Wednesday, July 11, 2018

The Walsh Group - A 120-Year-Old Family Construction Business


The recipient of a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Lauren Plouff serves as a project engineer at The Walsh Group in Galveston, Texas. For their work on the construction of the Biocontainment Critical Care Unit at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Lauren Plouff and the project team earned the Matthew Myles Walsh II Founder National Safety Award.

The Matthew Myles Walsh II Founder National Safety Award honors the memory of The Walsh Group’s founder, Matthew Myles Walsh. An Irish immigrant, Matthew Myles Walsh came to the United States to work as a carpenter in 1898. In the same year, he established a small carpentry business that he operated from his Chicago home. 

The business subsequently developed a reputation as a respected contractor in the city and went on to stay afloat through the Great Depression. It incorporated in Illinois as The Walsh Group in 1949 and later expanded, first nationally and then into Canada.

Today, The Walsh Group remains a family business, run by third-generation brothers Dan and Matt Walsh. Celebrating its 120-year anniversary in 2018, the company has grown into one of the largest construction firms in the United States.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

The Matthew Myles Walsh II Safety Awards


Lauren Plouff joined The Walsh Group in Chicago, Illinois, as a project engineer in 2016. In recognition of her fieldwork and office leadership, Lauren Plouff recently received the Matthew Myles Walsh II Safety Award.

The award is given annually to project managers and other management team members who demonstrate an exceptional commitment to safety over the course of a successfully completed project. To be eligible for the award, management teams must not only adhere to all aspects of the company’s safety matrix system, they must do so in an “extraordinary fashion.”

The Matthew Myles Walsh II Safety Award program is separated by contract value into four categories, with tiers ranging from below $20 million to above $150 million. Recent award-winning projects by The Walsh Group management teams include the University of Texas Medical Branch Critical Care Unit, the McCook Reservoir Des Plaines Inflow Tunnel, and the SOF Language and Cultural Center in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.