A team of students from UALR’s Department of Construction Management took first place in a recent regional Associated Schools of Construction’s Heavy/Civil Construction competition advancing to national contest in March that is considered the Super Bowl for construction education.
Team members Lisa Bishop, Angel Corley, Waylon Corley, Jeremy Land, Miyoshi Stringer, and Kevin Young bested construction management teams from Oklahoma State University, the University of Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Texas A&M at Commerce, Texas Tech, and the University of Louisiana at Monroe.
They will compete in the national competition at the Associated General Contractors Annual Convention in San Antonio in March.
“The Construction Management Department faculty and staff would like to thank the team members and the AGC Highway Contractors for their dedication, commitment and support,” said Mike Tramel, chair of the construction management department. “We know that the team will face the challenge of a more difficult problem and presentation at the national competition, but UALR’s success at Region 5 proves that our students can compete with the best in the country.”
At the regionals, the UALR team and its competitors were to develop a construction operation plan involving a one-mile stretch of a four-lane Texas state highway involving two railroad bridges and two half-mile retaining walls on both sides of the highway. Student teams were to come up with a construction operation plan to remove and replace one of the bridges within a 16-hour timeframe and without impacting the second. Teams were assessed penalties of $15,000 per hour for impacting the other railroad line and $15,000 per hour for a bridge schedule overrun.
After 13.5 hours of work during which the team prepared a bid package, estimated costs, prepared a project schedule, developed a construction operation procedure and answered 35 detailed questions about the project from the Texas Highway Specifications Department, the UALR’s team’s bid of $10.8 million was closest to the actual cost of the project – $16,000 off the actual bid.