Sitting in on construction industry conference sessions used to be about LTPP, HPC and FRP. Now it's also about PPP and LEED. Design-build is becoming design-build-operate-maintain. Warranties, guarantees, bonds and banks are all becoming hot topics of discussion, side-by-side with the old reliables of materials, methods and project delivery. And so it went at the 85th annual Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington, D.C. Jan. 22-26.

Great. Now in addition to memorizing an endless array of acronyms, I now have to become an insurance industry dilettante. No rest on the transportation beat. (For the uninitiated or faulty of memory, LTPP= Long Term Pavement Preservation; HPC=High Performance Concrete; FRP=Fiber Reinforced Polymers; PPP= Private-Public Partnerships and LEED=Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design).

Even if I were to whittle down my focus points to just aviation, just transit, just highways or just ports, it would be impossible to comprehensively cover TRB's hundreds of sessions. That will have to wait until reporters can be cloned (not a thrilling notion for most of you, I'm sure). But there were two clear elements of this year's go-round: on the 50th anniversary of the Interstate, designers and builders are looking at how to efficiently build longer-lasting infrastructure for the next half-century; and they want to build it to withstand extreme events‹be they man-made or nature-sent. As Thomas Ewing of the Argonne National Laboratory put it: "Terrorism is like a smart hurricane."

Even without the Katrinas and the extremists, there are plenty of threats, Ewing warned. Global warming might melt the permafrost and compromise the Alaska Pipeline. The Northeast power grid could fail again. The Big One could hit. "It's not about how varied the threats are, but how similar the responses need to be,"Ewing said. That means infrastructure facilities that are redundant, "self-correcting"and quickly repairable. It also means training staffers well, using intelligent transportation and technologies efficiently, and creating effective emergency routines.

Naturally, the key to doing all this lies in funding. Money may or may not make the world go ‘round, but it surely helps build the things that move the people of the world around. Plenty of advice abounded on how to raise money, utilize money and make money in the business of building infrastructure.

For example, John A. Epps, a veteran of Granite Construction Inc.,  offered his pithy opinions on the future of construction bids: "I would have design-build-operate contracts that allow for innovation,"he told his audience. "O+M is key."

He adds: "It's not enough for the owner to write a spec without enough information. Nor is it enough for contractors to merely meet the specs. That doesn't get the job done."

Warranty periods? "If I could, I would start off with a few years, then more. Two to three years to start, then five, ten, even 20."

Bonding? "People in the bonding business aren't familiar with our business. It's up to us to help them understand the risks."

An audience member asked: "Why aren't there more civil engineers in charge of projects?"He was dissatisfied, he explained, with the contractor response of "They're not trained enough."Epps responded that many firms are hiring young civil engineers fresh out of school, with not a lot of actual field experience in quality control and the like. And if a contractor is not required by spec to hire a certified experienced civil engineer rather than a CM, and the former is more expensive, then what incentive would the contractor have to hire the former?

As for project quality control, added Epps, "Everybody is responsible for quality. Some firms will be focused on production"on a project. That makes it all the more crucial for a prime contractor to find top-of-the-line , qualified subcontractors and material suppliers, and to provide them with the QC component.

Performance-based specs? "As long as it's a level playing field, contractors will figure it out,"said Epps. Whether as part of a spec or as another tool, performance standards and material properties must be connected.

Finally, Epps emphasized the challenge of personal relationships on the job. "We get in trouble when the technical and personality issues are imbalanced,"he said.

Yes, civil engineers care about personality now. Throughout the sessions on megaprojects, be they airports or highways or rail, presenters echoed time and again the lesson learned about personal interaction between the project players. The factor of interpersonal communication may be old news to say, a theatrical troupe‹but engineers are now learning that staring at your acquaintance's shoes rather than your own no longer is enough.

(Disclaimer: I'm just poking fun here at the stereotype of civil engineers. I hear they make fine spouses. After all, they know how to handle long-term projects. Can't say that for most actors.)

But investing in the personal communication needed to keep a project running well doesn't just mean holding a few meetings. For the new Doha Airport project, it meant flying project players in from different offices to a partnering meeting, and appointing interface managers whose major focuses were to coordinate weekly design subcontractor meetings. "Invest in the face-to-face,"said Cliff King, Bechtel deputy design manager. That summed it up.