The Shaw Group

Post-Katrina work was pivotal point for engineer/contractor

By Dana Crisson

The Shaw Group, founded in 1987 by Jim Bernhard and headquartered in Baton Rouge, is a diverse engineering, construction, technology, fabrication, environmental and industrial services organization with 25,000 employees in locations around the world.

The company has worked on thousands of design-build projects in the chemicals, energy, environmental and infrastructure industries worldwide. Its projects include maintenance and warehouse facilities in Arizona, a railroad tank car manufacturing facility in Louisiana, the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and Army base facilities in Iraq.

But one of the company’s greatest achievements may be helping out in its home state in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina struck the Gulf Coast region just two days before the end of the company’s 2005 fiscal year. As a leader in emergency hurricane response work, Shaw and its Louisiana-based subcontractors were called upon to help and ended up providing a broad range of services, including power restoration, emergency provisions, housing and temporary roof repairs. 

“The experts predicted it would take three months to pump the floodwaters from New Orleans. Our company accomplished the feat in 17 days,” says George Bevan, Shaw’s acting president of infrastructure, encompassing the commercial, state, local divisions.

“We are a Louisiana company. We knew the dire situation we were in, and we had the resources in place to help. Our response was first-class. We flew people into the area in helicopters, and Jim turned a building into a ‘war center’ for months. The Army Corp of Engineers played a great role, as well.”

Over the course of the rebuilding, Shaw and its employees announced a total cash contribution of $1 million to hurricane relief and recovery efforts.

The success of the company is the direct result of Bernhard’s vision and dedication.

“Jim always had the dream,” Bevan says. “He started with a pipe fabrication company. Piping was usually the last component to arrive at the jobsite, but he always regarded piping as was one of the most important elements of the job. He thought, if I can cut pipe, why not enter the construction business? So that is exactly what he did.

“Our customers that we sold pipe to in the beginning became our competitors when we diversified, but we still sell a lot of pipe to the competition.”

Bernhard began acquiring companies to make his dream a reality-first construction, then engineering and then other field contracting companies. When the company went public in 1993, it was the largest fabrication company in the United States and one of the top three in the world. As the company continued to grow, Bernhard saved time and money by consolidating entities.

“In 1999, he saw the need for power after the power blackouts in California, so he joined with Entergy Corp. to create EntergyShaw LLC., a new equally owned and jointly managed company to construct power plants in North America and Europe for Entergy’s unregulated wholesale operations,” Bevan says.

“Then, in another brilliant move, he bought Stone & Webster Inc., a 110-year-old engineering and construction company in Delaware. That brought our total number of employees at that time to over 12,000.”

For the past two decades, Shaw has also performed extensive design-build, construction management and general contracting services for the U.S. Department of Defense as part of the department’s efforts to upgrade and replace existing military facilities.

“We worked on the anthrax cleanup in 2002/03. We also outfitted the initial wave of soldiers deployed in the Iraqi war.”

The company has worked on more than 12,000 projects at 85 military locations across the country, including more than 150 base realignment and closure-related projects. Security is another important business component and a top priority for transportation infrastructure.