Leesburg, VA – Jackson Morrill, president and CEO of The American Wood Council (AWC), headquartered here, issued a statement following Idaho Governor Brad Little’s signing of H 143, which directs the state building code board to amend the state building code to include the 2021 tall mass timber building code provisions by January 1, 2022.
AWC testified in support of H 143 at the Idaho Legislature.
“Mass timber is a category of wood product that is already revolutionizing how America builds,” Morrill said. “There are already over 1,000 mass timber projects constructed or in the design phase in the United States.
In passing this bill, Idaho has now joined Oregon, Washington, Utah, California, Virginia, as well as the City of Denver as early adopters recognizing a sustainable alternative to traditional construction,” Morrill added. “The use of mass timber will support healthier working forests, expand markets for wood products, and increase forest industry jobs most often found in rural areas.”
In other news, AWC completed testing of connections used in recent full-scale tests of cross-laminated timber (CLT) diaphragm. The latest test results indicated that the connections performed better than expected, resulting in higher than expected shear capacities of the CLT diaphragms.
“In order to fully understand the full-scale CLT diaphragm test results done last year, we needed to better understand some of the connections that were used in the full-scale tests. The results of these latest tests could lead to changes allowing more efficient CLT diaphragm designs in the future,” said AWC Vice President of Engineering Bradford Douglas, P.E.
For more information, visit www.awc.org.
