Boston is chock-full of history, and it’s hard to pick the best event—the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s ride, the Red Sox overcoming the curse of the Bambino to win the World Series in 2004. (You know we like our baseball here at Electrical Contractor.) We are personally intrigued by the Great Molasses Disaster of 1919, when an enormous storage tank exploded and a wave of molasses flooded the streets. According to urban legend, Bostonians still smell molasses on hot days.
With the NECA Show returning to the City on a Hill in October, we want to keep you abreast of the electrical contracting situation in that fair city.
In “Got to Get Down to Beantown,” Susan Casey rounds up projects at Quincy Market, the Old South Church, Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant and the Seaport District. ECs are really covering a lot of territory, workwise. Another project profile this month is about shoe company Converse’s headquarters on Lovejoy Wharf.
Speaking of history, Chuck Ross writes about the fire-protection challenges at museums in “Risky Business.” We also jet over to North Dakota, a place we haven’t covered very often, to learn about the new School of Medicine and Health Sciences building at UND. Read “Just What the Doctor Ordered” by Casey.
We have a range of other features this month. They include working with and learning from the new generation (“The Millennial Difference,” by Jeff Gavin), the growing use of electric vehicles in the commercial market (“Fleeting Benefits,” by Chuck Ross), and standards for power over ethernet and the Internet of Things (“Taming the IoT,” by Gavin).
We learned in July’s Profile of the Electrical Contractor that 95 percent of you work on lighting, and this month we bring you two articles on that topic. Craig DiLouie writes about energy-efficiency requirements in “Decoding Energy Codes.” In “Strategic Assembly,” Susan Bloom outlines the benefits of prefabricated lighting.
If you come to the NECA 2016 Boston Show and Convention, stop by our booth to say hello. We really enjoy meeting and speaking with our readers. We want to know what projects you are working on and how your business is going.
Whether or not you make it to Boston, please consider conversing with us by participating in our subscriber research panel. For more info or to sign up, visit www.ECmag.com/2016-panel-signup.
About The Author
Julie Mazur
Managing Editor, Electrical Contractor magazineJulie Mazur is the managing editor of ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR, Safety Leader and Line Contractor magazines. Before coming to ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR, she was an editor at Knight-Ridder/Tribune newspapers and the Los Angeles Times and taught English as a foreign language in Egypt and Japan. As managing editor, Julie oversees the whole publishing arc. She plans and assigns the stories for every issue, works with writers and designers and interacts with the printing plant. She has a mass communications B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Go Bears!
Permanently retired from ziplining, Julie is an enthusiastic sports spectator and radio listener. She likes to read, exercise and cook.
JOHNSON is a writer and editor living outside Washington, D.C. He has worked in magazine, web and journal publishing since 2006, and was formerly the digital editor for ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR magazine. Learn more at www.tjfreelance.com.
