Three years ago this month, I joined a group of
about a dozen volunteers on an emergency trip to Gulfport, MS. We were a couple
weeks behind Hurricane Katrina and traveling with an 18-wheeler loaded with
supplies. The devastation was still immense as we arrived. Now our eyes are fixed on Texas, Louisiana and
the other states that bore the brunt of Hurricane Ike.
There’s an unsettling thought tailgating the bumper of this
week’s wild ride
on Wall Street. The bad news isn’t over. Clearly, the housing and financial crises are not going to
subside any time soon. For construction pros, business opportunities will be
limited. But this is no time to play possum.
The Copper Development
Association’s “2008
Global Market Trends Conference” was held in Chicago, Sept. 10-12, and focused
mainly on green technologies and sustainable development. I attended several of
the programs, and will take this opportunity to share some of the more
memorable insights coming out of them.
September 11 was a somber day for me. From the moment I
turned on my car radio in the morning until I went to sleep, words and images
kept flooding my mind.
All day long my thoughts returned to the events of
September 11, 2001. I rarely look out my office window, but a flag flying at
half-mast kept stealing my attention. I haven’t thought this much about 9-11
since the one-year anniversary.
Uncertainty going in…certainty coming
out. That’s the shortest summary I can give of my view of cast
iron as a “green” material following last Thursday's MEC Webinar by John
Siegenthaler, P.E. (Siggy). His 60-plus-minute presentation, called Cast-Iron
Boiler Technology: Past, Present, and Future, talked at length about why cast iron boilers can no
longer be seen through “rust-colored” glasses.
Following an investigation that included 269 first-hand reports from
victims, we’ve identified the thief who stole money from construction firms
nationwide. His name: Residential Construction Decline, or RCD for short.
Forget football. Forget politics. Fall is Webinar season-and
it’s back.
That’s right. The
Fall 2008 Modern Engineering Concepts Webinar Series kicks off next Thursday, Sept. 11, (1 pm ET) when yours
truly gets to moderate an extremely interesting session...
"In just a few months we’ve gone from feast to famine…
from too much business to 'where is the business?'…from fat and happy to hungry
and stunned. " These words serve as the starting point of Tim Fausch's
blog--which will appear weekly and address the issues causing you pain. He’ll
use research and firsthand reports to quantify and understand the trends
causing you grief...
It
grates on the nerves of a thinking person to endure all the political posturing
that blames Big Oil and speculators for this year's explosion in oil prices.