A spandrel crack is a hairline fracture which forms on a building’s perimeter beam, the structural segment spanning from a window head to the sill of the window directly above it. A fissure which might go unnoticed at a casual glance, but an engineer would never miss its warning. Because to that expert a spandrel crack is evidence that a structure's façade has shifted, changing the load forces so that further degradation is a risk. A nearly imperceptible flaw of that aesthetic, whose...

On the front pages of the national news last week was a tank fire in California, which exposed the Garden Grove area to the chemical contents of that tank. Which at the time of that fire was 6,000 gallons of the hazardous monomer Methyl Methacrylate. In response to that risk of exposure, the government of California mobilized three state and one federal agency and installed 24 stationary air monitoring stations over the nine-square miles around the fire. To track every fugitive gram of...

I’ll be recording a podcast live today, May 21st, at 3:00 PM Eastern summarizing the results of Big Paint’s most recent quarter, including updates on Sherwin-Williams, PPG, Behr, RPM, Pittsburgh Paints, Benjamin Moore, Home Depot and Lowe’s. And from Graco, the makers of professional paint sprayers which are an indispensable component of most larger paint jobs. Making Graco’s results perhaps the best data available, when forecasting demand for architectural coatings. And sales at Graco’s...