Muskrat Falls wins an award. Despite all the problems, someone sees one good thing about the misbegotten hydropower project.
Labrador’s Muskrat Falls hydroelectric generating station may be an obscenely expensive, environmentally damaging, socially divisive and far-behind-schedule white elephant, but apparently it also happens to be quite well engineered.
Or, at least some parts of it are.
The Engineering News-Record, a weekly Michigan-based magazine that started life in the 1870s as two separate publications and now claims almost 48,000 paid subscribers (which means it is doing quite well in the publishing world), announced on July 6 that it had named the construction of the north and south dams at Muskrat Falls the Global Best Project of 2019 in the Dam/Environment category.
The announcement did not explain the rationale behind the choice and, when asked by email, the News-Record’s managing editor Scott Blair, who is also in charge of contests, would not impart the reasons either. He replied that the magazine would publish more details at a later date.
“The blog is just the winners announcement – we will write lengthier stories on each project, including any controversies and challenges and how they were overcome, in our Sept. 30 issue,” he wrote. “ENR does not select the winners – we have a panel of industry veterans who have years of experience in the global construction industry evaluate, score and then debate the merits of the projects in five categories to select the winners.”
Those industry veterans were guided by five judging criteria set out on the ENR website. They are: “Overcoming global challenges and international teamwork” (since at least one of the companies on the project team has to be working outside its home country); “safety” (since any accidents causing fatalities would disqualify a project); “innovation and contribution to the industry/community”; “construction quality and craftsmanship”; and the “function and aesthetic quality of the design”.
“We are seeking entries for a competition dedicated to honoring the best global construction projects and the companies that designed and built them throughout the entire world,” reads the online entry form. “The awards focus on the challenges, risks and rewards of designing and constructing in other countries – whether you are a Canadian company building in Africa, or a Japan-based firm building in the United States.”
The winner for Muskrat Falls in the Dam/Environment category, as it happens, was not Nalcor Energy – a semi-autonomous corporate arm of the Newfoundland government created to oversee the entire construction project. Instead, one of Nalcor’s contractors gets to take the prize home. The company that actually submitted the entry form was the Barnard Construction Co. Inc. of Bozeman, Montana, which describes itself as “People building for people”. Nalcor had granted Barnard Pennecon LP the contract to construct the 432-meter concrete north dam and the 325-meter earthfill south dam in September 2015. The work, which had to abide by a “fast-track schedule”, was completed in February 2019.
What winning one of ENR’s Global Best Project awards means for Bar
nard is unclear, besides, no doubt, giving the company justifiable bragging rights. As the ongoing public hearings into the Muskrat Falls venture continue to reveal, successfully completing a contract for an outfit like Nalcor is an achievement in itself, let alone doing so in a relatively remote location like central Labrador. Barnard, however, might not feel the need to brag too much, since it is no stranger to ENR awards, having won one in 2018 for rerouting a transmission line in California.
What the award means for Nalcor and the Muskrat Falls project is even less clear, since any credit the Crown corporation takes would have to be borrowed from its American contractor. At any rate, if Nalcor and the provincial government try to cash in on the dual aspect of the “Dam/Environment” category to deflect the mounting criticism about the dam’s environmental problems, they had better move fast to get their message. By the time the News-Record’s Sept. 30 issue hits newsstands it will be too late.
“I don’t release the names of projects that were submitted but did not win,” managing editor Blair emailed, “but I can tell you that there were no ‘environment’ oriented entries this year, they were all dams, so I will actually probably revise that category name before we publish.”
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