Construction and Infrastructure

The 6th North American Strategic Infrastructure Leadership Forum is hosted by CG/LA Infrastructure and aims to bring together officials and sponsors from the top infrastructure 100 projects in North America. “Infrastructure drives economic growth across the board. Vice President Biden understands this and has demonstrated leadership in developing a national vision to innovate and improve the state of US infrastructure,” said CG/LA President and CEO, Norman Anderson (pictured) in a statement.

The Bahrain Airport project is a $1 billion project that aims to host 27 million passengers a year. Other projects, like the Riyadh Metro, extending 176 kilometres of rail throughout the largest city in Saudi Arabia, present growth opportunities that will last a decade or more.

Zimkhitha Zatu (30), who holds a responsible managerial position in the finance department of South Africa's largest cement manufacturer, believes that women who enter the construction industry should keep an eye out for male counterparts willing to become mentors. “You will be surprised by the number of male employees who are always willing to mentor their female colleagues and help them to make a success of themselves in this hard industry,” says Zatu.

El Salvador’s Executive Autonomous Port Commission (CEPA) is the organisation charged with managing the country’s transportation infrastructure – its ports, airports and railways. Tracing its origin back to the 1950s it has accrued responsibility for a number of projects over the years in a piecemeal way. Over this period El Salvador has attracted international attention for some of the wrong reasons, taking attention away from the considerable strengths that derive from its strategic location at the heart of the Americas.

To the disappointment of rival bidders Arriva, Keolis and National Express, the eight year concession to run Crossrail, the £15 billion project that will provide trains in an east-west link across London, with links to south London as well, has been granted to MTR. Short for Mass Transit Railway this is a company that operates nine urban lines in Hong Kong, and already runs London's Overground metro service in conjunction with Arriva.

Covering an area of approximately 48,445 square kilometres, the Dominican Republic is the second largest Caribbean nation by area and is home to an estimated ten million people. Today it also represents the second largest economy in the Caribbean and Central American region and has the ninth largest economy in all of Latin America, one that was long known for agriculture and mining, but is now dominated by services.

Praxis Earth Works (Praxis), based in Grande Prairie in northern Alberta, is a new company, led by its General Manager Ryan Martin since October 2010 – yet in terms of experience it lacks nothing when it comes to rock crushing, its core competency. The company started out operating a single crusher, making aggregate for a mixture of private clients, government departments and municipalities within a reachable radius of Grande Prairie.

Global capital project and infrastructure spending is expected to grow to more than $9 trillion annually by 2025, up from $4 trillion in 2012, according to a new report from PwC, Capital project and infrastructure spending: Outlook to 2025.

When we last featured Basil Read within this magazine in October 2012, much of our focus was on the group’s ongoing work on the St Helena airport project. Said article went into great depth regarding the efforts of the group to deliver the British Overseas Territory with its own international airport, and it soon became clear, to this writer at least, that this project would not only go on to be hugely significant for St Helena but for a group that was already able to boast an impressive track record.

With the FIFA World Cup kicking off in Brazil, the momentum South Africa built up since it hosted the event in 2010, and back to independence, seems to have stagnated,. The leading infrastructure player PPC Ltd believes that an Infrastructure Codesa could help relieve pressures on the industry and stimulate infrastructure development levels last seen in preparation for the 2010 World Cup.