Practical Welding Today - May/June 2009

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT
From Roads&Bridges magazine

“Welders are needed, and skilled welders are at a premium,” said McQuaid.

MACTEC’s Merrill, who does engineering consulting primarily in quality assurance, said he is troubled by the increasing amount of steel-bridge fabrication that has been outsourced overseas in recent years. The last three major bridge structures that Merrill worked on were fabricated in Japan, Italy, and China.

C Photo courtesy of Stinger Welding Inc., Coolidge, Ariz.

employment numbers have remained steady. Allen Zeyher is managing editor of Roads & Bridges magazine.

The price of steel has fallen from its 2008 highs back to the range it was in 2007, he Associated General Contractors of America, www.agc.org said. Because of the time lag between letting

MACTEC Engineering and Consulting, www.mactec.com

a contract and fabricating the steel, he is

D.L. McQuaid & Associates Inc., davidlmcquaid@

looking to 2010.

comcast.net

“Our concern is that if the states don’t start

National Steel Bridge Alliance, www.steelbridges.org

letting more steel-bridge projects, we’re not going to fill up the order book for 2010.” ■ High Steel Structures Inc., www.highsteel.com

Big Fabrication

One reason to send fabrication overseas is to reduce the cost of labor. The other is because other countries have larger facilities to handle supersized bridges. For example, the largest suspension bridge in the world is in Japan.

“Most bridges are primarily fabricated as much as they can be in a controlled environment,” said Merrill, “and then as big components as can be handled are brought to the site and then put in place.

“The United States doesn’t really build that many large-scale bridges,” he added. “We’re really not a port type of nation if you compare us with Japan, China, Korea, or other places that have 15 to 20 bridges for every one we have of a large-scale nature.”

So maybe it makes sense that some other countries have larger bridge fabrication facilities. China also has more large bridges on its electronic drawing boards.

McEleney had more to say about the labor situation in the bridge fabrication sector: “My understanding is that most fabricators, in the bridge industry at least, have been able to avoid layoffs. The pool of labor available to the bridge fabricating industry is more than adequate and properly skilled.”

Jeffrey Sterner is looking toward the future. He is the president of High Steel Structures Inc., Lancaster, Pa., a company that does 85 to 90 percent of its work on steel-bridge projects in the U.S. His company’s