Case Studies February 2021

Here in California, wildfire season only seems to come earlier and last longer. What used to be June through October became April through November, but at no time does the threat really dissipate. The huge Golden State is always hot, dry and windy somewhere—Southern California beset by the Santa Ana Winds and Northern California, especially […]

A horrendous off-field injury to his right arm might have precluded Billy Demory from a baseball career but it’s never kept him from lending a hand in more far-reaching pursuits. Facilities management now his game, Demory has held a series of such positions in healthcare for over 17 years, the last couple at Frederick Health […]

Apartment complexes used to be simple. Building after building lining meandering roads. A visible outdoor cement staircase leading to the upper floors of each structure. There might have been a nondescript clubhouse or a pool or the occasional tennis court. Like Jean Stapleton sang as Edith Bunker in “All in the Family,” those were the […]

No matter what the health crisis at Medical City Plano in North Texas, Facilities Management Director Brian Martin says the 600+ bed hospital, located in thriving Collin County, is ready. As Collin County’s only Level I trauma center, Medical City Plano regularly accepts transfer patients from more than 200 hospitals in a four-state region. Level […]

With his father working as a diesel mechanic for a railroad in Massachusetts, Harry Takesian has always wanted to work with tools. While attending Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School in Haverhill, Massachusetts, Takesian enrolled in a summer program designed to give students even more hands-on experience with machinery and equipment. It was then Takesian […]

Working at down to minus 20 degrees is a challenge for humans and machinery alike. For the former, it takes wearing the same kind of gear one might wear on an ice-cold snowmobile ride: gloves, long underwear, heavy duty outerwear and face masks covering every inch of fragile skin. For the latter, extreme cold isn’t […]

Hard to believe, but 13,000 years ago, Ohio’s landscape was dotted with mastodons, giant sloths and prehistoric lions moseying around what is now the shores of Lake Erie. Toledo residents can now glimpse into that rare window of the world through Toledo Zoo’s ProMedica Museum of Natural History, says Jennifer Van Horn, the Toledo Zoo’s […]

It’s not as if Jerry Nadeau’s work in the early and mid-2000s was not unique and wide-ranging. As manager of global project planning for Biogen, he directed capital projects and facilities master planning for the biotech firm as it developed therapies for neurological and neurodegenerative diseases. It was rewarding, he says, working with an M&A […]

Faulty heating and cooling systems making students shiver or swelter—not to mention dimly-lit classrooms—are not only uncomfortable, but also may result in lower scores on standardized tests, says Dr. John Bailey of the National School Plant Management Association. He should know. Bailey studied classroom environments as part of his doctoral dissertation and found mean scaled […]

The equation may appear simple when designing a new parking garage. But while it’s still about how many spaces are needed and how traffic flows inside, 21st century variables are now part of the math. As Jose Morales of FlashParking notes, even the basic steps of getting a time-stamped ticket from a dispenser and then […]