Introduction Erosion control is rarely glamorous, but on a misty April morning along Pennsylvania’s US-322 I watched something beautiful: thousands of rye seedlings poking through a coarse, coffee-colored blanket of jute burlap mesh that we had laid six weeks earlier. The slope, once a raw gash of red clay, was already greening over—and runoff monitors

Introduction Torrential summer rain had just hammered a newly graded slope I was overseeing, and rills were carving through the seedbed before my eyes. My quick fix—unrolling heavyweight burlap in sheets and pinning them down between squalls—stopped the soil migration in minutes and saved the project from a costly re-grade. Moments like that underline why

Introduction Fire- and heat-related work leave zero margin for guesswork—selecting the right fire blanket fiberglass can mean the difference between a controlled job and a full plant shutdown. I learned this firsthand on a refinery turnaround in April 2025: a crew grabbed a bargain-bin blanket that shrank under slag, igniting scaffold netting and costing four