ENR Southeast announced earlier in August its lineup of 31 award winners in its 2023 Regional Best Projects competition, and now it’s time to recognize the projects that stood out for their approaches to safety and sustainability. 

Each contest, the Excellence in Safety and Excellence in Sustainability, has two winners: one Best Project and one Award of Merit. Three of those four projects also picked up awards in the overall competition, so make sure to check out the full list of winners here.

Assisting with judging this year’s Excellence in Safety contest was Steve Sawyer, safety operations manager for Brasfield & Gorrie, who looked not only at the projects’ safety stats and policies, but at the projects’ risk levels and creative ways project teams kept their crews safe throughout construction. 

Judges assisting with the Excellence in Sustainability contest were Robbie Ferris, CEO of SFL+A Architects, and Brandon Yezbick, vice president of LEAN for Barton Malow. The pair picked two winners from among a group of projects with interesting sustainability initiatives that had to be pulled off at a large scale in some cases, and others with innovative sustainability initiatives both in construction and design.

Read more about all the winning projects in the Oct. 30 edition of ENR Southeast.These winners, along with other Southeast Best Projects winners and ENR Southeast's 2-23 Firms of the Year, will all be honored Nov. 10 in Orlando at the ENR Southeast Regional Best Projects Awards event. Find out more, or register to attend, by clicking here. 

Congratulations to this year's winners!

Best Project, Excellence in Safety

Winship Cancer Institute at Emory Midtown, Atlanta, Ga. 

Submitted by Batson-Cook Construction 

The new cancer care center on the campus of Emory University Hospital Midtown integrates all of Winship’s cancer care into one 450,000-sq-ft building, a 17-stoy facility constructed in the midst of a fully operational hospital in Midtown Atlanta with streets and main thoroughfares which had to be closed for days and weeks throughout construction. 

“There was no question about the amount of risk this job had,” says Sawyer. “It was a standalone.”

More than 2 million worker-hours went into the project, which recorded an OSHA Recordable Incident Rate of 1.7, and a lost-time accident rate of 0.29. The project team notes the focus on dropped object prevention throughout the structural phase and into glazing, as work continued near a busy street and the hospital’s patient discharge. 

The project became a frontrunner for Sawyer in light of the safety plan Batson-Cook had to put together and execute given the amount of activity managing for not only the construction site, but the public and traffic exposure. 

“That doesn’t just happen by coincidence,” Sawyer says. “There’s a tremendous amount of commitment and intentionality that drives that.”

Award of Merit, Excellence in Safety

RB Simms WTF Raw Water Improvements, Chesnee, S.C.

Submitted by Harper General Contractors

Working to refit the nearly century-old RB Simms Water Treatment Facility took some modern technology, including 3D scans and Building Information Modeling to avoid impacts on the working plant. Construction of a new raw water feed system, including 1,500 linear ft of 64-in raw water main, rehabilitation of nine filters and new bulk alum storage facility called for permit-required confined-space work and engineering shorage for a 40-ft excavation. That work presented specific safety challenges, and throughout the team reviewed crews’ safety practices for all work on site, including subcontractors. In all, 187 safety inspections were performed and 150,111 worker-hours logged with zero lost-time incidents.

For Sawyer, it was the team’s creativity with trenching, shoring and other excavation work, as well as the demands and heightened risk of working in a confined space. 

“I just felt this job was extremely unique, (and) had its own sort of very unique set of complexities—certainly a ton of risk,” he says.

And while not the largest project in the running for awards, Sawyer says notes that that doesn’t diminish the safety challenges of the project. 

“It was one of those that could have slipped under the radar, but they were doing a lot of things on that project to manage the risk, manage the safety,” he says. “It stood out to me as being a pretty complex, pretty tough job.”

Best Project, Excellence in Sustainability

Emory University Health Sciences Research Building II, Atlanta, Ga.

Submitted by Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, Inc. (HOK)

Designed to enhance connectivity and collaboration among researchers at Emory University, the eight-story biomedical research building includes a six-story atrium, multi-tiered cantilever stair, five-story living green wall and large skylight that fills the building interior with light. The project is aiming for a LEED Gold certification, a tall ask for a research building, known for intensive energy usage. 

The facility aims to save 2.4 million gallons of water each year and use 50% less energy than the standard research facility, saving enough to power more than 100 homes. 

Judges called that a big number, with Ferris adding just how hard that is for a research facility compared to a office building or school. Judges noted, too, that 79% of construction waste was diverted from the landfill. It was the intentionality of the approach, and the overarching commitment to sustainability from the construction team that helped the project take top spot. 

The project team also achieved a 13% reduction in embodied carbon, equal to taking 276 cars off the road for 12 months, and 29% of the previously developed site was restored with native and adaptive vegetation. 

Award of Merit, Excellence in Sustainability

Orlando International Airport, Terminal C, Orlando, Fla.

Submitted by HNTB Corp.

The $2.8 billion, 1.8 million-sq-ft Terminal C project at Orlando International Airport is the airport’s largest expansion to date, taking more than 9 million worker-hours to complete on time and on budget.

Designed to be one of the first LEED v4 airports, the facility’s innovative design provides a 25.6% energy cost savings and includes a 360-panel solar array that produces 123 kilowatts and cuts 196 tons of carbon dioxide annually, while faucets and fixtures inside the airport cut 35% of water usage. 

Judges noted the innovation in the design, as well as the long-term sustainability aspects of the project that earned it the Award of Merit over an array of other project types vying for Excellence in Sustainability honors.