The Construction Collaborative Group

The Construction Chart Book, published by CPWR is now available. This is the 7th edition of published research that stretches back 30 years, and it is extensive. For those of you used to referencing CPWR for safety data and information, there is much more here than safety. This PDF file is 170 pages and includes 54 chapters (each one covers an individual topic).

Among the key findings:

• Employment in construction continues to grow, increasing 31.6% from 2011 to 2023. Chapter 10

• Hispanic construction workers account for almost a third of the workforce, increasing 18.1% from 2020 to 2022. Chapter 16

• The number of construction workers 55 years or older increased 73.3% from 2011 to 2024. Chapter 15

• While the number of self-employed construction workers has reached 2.7 million, they remain unprotected by OSHA safety and health standards. Chapter 23

Here is an interesting scenario...

A small trade contractor successfully bids for work on a data center project and receives a contract they are asked to sign. Upon thoroughly reading the contract (you all do that, right?) they discover that the project will be covered under a project level insurance policy (also called a wrap policy), which they knew, but the deductible is $1 million. Would you sign on to this??? Sounds crazy to me unless you can backstop that somehow. Not realistic you say? Check out the article on data center construction from Engineering News Record.

Close the Gaps in Data Center Project Insurance Policies, Say Risk Managers | Engineering News-Record

There are lots of lessons and take aways to be gathered from the recent tragedy in Hong Kong. Of upmost importance is the stark reminder that the General Contractor and its trade contractors are responsible for life safety during operations. Never forget that the design team references building codes to ensure life safety, but that only applies to the completed structure. During construction, it's the contractor that is responsible for things like temporary shoring and bracing to ensure structural stability, methods to prevent fires, and planning for emergency services access in case something goes wrong.

In this case, investigation is ongoing but centered on the lack of fire resistance of the netting and shoring system. Here is the best article I have found so far that includes many details being left out of the typical media reporting - including the fact that the buildings where owner managed.

From Engineering News…

As I review notes from the recent Bluebeam Unbound conference and try to decide what to write about first, this article from Architosh seems to have done all the work for me! This is an excellent review and perspective with insights from a presser that I was invited to sit in on that surfaced some great insight into where Bluebeam is heading. The two take aways on which I will be focused for now are it's angle on how to implement AI and the moves it has made into mobile access. 

Its implementation of Anthropics’s Claude AI agent and MCP server technology offers some intriguing possibilities. (from the article below) "Anthropic’s MCP technology enables users to tell an AI agent to do things in the software that are possible for the human user to do, but incredibly time-consuming. Instead of the user manually taking a series of actions in Revu." Of all the current…