ConstructConnect Blog

Ever since it struck at the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 has altered our lives. It has wrecked the economy, shoved millions of people out of a job, and locked us inside our homes.

Since we’re all cautiously emerging from sanctuary, the former title of my articles, written while I was housebound, Notes from the Trenches, no longer applies. Therefore, I’ve chosen a new heading, as you will observe above. It still captures a certain wariness on my part.

The accompanying table records the 10 largest construction project starts in Canada in April 2020. Also included is the latest trend graph on starts. This looks at 12-month moving totals of the civil and nonresidential building categories in Canada.

There are currently two crises underway simultaneously. The advance of the novel coronavirus is taking a terrible toll in terms of physical and emotional well-being. At the same time, job losses resulting from ‘social distancing’ are sending the economy into a tailspin. To fight on both fronts, governments are advancing rescue packages of never-seen-before dimensions. Every day, the tremendous number of factors in play reconfigure in a new way. These ‘from the trenches’ notes attempt to shed some light along a murky pathway.

Listed below are ConstructConnect’s Hot Commercial Construction Projects for the week of May 4 - 8, 2020. Our Hot Projects showcases three currently bidding or sub-bidding projects from all 50 states and the District of Columbia pulled from our extensive database of construction leads.

This article was originally published on August 10, 2016. Last updated on May 22, 2020. We all know that fall hazards are the leading cause of construction worker deaths, accounting for about 33.5% of all fatalities in construction each year. Of the 338 construction worker fatalities attributed to falls in 2018, close to 15% were from scaffolds. OSHA estimates that about 65% of all construction workers perform some work on scaffolds every year. That’s a lot of folks working on scaffolds potentially being exposed to a number of hazards such as falls, electrocutions, and falling objects.