How Infrastructure Teams Can Build More Resilient Projects

If you ask a project superintendent about a bad morning, you will usually hear about a call that came in before 6, a concrete truck that was stuck behind a closed ramp, an inspector who moved the visit to Thursday, and steel that was promised for this week and is now coming next month. Big civil builders, Tutor Perini among them, plan for mornings like that on their bridge, transit and highway jobs, because on a large public project they are a regular part of the work.

On such a task, resilience boils down to one simple question. Does the team know what to do when anything goes wrong in the morning, or are they all waiting for an office call? The superintendent may make the choice immediately since the teams who effectively handle it typically discuss it months in advance.

Why Project Resilience Matters

The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the country’s infrastructure every 4 years, and this is what turned up when we went through the 2025 report card:

• The overall grade came out at a C, the best since the report card started in 1998, up from a C minus in 2021.
• Roads moved from a D to a D plus, while stormwater and transit both got a D.
• The gap between planned spending and what it will take to put everything in good working order is now $3.7 trillion.

Hmm, so the best grade ever is still a C.

A bridge deck that is poured this year could still be carrying traffic in the 2090s, so a corner that gets cut in a rushed site meeting is going to stay with the city for a long time.

If plan B was agreed before the first truck rolled in, a delay usually ends up as a phone call instead of a claim, and yes, there will be delays.

Start With Early Risk Planning

The first version of a risk list does not need any special software. A shared spreadsheet will do the job, and every worry the team has gets a row of its own.

What Goes On it?

Mostly the things people say out loud in the parking lot after a meeting and then never write down. A landowner on the north side might not have signed the easement yet. Or the bridge bearings might be coming from a single shop in the state that already has 3 other jobs ahead of yours.

Beside each row, the team puts a rough figure for what it could cost in dollars and how many days it could add, along with the name of the person who has agreed to keep an eye on it.

The name is the part teams tend to leave blank. When a risk belongs to the team in general, it usually sits there until it comes back as a change order.

Make Reviews Routine

We would open that sheet again whenever the drawings get a new revision, the grant money shifts, or a crew digs up a pipe that was never on the plans. A sheet that has not been touched since the kickoff meeting is not going to be much help by month 4.

Some teams also play the job out 3 ways in one afternoon. There is the version where it rains for a month, the version where every delivery arrives on time, and the version in between, and for each one they agree ahead of time who calls whom.

A laptop open to a shared risk spreadsheet with rows of entries, a column of names and rough dollar and day figures, a scratched white hard hat and a half-finished coffee cup next to it, a printed road widening plan with one utility line marked in yellow highlighter taped to the wall behind, natural colors, a candid documentary feel and no faces visible are all visible in this realistic 16:9 photo taken inside a construction site trailer in early morning light.

Take a road widening where the survey records put a gas main 6 feet off the curb line. When a locate crew walks it, they find it at 9 feet, and there is a fiber line in the same trench that does not appear on any of the records.

If that turns up 2 months ahead, it means a few phone calls to the gas company and the fiber owner. If it turns up on the morning the excavator arrives, you are paying for the machine, the operator and 4 laborers who cannot start, and the rental is charged whether they dig or not.

Account for Climate and Site Risks

A culvert that was sized for the storms of the 1980s is likely to be undersized for the storms it will see over the next 30 years. The U.S. Department of Transportation makes a similar point in its guidance on building resilient infrastructure, where climate impacts are counted at the planning and funding stage.

What you need to study depends on where the job is, and a highway outside Phoenix and a culvert in Vermont are dealing with very different conditions.

• Around Phoenix, asphalt can soften on a 115 degree afternoon and crews are not safe working much past noon.
• In Vermont, frost heaves the road every March and a brook can come up a few feet overnight.
• On the Gulf Coast, salt gets into the rebar and storm surge has to be planned for.
• Out west, smoke can shut a job down even when the fire is 80 miles away.

Those findings are supposed to change the drawings. If the soil report says the slope is moving, the wall is designed for that movement, and if the creek has flooded twice in 10 years, the pipe under the road is upsized before anyone places the order.

Design for Conditions, Not Assumptions

A contingency line at the bottom of the budget has never kept a culvert from washing out. What helps is checking the drainage, the pavement section, the retaining wall and the access road against the storms and loads they are likely to see over their full service life, the bad years included.

Build Stronger Project Teams

We went looking for a number on what poor communication costs a job. The best one is still the survey FMI ran with PlanGrid, where close to 600 construction leaders were asked how their teams spend the week:

• Miscommunication and bad project data were blamed for 48% of all rework on US jobsites.
• Poor communication on its own came to about $17 billion a year.
• The average team member was losing more than 14 hours a week to conflict, rework and hunting for information.

14 hours is close to 2 days out of every week.

The utility company, the city traffic engineer and the crew that will look after the road after handover are all able to stop the work later on. That is why they should be at the early meetings, well before a problem with them shows up in month 9.

Decide who can say yes to a change in the field before the first shovel goes in, and put that name on the trailer wall.

On a lot of jobs the coordination meeting happens once a month and runs for 3 hours. By the time an item comes up, half the room has forgotten why it was added in the first place. A short check in every Monday, 20 minutes standing around the plan table in the trailer, will usually keep the list moving better than that.

It should be just as easy for the team. A worker should be able to take a photo of a damaged coastline or water seeping into a trench, send it to the superintendent, and get a reaction before lunch, rather than waiting until the next meeting to bring it up. When a single design change affects both the budget and the schedule, a one-page chart outlining who does what is useful. 

When one design revision changes both the budget and the schedule, it helps to have a one page chart of who does what.

• The engineer of record answers the technical question.
• The builder prices it and works out the extra days.
• The owner decides.
• The project manager writes the decision down where it can be found 6 months later, which is the step that gets skipped most often.

Use Technology and Better Data

BIM is useful for catching a duct that runs through a beam before any concrete has been poured around it, and a drone can fly the site in about 20 minutes and give you a dated progress photo. When the crew has the drawings on their phones, they are working from the current revision and not from a copy that was printed months ago.

A dashboard can put the main numbers on one screen for the owner meeting, and a sensor on an excavator might warn you that a hydraulic line is wearing out before it fails.

None of that helps if the data going in is out of date, or if it is unclear who acts when a number turns red.

Prepare for Materials and Supply Chain Delays

Electrical gear is where a lot of schedules have been slipping lately, and this is how the Wood Mackenzie supply chain numbers looked in the second quarter of 2025:

• Large power transformers averaged 128 weeks from order to delivery, close to 2 and a half years.
• Switchgear averaged about 44 weeks.
• Distribution transformers came down to around 30 weeks after peaking above 100 in 2023.

That transformer wait is longer than the build time on some of these projects.

So anything with a long wait should be ordered while the drawings are still being worked out, before they are stamped. It is worth calling the factory and asking for an actual production slot, because a lead time in a catalog is not the same as a confirmed slot, and if the spec allows an equal product, you can get it approved now while there is time to review it properly.

Once the switchgear arrives, it still needs to be stored somewhere dry and secure on site until it is installed.

Keep Communities and Stakeholders Involved

People who live and work next to a job site are going to hear it and breathe some of its dust. Most of them will put up with that if they were told before it started.

Every sign on the site can carry one phone number and one web page, and someone on the team should actually be answering that number. It also helps to keep a simple count of what people are calling about. If the backup alarm on a loader has been waking the street at 5 a.m. and 30 calls have come in about it, the early work can probably be moved to a later start.

If the diner on the corner gets a week’s notice before the lane in front of it is closed, the owner has time to move the produce delivery to the back door and put a note up for customers. If they hear about it the night before, you are likely to hear about it at the next council meeting.

A Practical Resilience Checklist

1. Get every worry out of people’s heads and into one spreadsheet.
2. Put a name next to each big one.
3. Leave extra time in the schedule wherever the city, the inspector or the weather has a say.
4. Find a second supplier, or an approved equal, for anything with a long wait.
5. Let the crew report a problem from a phone in under a minute.
6. Keep every change and its sign off in one place.
7. Have the heat and smoke plan written before July arrives.
8. Tell the neighbors before the cones go up.
9. Leave money for maintenance in the years after handover.
10. Sit down after each phase and write down what went wrong.

Final Thoughts

There is no single tool in any of this. It is a long run of small decisions that are made early and written down where the next person can find them. On a job with a 128 week transformer in it, there are going to be surprises, and they are a lot cheaper to deal with when the answer was agreed months before.