Probably not. There continue to be significant changes in the work force in many areas, including size, background, language, and fundamental skills requirements. Certainly we’ve come a long way in designing safer and more ergonomically sound equipment and in reducing the number and insidiousness of work-site hazards. Without doubt, we have more and better warning signage, our people are better equipped and clothed, and we provide better basic safety training than ever before … but are we win More...
Sunday, November 01, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
LiDAR stands for “light detection and ranging,” a technology able to create an interactive topographic map by scanning the earth with lasers. It is similar to sonar in that it measures distance by the time it takes for the laser to reach the ground and bounce back to the source. While laser scanning is routinely done from ground-based locations, aircraft are being used more and more to increase coverage. As a supplement to field surveys, LiDAR is useful in planning for corridor projects such More...
Sunday, October 25, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Though there are those who claim to be able to predict the frequency and magnitude of such things, expansion and consolidation in the construction industry follow the rules of chaos. Face it, right-sizing for conditions that are always changing falls into the realm of a black art.
Right now we are in a period of consolidation—how deep or prolonged remains to be seen—but regardless of the situation, it seems unlikely that we will experience an expansion in the future that matches wha More...
Sunday, October 18, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
A 2008 equipment-theft study commissioned by LoJack and the National Insurance Crime Bureau showed that while most aspects of heavy construction have suffered during the downturn, equipment theft has continued unabated…clocking in at its annual average of $1 billion. And that’s just the amount based on reported thefts. According to statistics, more than two-thirds of equipment owners have fallen victim to a crime that shows no sign of abating on its own, so if you believe it’s time to d More...
Sunday, October 11, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Rain and a little mud notwithstanding, this year’s show was a success.
Despite fears by many that last week’s ICUEE 2009 would suffer the effects of a continuing sour economy, the event seems to have been a winner for attendees and exhibitors alike. For starters, the 16,500 attendees made it the second largest turnout in show history, an unexpected bonanza for the show’s 780 exhibitors. Adding to the show’s attractions this year were the co-location of the inaugural H2O- More...
Sunday, October 04, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Have you ever sat down and figured how much time (and money) you spend each year dealing with regulators, explaining how what you’re doing meets their standards on one project, and then having to go through the whole exercise again with somebody else on your next project? Ditto when it comes to fielding complaints and doing make-good work.
Then there’s the safety connection. As you look back over your company’s accident record, how many of them really reflect a lack of clear-c More...
Monday, September 28, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Doesn’t it seem that nearly everywhere you turn, there’s someone spouting off about the environment, sustainability, and something you and I are doing that is leading us to global catastrophe?
Well, maybe I exaggerate, but I find myself wanting to ask my accuser just where and how we should be looking to channel our efforts. Even if we want to invest our valuable time and resources, how do we know which causes are truly worthwhile or can profit from our efforts?
Some factors, More...
Sunday, September 20, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
“Get your head out of your tailpipe [well sort of], idiot!” was my instructor’s pungent comment to what had begun as a routine join-up and evolved into a fiasco. It came at the moment I was trying to convert a slightly acute rendezvous path by means of several increasingly urgent salvage maneuvers culminating in an inglorious if somewhat spectacular departure from flight and a never-to-be-forgotten sequence of buffet, stall, snap back over the top, and heart-stopping entry into uncontro More...
Sunday, September 13, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Normally I’m a cynic when it comes to prognostications by people in high places, considering them motivated by some form of self-interest. But when an authority with no dog in the fight such as Google speaks, I tend to listen. That said, here’s an announcement I ran across this past week worth your consideration.
Google Economist Sees Good Signs in Searches
Jobless Queries Down, Real Estate Up
More...
Monday, September 07, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Last week I talked about the incredible performance improvements brought about by blade-control systems, and for sure I’m a true believer in their value, but that’s only part of the story.
Despite all the machinery involved, dirtworking is not merely a mechanical exercise. If it were, we could go immediately to robotics and spend our time shuttling back and forth between our favorite fishing hole and bank while legions of little black boxes did all the work. Instead, machin More...
Sunday, August 30, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
If talents from this life are transferrable to the next, I’ll have a lock on making whoop-de-doos for motocross courses around the globe. Just put me at the controls of a dozer and turn me loose…which is exactly what John Dice, senior training manager for Topcon Positioning Systems in Livermore, CA, did.
After pointing out the features of the John Deere 750J, and pointing me down a relatively smooth track, he gave me my final instructions for making a couple of manually con More...
Sunday, August 23, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Over the last half-century we have undergone a massive transition from a rural to an urban society, a trend that is accelerating…a societal phenomenon taxing our ability to provide new water delivery and discharge systems and overwhelming those already in existence. I’ve listened to estimates for the repair, replacement, and upgrade of our existing water infrastructure between now and mid-century ranging from $15 trillion to $30 trillion…figures, mind you, predicated on fighting a rear-guard action. Roa... More...
Sunday, August 16, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
A decade ago I did my Editor’ Comments on my neighbor Jorge, who had a small company with 12 employees and a dozen pieces of equipment of various sizes and indeterminate ages. Here’s what I said then: I got a call from Jorge, my contractor friend down the street, inviting me to his annual Memorial Day barbecue. “Lots of cow and corn and things to ward off scurvy and dehydration,” he explained. “Besides you’ll get to meet a few of my Gulf War buddies and the families of the crew.” I couldn’t turn down an... More...
Sunday, August 09, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
We devote a lot of time and space
to productivity enhancements, and because of this some readers have let me have
it between the eyes for making it sound as if I see those developments as a
replacement for operator skill. Not so.
It’s true I believe they can
offer real, bottom-line, moneymaking contributions to a company's balance
sheet—that they can pay for themselves again and again in operational
performance and that helps free workers for other more valuable tasks th More...
Monday, August 03, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
It seems like
only yesterday that we were worried about what computer monsters lay hidden in
the transition to the new milennium…worries fed by guys in suede shoes for the
most part, but the magic date came and went with fewer ripples than when an F-22
Raptor slips into supersonic flight. That was a decade ago—a time many of us
scoffed at the idea that joysticks and computers would replace levers and
mechanical linkages or that we would find ourselves relying more and more on
More...
Sunday, July 26, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I spent the latter part of last week
in Branson, MO, being brought up to date on new initiatives by the CNH Parts
& Service (P&S) and Fiat Powertrain Technologies (FPT) designed to
strengthen customer service activities. Chief announcements included the
formation of a partnership between P&S and FPT, a joint venture between
P&S and SRC Holdings Corp. (SRC), and plans for a new P&S distribution
facility in Portland, OR.
Details on each of these initiatives
can b More...
Sunday, July 19, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
True, the
numbers appear to be dropping, but then that really doesn’t tell the whole
story, does it? Think about how many minor incidents get caught up in the
statistics…how many carpal tunnel syndromes and stressed emotions get wrapped
into the mix. But then there all those people confined to beds or riding around
in wheelchairs, unable to engage in all the activities most of us take for
granted. Does it balance out: the nickel-dime statistic enhancers versus the
serious stuf More...
Sunday, July 12, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
“What next?”
you may well ask when you look around at what was once a conservative occupation
but today is awash in a sea of momentous change affecting nearly every aspect of
our business. Time was you could pace out a site, scribble some numbers on the
back of a piece of paper, make a few calculations, add in your secret fudge
factor, come up with a decent bid, bank in a bunch of stakes, leap on your
trusty smoke-belching monster, and start pulling levers. When the electronic
More...
Sunday, July 05, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Several years
ago I told the story of how my neighbor had his brand-new compact loader stolen
from a work site. Not surprisingly, he was livid when he called to tell me about
it, and his mood had hardly improved after visits with his insurance company and
the local sheriff's department, both of which acquainted him with the painful
fact of life that there was little likelihood his machine would be recovered.
“Snowball's chance in hell” was the sheriff's considered opinion, thoug More...
Sunday, June 28, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Counting travel time, it was a
four-day venture into what, in the estimation of several of the locals with whom
I chatted, was “a particularly hot and humid spell for this early in the
summer,” but at least there were no industrial grade mosquitoes to swim through
the moisture.
“OK,” you ask, “but was it worth
it?”
You betcha!
A lot has been happening with the
folks at Caterpillar, and they were eager to tell and show the 20-odd ed More...
Monday, June 22, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Time and again
our companion publications, Stormwater and Erosion Control, present horror stories
of installations gone wrong—horribly awry—and would you care to know who gets to
eat the cost of replacing these failures? The general contractor? Rarely. The
developer? Sometimes, but only when nature has outdone herself and loosed
biblical torrents of rain. No, folks, more often than not it’s the installer who
takes the hit, and you know who that is.We hear a lot
about t More...
Sunday, May 17, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Despite all the
machinery involved, dirtworking is not merely a mechanical exercise. If it were,
we could go immediately to robotics and spend our time shuttling back and forth
between our favorite fishing hole and the bank, allowing legions of little black
boxes to do all the work. As you well know, a machine’s productivity on a
jobsite starts with the operator’s underlying knowledge of dirt, without which
all the skill in the world at video games doesn’t mean squat. This More...
Sunday, May 10, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I sat down to lunch last Friday at a
table composed of contractors, equipment dealers, and representatives of our
hosts, Volvo, and its Construction Equipment and Truck divisions, and not
unexpectedly most of the conversations fluttered around the economy, what its
impacts have been and are, and mostly what the future might hold in
store.
After the meal was finished and
people went off in their several directions, I reviewed what I had heard and
realized that, for all the discussi More...
Sunday, May 03, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Time and again
our companion publications, Stormwater and Erosion Control,
present horror stories of installations gone wrong—horribly awry—and would you
care to know who gets to eat the cost of replacing these failures? The
developer? Sometimes, but more often than not it’s the installer who takes the
hit, and you know who that is.
We hear a lot
about the fines various agencies dole out, and, yes, they can be
company-busting, More...
Sunday, April 26, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Over the years I’ve yielded to
temptations to stick my nose into places that interest me. On one hand, these
snooping exercises are the product of curiosity, but I’ve found the technique
useful in a variety of circumstances throughout my life, such as when my wife
and I, moving to a new town, were looking at schools for the kids. It dawned on
us at some point that what we were looking for was not to be had by reading
anybody’s literature or being regaled by the wonders of this More...
Sunday, April 19, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The dirt-moving field has seen more
change in the past decade than in all the years following World War II, a fact
that is most apparent not only in the equipment being delivered today but also
in the profusion of productivity enhancements that come at us from all sides. No
matter how you slice it, the real culprit is computerization.
Think back to when you bit the bullet
and took your first tentative steps into the computer age. Then compare that
vision to where you are today. You More...
Sunday, April 12, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
It’s one thing to listen to
government-anointed hacks justify the Bailout and Stimulus programs as necessary
to our salvation; after all, that’s what they’re paid to do. It’s another matter
to pay good money, as I did last week, to hear a private “economist” echo the
same apology for what in my humble opinion are some of the most absurd,
self-serving social and economic actions ever foisted on the public by its
elected representatives.
Actually, I More...
Sunday, April 05, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In response to
the present downturn, what has become clear to all of us that we are now in the
midst of a phenomenon that is nothing less than a runaway revolution in the way
the construction business will proceed in the foreseeable future.
For decades,
the introduction of new equipment meant “bigger” or “stronger” or “faster,”
expressed in units of size, power, or performance. While the improvements were
real, they were for the most part iterat More...
Sunday, March 29, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Where once we
were looking at what we thought to be an expanding construction universe, today
we are caught up in a sea of momentous change affecting nearly every aspect of
our business. The economy is one aspect, but that’s not what I want to talk
about here. Rather it’s about how the tools of our trade have changed and what
this means.
Time was you
could pace out a site, scribble some numbers on the back of a piece of paper,
make a few calculations, add in your secre More...
Sunday, March 22, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
For the fifth
time in the 10 years that I’ve known him, my contractor-neighbor Jorge has had
another piece of equipment stolen. Unlike the past—when it’s been small and
lower-cost equipment including a compact loader, two pumps, and a generator—this
time it was a full-featured backhoe loader. Whereas, before, the thieves broke
into remote job sites, this time the backhoe loader and its trailer were taken
as a package right from Jorge’s equipment yard. Worse sti More...
Monday, March 16, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Headline news for more than a half
year now is the fiasco involving our major banking and lending institutions, but
money is not the only area where we’ve been living beyond our means. Other, far
more critical resources—air, water, and dirt—have fallen victim of similar
levels of greed and corruption, only they are not as immediately obvious as the
debacle on the financial front.
I’m of an age that has a broader—if
not better—perspective on the si More...
Sunday, March 08, 2009 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I
just returned from the National
Utility Contractors Association (NUCA) Expo 2009 in Phoenix, which was,
despite sparse attendance, an excellent event featuring two full days of
education sessions complementing the exhibition hall, which featured more than
120 display booths.
Similar
to previous events I’ve attended in the past several months, while the
exhibitors tended to be a bit tentative about what the near future held in store
for them, the attendees with whom More...
Sunday, March 01, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I attended Trimble’s Dimensions in
Las Vegas, NV, this past week, and I think the mood and focus of the attendees
and exhibitors is particularly revealing and applicable to our present
situation.
Given that attendees had not only to
pay for transportation and accommodations, but for a rather large registration
fee as well, conventional wisdom might suggest Trimble’s Dimensions was facing
tough sledding, right? Not according to the 2,300 or so attendees who, along
with More...
Sunday, February 22, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In light of the current economic
situation, we’ve been focusing on the efficiency with which you are able to
marshal your resources of leadership, knowledge, people, and equipment to move
dirt…and ultimately to prosper. That’s where our focus will continue to lie, and
that’s why you’ll want to check in with our “Technology in Construction” column
every issue. But there’s another matter here that is all too often overlooked,
or if considered, a More...
Sunday, February 15, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The classic dogfighting axiom held
that speed is life, an acknowledgement in a conflict pitting speed against
maneuverability that the former had the option of bugging out, whereas the
latter remained a target until the contest came to a conclusion. Of course,
speed was of little combat value for a fighter plane if all it meant was that it
got you home for dinner. The real measure was “kills.” While not totally
discounted, it is no longer the absolute it was back in the days whe More...
Sunday, February 08, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Everyone expected a reduction in the
show’s attendance—30% down from last year’s record-breaking estimate of 84,000
seems a reasonable guess—but was it as bad a scene as the numbers would
suggest?While aisles in the halls were
definitely less congested than in past years, many of the exhibitors with whom I
spoke felt that the quality of the attendees was superb. This was particularly
true for those whose technology-based wares promised increased
productivity̵ More...
Sunday, February 01, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
As
some of you are already aware, you now have a choice: You can get the magazine
in its digital edition instead of—or in addition to—the printed
copy.
This
doesn’t replace the content you’ll find here on www.gradingandexcavating.com;
all the articles will still be available here, along with readers’ comments and
additional Web-only content. The digital version is simply an exact reproduction
of the printed magazine with its original layout and advert More...
Sunday, January 25, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
This morning (January 26) Caterpillar announced a significant
cut in its work force in response to sagging global sales. Coming from the
construction equipment giant, this signal of tough times ahead for the heavy
construction industry confirms the worst fears many have held on the depth and
length of the downturn. While there’s nothing you or I can do to change the
underlying factors involved, what we can do is make sure we’re doing everything
in our power to increase the e More...
Sunday, January 18, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The year was 1980, and the county administration was in the midst of its budget cycle. I was sitting in the hearing room, awaiting my turn to address the supervisors on another matter, but since I wasn’t sure when my petition would come up, I watched and listened fitfully while department heads came to the podium to plead their cases for capital and operating funds for the following year.
It was truly a ho-hum morning as Tweedle-Dums and Tweedle-Dees read figures from handwritten viewgraphs, More...
Monday, January 12, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
According to Stephen Sandherr, CEO of the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC), an estimated 30% of the nation’s non-residential construction workers’ jobs are at risk this year if market conditions don’t improve.Based on surveys conducted in recent weeks of a variety of its members, AGC estimates that two-thirds are planning to cut their payrolls, resulting in a 30% decline in the number of people working on construction projects.
Taking directly from AGC’ More...
Monday, January 05, 2009 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
A lot of people with whom I’ve spoken over the last several
weeks seem to be hanging by their thumbs until the inauguration, expecting the
new administration and Congress to wave some sort of magic wand and puff,
we’ll all be saved…only that’s not how things work.
Sure, you can bet that there will be a lot of noise and smoke
flying out of Washington over the next several months as people and
organizations press their claims for a piece of the action promised dur More...
Monday, December 29, 2008 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
EPA
is proposing to reissue its stormwater Construction General Permit for a
two-year time period. The permit would apply where EPA is the permitting
authority which is in five states, most territories, and most Indian country
lands. The draft permit utilizes the same terms and conditions as EPA's 2003
permit which expires in July 2008. EPA is proposing the permit to coordinate it
with a second effort that is underway to establish national clean water
standards, known as an effluent limit More...
Sunday, December 21, 2008 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Passed by the House of Representatives in 2007 and defeated
by filibuster in the Senate, it seems likely that FCA will go before Congress
again in 2009, and if passed, will be signed into law by then-President
Obama. I’m not going to try and explain the Act here, or make any
suggestions as to what it might mean to you and your business other than to make
two points: (1) if your company is already unionized, the FCA does not apply,
and (2) if your company has gotten by without a More...
Sunday, December 07, 2008 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
When you consider
all that has happened in the last decade, it’s tempting to say that everything
has changed. But has it?
Yes, there have
been startling leaps in the equipment and the systems that allow us to wring
ever greater productivity from them. Yes, we’ve witnessed wholesale changes in
the regulations that define so many of our actions. For certain we’ve seen a
significant turnover in our workforce in terms of age and background. Now we’re
confronte More...
Sunday, November 30, 2008 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
From our very
first issue we’ve focused on those areas we feel are most important to the
long-term success of your business, chief among which are safety, regulatory
compliance, technology, and human resource development. Partly because it is the
nature of the medium but also because it’s the way we’ve approached information
throughout our lives, the majority of our articles present these elements as
separate entities, only occasionally ganging two or three together under More...
Sunday, November 23, 2008 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Bringing Wall Street
down to Main Street
Here we go again
shoveling billions of dollars into “the economy” with what appears to me to be a
curious lack of purpose other than some wishy-washy notion of bailing out Wall
Street…perhaps the last street in America that needs and deserves it. The
situation seems curiously similar to what got us into the present mess in the
first place, where the government with the blessing of the Federal Reserve
crammed capital into t More...
Monday, November 17, 2008 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Forester Media’s offices are located in Santa Barbara, CA, a city of some
80,000 inhabitants that has made it into the national news for the fifth time in
less that two years with yet another serious fire. Named the “Tea Fire” because of its birth in an abandoned but
oft-trespassed tea house in the foothills of neighboring Montecito, as of today
(November 18) th More...
Sunday, November 16, 2008 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Your primary
concern in these discussions has to do with the efficiency with which you are
able to marshal your resources of leadership, knowledge, people, and equipment
to move dirt … and ultimately to prosper. That’s where our focus will continue
to lie, and that’s why you’ll want to check in with our “Technology in
Construction” column every issue. But there’s another matter here that is all
too often overlooked, or if considered, apt to be regar More...
Sunday, November 02, 2008 7:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The opportunities
afforded by existing technologies are too great to envision, much less
enumerate, but I’d like to suggest a couple you ought to watch. Over the past
several years we’ve experienced an increase in the amount of night and inclement
weather work, both of which place a premium on situational awareness. During
this same period we’ve witnessed a significant increase in the use of hearing
protection gear—plugs, Mickey Mouse ears, or acoustic earphone More...
Sunday, October 26, 2008 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
The purpose behind our Technology in Construction Department
in every issue.
I don’t know about
you, but given a choice between putting my ignorance on display or side-stepping
issues, my temptation has always been spring-loaded toward the latter. It’s what
I refer to as my Mach-Zero (out of airspeed) tendency that has on occasion
allowed me to cry out, “Lord, I don’t mind dying, only don’t let me look stupid
in the process.”
Nor did this More...
Sunday, October 12, 2008 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
In good times
it’s easy to relax our vigilance and settle for a little slop. Well that kind of
thinking is out the window and it’s time to take a sharper look at our operating
procedures to make sure they’re as sound as they should be.
Under the
Microscope
Even if you’ve
got the newest, most powerful accounting suite on the planet the More...
Sunday, October 05, 2008 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
I figured that if I didn't take Jorge--my
contractor/neighbor--up on his invitation to go fishing with him, I'd never hear
the end of it. So with great reluctance I agreed to throw on my woolies and meet
him by my mailbox well before the cows and roosters in the area began to get
restless. Maybe, I told myself, the fish will be so impressed by this show of
enthusiasm that they will line up to take my bait…but I knew better. After all,
in the thousand or so hours I'd spent in the compa More...
Tuesday, July 08, 2008 8:00 PM
Posted By: Grading and Excavation Contractor Editor
Welcome to the new GX Contractor Web site. You’re among the first to experience our beta site, and we’re
glad to have you onboard to help us test the waters, try out the site’s new
features, and let us know what you think.
We’ve always made the content of the
magazine available online, but now it’ll be much easier for you to find current
articles as well as browse and search through past issues to find exactly what
you need. You’ll More...
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