According to the Barnum Museum museum website, the building, located at 820 Main Street, has begun a “major construction of the historic exterior.” The museum building has been closed to visitors since it sustained damage in a 2010 tornado. The Barnum Museum is on the National Register of Historic Places and is dedicated to Barnum & Bailey circus founder, former Bridgeport mayor and longtime resident, P.T. Barnum. Built in 1893, it contains more than 60,000 artifacts related to Barnum, Bridgeport and 19th century America. In the years since the tornado, the museum has raised $15 million toward repairs. That money has largely gone toward repairing the building’s iconic onion dome and east wall, and to clean some of the estimated 20,000 artifacts that sustained damage from water, dust, humidity and bits of broken glass.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/scaffolding-bridgeport-s-barnum-museum-amid-push-18088351.php

During its Tuesday Board of Selectmen meeting, the board approved $21,735 to install fiber optic cable at the Locust Avenue location and another $51,032 to relocate the dispatch center to the building. The police department is being moved while its headquarters at 174 South Ave. gets a complete facelift that could take anywhere from 18 months to two years. During a phone interview, Zagarenski described the work on the South Avenue building as a “renovate as new project,” in which the current building will be “stripped down to bare walls and reconstructed as new modern police facility.” Zagarenski said the project has been funded for up to $29 million including construction and other costs, such as relocation.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/new-canaan-police-locust-avenue-south-avenue-18076076.php

Availability of parts, not people, is the largest barrier right now to catch up with the delays in constructing Virginia-class nuclear attack boats, company officials at submarine builder Newport News Shipbuilding told USNI News. While work stoppages and worker attrition due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been cited as reasons for the delay in submarine production, availability of parts and materials has become the primary reason for delays, Newport News president Jennifer Boykin told USNI News on Friday. Workforce and supply chain concerns have prompted the Navy, HII and General Dynamics Electric Boat to retool the schedule for the Block V Virginia-class. Compounding the slip in the program schedule, the Navy is almost one year late in issuing advanced procurement contracts for the next two Virginia-class Block V attack boats. The impasse is over an insurance dispute between the submarine shipbuilders in the event of an accident occurring either during construction or operations aboard attack boats that field Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles.

https://news.usni.org/2023/05/08/submarine-supply-chain-largest-barrier-to-improving-virginia-attack-sub-schedule-says-boykin

Wellbuilt Company, a developer headquartered in Greenwich with two projects already in Stamford, has filed a pre-application with the Land Use Bureau to explore building an extended stay hotel on the property. Preliminary designs include a 10-story building with 95 rooms and ground-floor space reserved for retail or a restaurant. Parking would be off-site in the Bell Street garage. According to the pre-application, the concept is common for urban hotels and it was reviewed favorably by the city’s Transportation, Traffic and Parking Department. The developer has yet to submit a formal Zoning Board application, opting instead to file a pre-application. In order for the deal to close, though, the developer must secure zoning approval for the project. Trinity Financial, the developer of 66 Summer, did not respond to an immediate request for comment. In 2017, the company sold the 200-unit building to an out-of-state company for $67.5 million.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/greenwich-developer-exploring-plans-10-story-18074598.php?src=sthpdesecp

Much has changed since workers building the 66-story, 850-foot-tall Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan posed for “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” in 1932, but it remains construction’s most iconic photograph. The OSH Act created OSHA in 1971, so this photo existed decades before any federal agency provided standards or cited employers for violations. Goss and Rank also both noted a long battle to create the steel erection standard, which is a little over 20 years old. With today’s OSHA standards, if an inspector came across a sight like the men in the photo, the fines could vary, depending on whether they are classified as willful or not. If they are, Goss said, the construction firm could face an initial fine of around $155,000 per person — about $1.5 million total. That would be before negotiating a settlement from OSHA. For context, that would be about $200,000 higher than the largest initial fine of 2022.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/Lunch-Atop-Skyscraper-safety-week-construction-violations-OSHA/649221/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202023-05-05%20Construction%20Dive%20Newsletter%20%5Bissue:50248%5D&utm_term=Construction%20Dive

Given the shock of the earlier plumes of black smoke emanating from the bridge, there was some surprise when two southbound lanes opened three hours later. Additional lanes opened the following morning, but the right-hand acceleration lane and pedestrian walkway remain closed. “The Gold Star Bridge was inspected by experts immediately following the crash, which is why it was able to reopen several hours later,” DOT spokesperson Josh Morgan said in an email Wednesday. “Under no circumstances would that bridge have been reopened if there were any safety concerns.” Sweeney said if the superstructure had been jeopardized, DOT was looking at an alternate plan to push southbound traffic onto the northbound span. Rizzo said as Sweeney’s team did its assessment underneath the bridge and it became clear the left two lanes could likely reopen, the highway operations team was coming up with a traffic plan and acquiring the needed materials.

https://www.theday.com/local-news/20230506/how-dot-determined-the-gold-star-bridge-was-safe-to-reopen-after-catching-fire/

A Norwegian green hydrogen company recently announced plans for a “gigafactory” to be built in Michigan using technology that is being developed and tested at the company’s Wallingford operation. Nel Hydrogen makes devices that take water and split it into hydrogen and oxygen, known as electrolyzers, as well as making fueling stations. It recently announced plans for the new plant in Michigan, as well as an expansion of Proton Onsite, the electrolyzer manufacturing facility on Technology Drive in Wallingford, which it purchased in 2017. The Wallingford expansion will assist in the operations at the Michigan plant. Van Name said he did not have information with regard to how many new jobs the project may bring to Wallingford, but said the company has been actively hiring for the last year.

https://www.myrecordjournal.com/News/Wallingford/Wallingford-News/Wallingford-company-expansion-will-test-new-equipment-for-new-Michigan-plant.html

East Hartford officials are creating a menu of tax breaks and other incentives to secure a project demolishing chunks of the roughly 50-year-old Founders Plaza office park along the Connecticut River, and building back hundreds of new apartments, as well as retail and recreation amenities. East Hartford officials have been negotiating with an undisclosed developer. Mayor Michael Walsh, on Tuesday, shared with the Town Council a draft letter addressed to developer Port Eastside Partners LLC, broadly outlining the possibility of tax stabilization and other potential incentives that could be applied to the ambitious project. According to the draft letter Walsh shared with the council, the plan involves demolition of a four-story office building at 99 Founders Plaza, demolition of a garage attached to a 20-story office tower at 111 Founders Plaza, and demolition of unoccupied warehousing space at 300 East River Drive. Walsh, on Wednesday, estimated demolition costs of $9 million.

East Hartford officials eye tax breaks, other incentives to secure Founders Plaza redevelopment 

The $2.5 million project started in April 2022 and the roadway was completely closed to traffic for three months. After that, traffic was open to just a single lane. Officials from the Greenwich Department of Public Works and the Board of Selectmen gathered at Binney Park on Wednesday to celebrate the project’s completion. The bridge was originally built in 1925 and inspectors found it to be in poor condition five times between 2011 and 2019, which led to the replacement recommendation. The $2.5 million project cost was reimbursed to the town with a grant from the state’s Local Transportation Capital Improvement Program, or LOTCIP. Greenwich is seeking another LOTCIP grant to fund replacement of the North Street Bridge, which is expected to start next year.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/old-greenwich-sound-beach-avenue-bridge-17919879.php

The plan to build a new Elmwood Community Center that would include the senior center, a library branch, teen center and more began when the town purchased the former St. Brigid School at 100 Mayflower St. for $3 million in 2021. Last August, town leaders announced they would be creating a West Hartford Center master plan that it would use as a guide to reconstruct and update roadways, crosswalks, intersections, sidewalks and other street features in the center of town. In April, Ledwith said LaSalle’s reconstruction would be first after the announcement that the road would be returned to its pre-pandemic two-way traffic set up. Final decisions on the road’s reconstruction would be considered by the town’s Community Planning and Economic Development and Public Works and Facilities committees. Construction, though, has been delayed from this year to the spring of 2024, meaning Farmington Avenue’s reconstruction would not begin until the spring of 2025. Over on New Park Avenue, drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists can expect substantial changes, including a road diet that is similar to the one implemented on North Main Street, bringing four lanes of traffic down to two lanes of traffic with a shared left-hand center turn lane.

https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/westhartford/article/west-hartford-ct-community-center-road-design-18074476.php