Good afternoon. My name is Adrian Rodriguez-Marek.
I'm in the geotechnical faculty here at Virginia Tech.
I would like to welcome you all to Virginia Tech.
Students that are here,
I'm glad that you're here.
We are ready for a very interesting lecture.
To those that come from the outside,
welcome to the campus, welcome to Virginia Technical.
My job is very simple today,
I have to introduce Allen.
Allen Cadden is the Principal at Schnabel Engineering.
He has been instrumental over the years in developing
a very strong link between
Schnabel Engineering and Virginia Tech,
and we are very thankful to him for that.
This is the 14th annual Schnabel Engineering Lecture,
and we're privileged today to have
a very distinguished Speaker.
Without further ado, please help
me to welcome Allen Cadden.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, I'm happy to see so many people show up today.
It's such a beautiful day out there.
I expected everybody to be out in
the drill field and join them in the afternoon.
Well, it's probably one of
the most beautiful times here on Campus.
Even many years ago when I was here,
maybe the only better time is graduation, but trust me,
once you graduate and leave,
you'll wish you could come back more often.
So enjoy while you're here.
It's really a pleasure to be back in
Blacksburg each year for this event.
As Dr. Marek says,
14 year in a row
that we've been able to do this and I want to thank
you and Andy for helping to organize
this event and welcome us back so graciously every year.
Wonderful, as I said,
I see so many people in attendance and I always enjoy
the opportunity to catch up with old friends,
including the many exceptional faculty members,
professors we have here on campus,
and get the pleasure to work
with throughout your time on campus.
It's also been a pleasure to meet so many of
the new hockey alumniry and future alums.
It's nice to see a new crowd here every
year and get to put some names and faces.
Please remind me when I see you
again the name because the face, I'll remember that.
We at Schnabel enjoy this opportunity to share some of
the history and insight of
the civil engineering profession,
and in particular the part
of it that interacts with the ground,
which is really what our specialty and
our interest is at Schnabel Engineering.
Schnabel recently celebrated
our 60th anniversary a few years ago.
I'm proud to say that it's
been my pleasure to be working with
this company for more than half of that time.
Just ask my kids as I have worked on
many interesting projects and they know many of them.
As we drive around the country and I go,
"Look, I worked on that project.
I worked on that project."
Then I have to break it to them that
all my stuff is underground,
they can't see it, but trust me, it's incredible.
[LAUGHTER] We have about 20 offices,
most of them are on the East Coast.
We do work around the country and around the world.
It's unique for our firm that we've had
the opportunity and pleasure
to work in well over 100 countries
in the last couple of decades.
Again, it's a great opportunity to work on
challenging projects and meet
some wonderful people everywhere.
I'm also happy to say that over 60 years we've grown on
a breadth of services as well geographic reach.
We're moving from primarily
geotechnical consulting services
to now include geosciences,
dam, and underground engineering to design
services with a staff of over 350 people.
Let me just say you know my tagline,
but it got washed out.
But our tagline is we build better together.
That's meets to our focus and working
closely together within our company,
to bring the best capabilities we can to a project.
But also to work closely with
our clients to understand their needs and
find ways that we can help them become successful.
We're part of the variants
graduate college experience and
civil engineer lead teams working
together to understand each other and to find solutions.
This is the key to our success,
and hopefully it will be the key to
success of your career as well.
It's probably a good segue then for me to move on to
the main purpose of this afternoon.
Thank you again for joining us.
Let me get to the introduction of our Guest Speaker.
With this lecture series,
Schnabel strives to bring you
representatives of civil engineering,
design and construction community who've had
significant impacts on the advancement
of our practice in the profession.
These industry experts come to share
experience and insights gained throughout their careers.
They may further provide a
little of their insight as to what
might be in store for you as you begin your career.
The changes, however, throughout
your careers are entirely up to you.
You have an opportunity to shape
our profession in future.
Today is our 14th Schnabel Engineering Lecture,
we are proud to bring you
a good friend who I had the pleasure to work with over
the past several years in
the Geo Institute Board of Governors
and for the past several years,
and they continue supporting his current efforts.
Our guest speaker is the ASCE
2020 President K. N. Gunalan.
His love of civil engineering spans four decades,
back to earning his master's degree
in India College of Engineering, Guindy.
Today with a doctorate from Texas Tech,
Gunalan is the Senior Vice President
at AECOM in Salt Lake City,
Utah, managing large complex projects around the world.
Good as ASCE presidency is a pinnacle
of his leadership and service to our profession,
dating back to serving as
a Texas branch President in 1992.
He represented Region 8 on the ASCE Board of
Direction and chaired
the society 2014 convention in Panama,
celebrating the Canal Centennial.
Anybody had an opportunity to go
to that conference, it was incredible.
The best part of it, beyond the [NOISE] conference,
was getting to see the new canal under
construction, that was quite a sight.
He also helped guide ASCE's first conference
in India in 2017.
Please join me in welcoming Guna,
as he shares some of his insights and
the challenges we will face as our profession evolves,
and performance measures to become
a co-factor in our daily work, Guna.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you. Can you all hear me? Can you hear me?
Yes. [NOISE] Good afternoon.
Thank you all for being here.
I know as Allen pointed out,
this is a great day to be outdoors,
and share your evening with me and us here.
It's a privilege and an honor to be here, to be invited.
Thanks to Allen and Schnabel Engineering
for extending the invitation to be here.
One of the privileges of being a President of
ASCE is you get invited to cool campuses.
I love to say that my first calling
in life was geotechnical engineering,
but not very many people
will know that or acknowledge it,
but I get to come here and talk to you a little bit about
my experiences as a geotechnical engineer and
something that's close to me and passionate about.
The topic that I've chosen is to talk about performance.
I know as geotechnical engineers,
we've always go based
on our observations and performance and as most of
your faculty here will let you know
that there is no substitute
for good field experience
in becoming a good geotechnical engineer.
Whoops.
[LAUGHTER]
[NOISE]
No problem. One of
the challenges that we have
is trying to define performance.
Performance is like beauty,
it's in the beholder of the eye.
You always try to come up with
a definition of what does performance mean.
We talk about performance,
and the reason why I picked
up this topic is also there's a lot of
discussion today in the industry
that talks about performance,
performance-based and so on and so forth.
I wanted to give you my two sense of what
my understanding is and take on the terminology is.
Performance, as you go back and
check in Wikipedia and other places,
it's how well a job is done.
But how do you define a job well done?
If you're not able to define
your expectations very clearly and succinctly.
I know a lot of you will be
practicing on both sides of the fence,
either whether you're developing
requirements for an agency or a client,
or whether you're working on the other side,
as a contractor, as a consultant,
delivering on a promise that you would
deliver a project to meet the expectations.
The second definition is, of course,
is from an attorney or a legal definition,
of fulfillment of an obligation in a manner that
relieves you of all your obligations through contracts.
We're not worried about that piece of it because
as engineers we take pride in what we do.
So we need to make sure that we are meeting expectations,
and what are those expectations in terms of performance?
I'm going to generally talk in terms of infrastructure.
As most of you probably know,
infrastructure entails all forms of infrastructure.
My area of expertise is primarily in transportation,
but as a geotechnical engineer,
I did contribute and consult in other areas as well.
But in the later part now,
I've been focused mostly on
transportation related projects,
large projects, as Allen pointed out,
around the country and elsewhere.
[NOISE] But as a geotechnical engineer, you would have,
and will touch on every one of
these elements of work in your career hopefully,
and not be pigeonholed into any one or the other.
I'm going to focus on transportation,
but I want us to be a little bit more conversational.
So please feel free to ask me any questions at any time
because I don't want to
presume that you understand what I'm
saying and I don't want to keep going on,
for you to later on say,
"What the hell was he talking about?"
[LAUGHTER]
How do you define expectations?
Over the course of time,
I know over the years we've always
done work based on what we thought was the right thing,
and so on and so forth but until attorneys
took over and then we became a lot more conservative.
We've started building a lot of factors of
safety into our design because we want to
be held liable for the things that we do
but as a member of ASCE,
the first canon basically talks
about health safety and welfare of the general public.
That's our primary responsibility; safety.
We need to make sure that
anything and everything that we do is
safe and will serve its intended purposes.
Over the course of time,
we used to talk about
performance and we have done that as
geotechnical engineers for years
and a lot of the legends in the field will tell you.
It's about experience and knowing what
the performance will be if you follow
a certain process but that started to get
into all the legal battles
and we started to become more and more prescriptive.
But the industry is taking
a different turn now and you all
have heard about what the future holds.
You've heard about the report card,
where we are, what we need to
do with the investments in our infrastructure,
which just talks about two trillion dollars
just in this country alone and I will not talk
anything about what's going to happen around
the world with all the challenges and the needs
because we are putting on
this planet that we call home
85 million people every year.
That's going to pose its own challenges in terms
of infrastructure needs and the quality of life
that we need to provide to
all our fellow citizens
and the demands on infrastructure.
We've taken a turn and you
probably have heard some of these terms.
We typically deliver projects through
a traditional Design Bid Build type of
an arrangement where as consultants, as engineers,
you come up with a design, develop plans,
specifications pulled out for bid and
a contract to fix it up and hopefully,
doesn't tear it apart,
but goes ahead and build the project and
delivers it on time and under budget.
But we're also starting to see,
given the need and the demand
for infrastructure that we're
starting to go to other forms of project delivery,
and some of them are listed up here.
The first ones that came out was Design Build,
which used to be the way that
projects were delivered a long time ago.
It was a master architect who
hired the engineer and the contractor,
and then built the projects and
staff and then we moved away to
low bid contracting to build projects but now we're
going back to the traditional way of doing things.
Design Build, construction management,
general contractor,
or construction management at risk, and so on.
We're now starting to move into the realm of
integrated project delivery because there is a need
for not only to build these things but to finance it
because we don't have enough revenues
coming in to be able to build it.
We'll look into the private sector to
finance these projects and build it.
A lot of you have
experiences in terms of toll facilities and other things,
but there are different forms of
public-private partnerships that's moving
into a realm where
we're transferring the responsibility to an individual or
a consortium to deliver the project
to us and maintain it over a period of time.
We started off with
99-year leases and now we're talking in terms of anywhere
from 30-99-year leases and
see how these things go for them to operate and maintain.
Given that with a single point of responsibility,
the responsibility for even the planning and designing is
now transferred over to
a developer or a concession as you want to call them.
What we need to do is to be able to
articulate to them as to what
your expectations are in terms of what
the infrastructure should be and how it should perform.
One needs to have
a good handle on understanding performance before you can
articulate it in black and white
to the proposers as to what the expectation is.
With that, the experience, and understanding,
you will not be able to articulate
those requirements clearly and
then will run into trouble.
[NOISE] Responsibilities.
Just to give you a little bit of background,
who has and what responsibility in
an integrated delivery setting.
The owner has a responsibility for
the existing conditions and predicted outcomes.
Basically, if you want a freeway to be built in
a certain location and the owner owns
the property and owner is
responsible for the existing condition because
the conditions cannot be
changed or the environment cannot be
changed by the concession or the developer,
so you take responsibility for
existing conditions or
pre-existing conditions as we call it.
The developer has the responsibility
of meeting the contractual requirements,
the expectations, the agreed-upon
contract that both parties signed to.
The engineer, on the other hand,
for the concessioner even though
our legal responsibility is standard of care.
The engineer needs to have a good understanding of
what the performance requirements are and what
needs to go in on the upfront design so that
the performance requirements or expectations can be
met because the engineer is in the middle.
You have a builder and you have a maintainer,
and you have the engineer or the designer in
the middle taking responsibilities
for the initial design to
assure an outcome and a performance at the end,
and the maintainer has a responsibility to maintain it
in good state of repair so that ultimately,
the facility provides the service that it is intended to.
Even though you can get away with the argument
that you follow the standard of care,
there is a responsibility with
a designer to make sure that
the ultimate performance criterias
are met because otherwise,
the maintainer is going to come
after the consultant or the engineer
to say that the initial design did not meet
the intent or the performance requirements.
It's a very complex arrangement
in terms of relationships,
expectation, actual work, and how it was built,
and so on and so forth.
As engineers and when you get into the field,
you need to first make sure that you have
a good understanding of the existing conditions.
You need to be able to understand
the environment in which the facility is going to
perform and also to be able to
predict as to what the performance might be 10,
20, 30 years down the road,
leave alone at the end of the construction.
It's a challenge.
It's an art and a science.
Some of you will probably agree with me.
One of the reasons I got into
this discipline is because it's still
an art form and not
a total science in terms of geotechnical,
but some of the other disciplines will say, "No.
You can make it into
a science and data-driven," but I still sincerely
believe that there is an element of art to
be able to be a good geotechnical engineering practice.
What are the various criterias,
as I basically say, the categories?
The first one, of course, is the safety of
any infrastructure that we built,
any built environment should safely serve its purpose.
That's our ultimate responsibility as engineers;
that we need to make sure that
when it is put to use, that it's safe.
In today's environment, you're talking
about both natural disasters and man-made disasters.
You need to figure out a way to make sure that
the facility is secure
and wouldn't hurt or
harm the public that is using the facility.
Then, of course, comes the rest of the staff,
that what you're learning right now in the classrooms,
you need to make sure it's strong,
and make sure that it is durable,
and make sure that it performs,
and that's why I put the thing that says experience it.
The performance is something that you
get a sense for based on experience.
You can't learn it in a textbook.
You can read about it in papers, and publications,
and stuff but this is something
that you have to have a good gut sense in terms
of what the performance might be because
the builder and the developer are
going to be constantly asking you to push the envelope.
In order to be able to push the envelope,
where you know when to stop,
and not cross the line of stupidity,
and basically tell them no and push back,
that's where the experience comes in.
You need to have both the knowledge and
the experience to be able to survive in an environment.
The reason why I bring this up is as we move forward,
it's going to go more and more into
public-private partnerships because we don't have
the revenues to build these things but also
the expectations are such
that in order to maintain the quality of life,
lots of things are needed
today rather than 30 years from now.
We need to be able to balance the staff so
the market or the industry is moving in
that direction in terms of how
we collaborate and work collectively in the industry.
The traditional way right now,
a lot of the large programs and projects,
I think 60-70 percent,
I guess anybody can disagree with me,
is going through alternate delivery.
The traditional way of delivering
projects, typical projects,
small projects, which doesn't need innovation,
and other kinds of things are still
there and will be there but
not to the extent as it used to be.
The low bid concept is slowly going away,
and in any industry,
as we start moving in and just like anything else,
we start talking about innovation,
we're talking about pushing the envelope,
we're talking about performance,
that a lot of these new things being thrown at you.
You need to be able to understand
clearly what's the expectation.
What is your obligation under the contract,
between yourself and the contractor or
the developer and the owner?
You need to have a good handle.
You just can't bury your head in the sand and say,
"This is what I was told to do.
This is all I know,
and that's what I'm going to do."
We talk about civil engineers being global leaders,
and I'm sure Jerry talks about in
his future world vision stuff that
civil engineers are integrators
of systems and being future leaders,
global leaders, and so on. What does that mean?
If you relegate yourself to doing
things routinely and doing
the same things over and over again,
yes, we will be commoditized.
But in order for us to take charge and I'm
sure that's what every consultant,
including Schnabel and others will be probably
expecting of you is at some point in your career,
once you've crossed a certain threshold,
the expectation is that you will take
on the reins and lead a team,
lead the conversation, lead the innovation,
lead the design, the engineering analysis,
or even the construction to deliver on a promise.
That's what you need to be thinking about in terms
of your progression as you go through your career,
is trying to find ways to take on some responsibilities.
There are others now, we're talking about risk and
risk-based analysis and design and so on.
You are today in a situation where you're going to be
bombarded with lot of terminologies and you need to
understand what they are and what they
mean and what the expectation is.
[NOISE] I'm going to touch on
a few things and examples to give you
so that we can have this conversation.
Some of the elements of work on
a typical highway transportation project.
As a geotechnical engineer,
you'll be asked to provide all of the services needed to
address and design any
of these facilities on a highway system.
It doesn't matter where it is, anywhere.
You'll be asked to bring your expertise to be able to
optimize the design of any of these elements.
A lot of people that I've known over the years,
those who are able to
step up and take the lead were people who are able
to use common sense judgment
and be able to come up with good solutions,
pragmatic solutions,
practical solutions that are economical and so on,
because the contractor wants to build
a facility at the cheapest price that he can,
meeting the obligations of the contract.
We cannot basically say that I'm not comfortable,
so I'm comfortable with the factor of
safety of three or higher. That's not going to sell.
For one, you won't be competitive in the market,
and even if you are,
you're going to be forced to make
decisions that's going to
make you a little uncomfortable.
You'll need to know where to draw the line.
These are the various elements that you're
talking about with a facility,
and I'll touch on some of the other things too.
I take simple things,
a pavement, we take it for granted.
We ride on a pavement surface when you
drive from point A to point B,
whether it's asphalt or concrete.
When I was first asked to write
the performance requirements for a major project in Utah,
that was my first task to
write the performance specs for the pavement.
When I sat down and thought about
what were the true performance criteria for a pavement.
Yeah, there are a lot of things that we can talk about,
but if you break it down and think about it,
those are the four primary performance criteria
that will need to be defined
clearly so that the expectations are
not confused with anything
else in terms of being prescriptive.
Ride, when we ride on the surface,
we want it to be a smooth ride,
not go into potholes or bumps or any of the other things,
and you don't want to be jolted as you're driving.
It has to be relatively a smooth ride,
whether it's asphalt or concrete
or even gravel, you want it to be smooth.
The second one, skid,
is for safety so that you can
brake and come to a stop without running into an object.
You need to be able to stop within
a certain distance when you're
traveling at a certain speed.
You need to make sure that the surface meets
a skid resistance criteria so
that you don't run into
trouble whether it's in a dry condition,
wet condition, or whatever the condition might be.
Third one is strength,
because with all the goods
that are being transported and so on,
we need to make sure that the load
is being transferred to
the subgrade soils without the pavement deteriorating.
The fourth one, of course,
is a material quality.
When I talk about material quality,
it's a durability of the pavement,
whether it's the joints,
whether it's the slope,
whatever the case may be.
Those are the primary four elements that you need to
define as far as performance of a payment structure is.
The rest of the stuff when you talk about whether it's
asked for concrete, gradation,
drainage, and all those things place
into one of these four elements.
When you sit down and think about
what you've been asked to do, same thing.
When you go to a wall,
if you have to build an embankment,
either you can build it natural slopes or,
because of right away restrictions and stuff,
you need to use some form of retaining system.
I just threw the MSE Walls in there.
The three things, the two things
primarily from our perspective is the global stability,
the internal stability of an embankment.
Of course, the level and plumb
is because of aesthetic reasons.
Technically, if you talk to
any Earth retaining contractor,
they'll basically say you
don't have to worry about aesthetics, it's stable.
But as a traveling public,
you don't want to see the wall leaning
outward or inward and so on and so forth.
It creates an illusion for the driver,
so you don't want to create that.
So that's the reason, but it is an expectation.
You need to be able to define
these things very clearly as to what the expectation is.
Then, of course, foundations for any structure
through the bridge foundations.
You're talking about total settlement,
differential settlement, and stability,
whether it's stability under static conditions or whether
it's under dynamic conditions, it needs to be stable.
Because the definition is bridges are these days
being designed for a design life of 75-100 years.
They need to stand in place and stay in place,
doesn't matter whether you have a seismic event,
the embankments will fall apart,
but the bridge needs to be upright
and serviceable because it's a huge investment.
It's not easy to go fix it,
especially the foundations, and say it's good.
You need to make sure that the bridge stays
on top and you can fix the things around it.
So that needs to be defined.
Whether you're sitting and working for the owner
and developing these requirements
as part of the contract,
it's only fair to ask you to be
fair in terms of your expectations.
You cannot put unfair expectations
on the builder and expect them to
be able to build it and deliver
it on budget and on schedule.
There are a lot of times,
for instance, the MSE Walls,
and I use it as an example
based on my experience when you use
metal straps for MSE Walls systems to hold them back.
The things that I've seen is simple thing
about galvanization when you
are in a corrosive environment.
The galvanization requirements for
a metal strap on an MSE Wall system.
I've known engineers will come in and start to
tweak the coating thickness on
a metal strap because
they think that that's how they're going
to increase the factor of
safety and the longevity of an MSE Wall.
But what they don't realize is it's increasing
the cost without a reason.
If your performance is
75 years and if you've met all the requirements,
why would you prescribe the galvanization thickness to be
double that of what is
required to meet a 75-year design life?
So you have to make sure that
your expectations are defined fair.
This is another example [NOISE] I wanted to share.
We were chasing a project in Florida in Orlando,
and if some of you probably
know the challenges in Florida,
erosion, and so on and so forth,
because we've had situations
where the freeways have caved in because of
cards formation and erosion and
stuff and we talked about
similar situations in Indiana, I guess.
Somebody at the department came up with a brilliant idea.
In order to make sure that the performance of
this bridge structure in this corridor
survives any or all potential for this type of situation,
said, every bridge has to be designed as if it lost
support 20 feet or so and then build it.
What does this do? Every bridge foundation
had to be designed to meet these criteria.
So what does this do to the project cost? Goes up.
From what I said earlier,
need to define your expectation.
Yes, this defines the owner's expectation
of what they expected.
But does this meet a performance requirement?
It probably does.
But is it the right thing to do?
It's anyone's predictions what happens in a setting.
Somebody said, well, instead of
spending all this money upfront,
is it okay that we go ahead and design it?
A typical design, meet the performance of 75-year,
100-year design life, and call it good.
If you run into this situation,
then it's easy to come in and
backfill the caved portion
of the highway and move on with life.
Probably that's true.
You can't say it's wrong and you
can't say it's a more sensible solution,
but it is a solution.
That's why I said, performance is like beauty,
it's in the beholder of the eye.
It's what we call and what we need
to know and how we define these things.
There are a lot of these types of things that
one will come across in your career.
I know most of you,
some of us are probably at the other end of the spectrum,
but most of you are going to get started on your careers.
So this is what you're going to be
facing in the future and some
of us did face some of these things for a period of time,
but this is the direction we're going.
Based on everything that you learn,
you also need to understand
what the expectations are or what the performance
might be and feel
comfortable to be able to deliver on a promise.
But you need to understand what
the requirements were first.
That's one of the things I always tell
folks is when you get on a job,
ask for the contract,
ask for the requirements,
study it, understand it
so that you're very clear on the expectations.
So that when you deliver your design,
then at least you're delivering
on a promise that you made
that you will be in
compliance with the contract requirements.
I know Jerry is here to talk about,
AAC has also undertaken
another project called The Future World Vision.
How many of you have heard about
the Future World Vision or
know about the project that AAC has taken.
Well, I've one hand go up,
a couple at the back, and some here.
It's an exciting project, exciting time.
Jerry, you can correct me anytime.
This is us looking at the future
of what the future is going to hold,
or what life is going to
be and how people are going to live,
move out, and so on and so forth,
50, 60, 70 years from now.
This is based on some solid research that
was done in collaboration with a partner
and they've come up with
five different concepts of
how this will play out in the future.
There is a timeline in how these things
will evolve over a period of time.
The first one that we featured in Miami was
called the floating city concept.
Because 60-70 percent of the population live around
the coastal areas and whether you agree with it or not,
climate change, sea-level rise,
flooding, and other things,
all the things that people could experience in
those areas and what will happen in the future.
So that was the first scenario because it was in Miami.
The next one is going to be megacities in
LA and so on and so forth.
The first thing when we played this out,
when they came up with this concept and
said we're talking about floating city,
talks about people live in offshore,
on platforms, some of it could be just floating,
some of it could be grounded on the ocean bed.
The first thing as a Geotech that came to my mind was,
what would a geotechnical engineer need to be doing
today to be prepared to
address that type of an environment?
I know we already have a lot of information that has been
developed in the past
because we've done a lot of offshore platforms,
drilling platforms, and stuff, people live there.
We drill deep into the ocean beds to
retrieve the things that we need
to do to keep us mobile today.
So there's already been a lot of research done in
terms of how to found these platforms offshore.
But this we're talking about
an entire city floating out in the ocean.
What would a geotechnical engineer need to know?
How do you prepare yourself
to address those challenges of the future?
Again, I said, is it going to be a prescriptive type of
an environment or is it going to be
a performance type of an environment? I don't know.
I jokingly tell people and I mean in
all seriousness, God willing,
I won't be around 30,
40 years from now to figure
this thing out, you guys will.
You need to be figuring it out and
thinking about what this would be.
Even though this is just a concept
that's being thrown out there,
this is something that you need to be thinking about.
The third scenario is the rural city,
but the fourth one is more interesting,
which is a frozen city concept. What would you do?
We do have a committee that looks into cold regions.
All of the stuff that goes
into a cold region environment.
What are the things that civil engineers need to do?
Geotech's have been there before.
We've done a lot of work to carry
the pipeline, Alaskan pipeline,
to bring it across,
and if you see in some of the AAC is advertised
when you'll see something like
a caterpillar up in the Arctic,
that's a lab that was built up there.
If you think about it,
why was it looking like
a caterpillar with all the legs and crapped up?
That's to address all of
the challenges and issues associated with permafrost
and so on and so forth to make sure that
that facility stays afloat. We've done that.
There is some knowledge already out there,
there's a lot of information out there.
But again, understanding all of that stuff and trying
to bring it down to simple performance criteria.
How do you do that? That's a challenge
I will post to the faculty here and
see this is something that we need to get
the next-generation prepared is
think in terms of performance,
that a lot of processes, tools,
skills available to be able to do these things.
But how do you zero this thing down into
a simple manageable performance criteria
that somebody can take and go design and build to?
I just tried to summarize this in
a small table on transportation.
Before I jump into this, the other thing,
[NOISE] like I talked about infrastructure.
One of the things that I dealt with in the past was,
all of us we keep using
our cell phones and a lot of us know
that we need transmission towers to be able
to be mobile and connected.
I still remember performing a lot of
geotechnical investigations and providing
recommendations for
transmission cell microwave towers and staff.
The guys would come to me and say
basically zero to quarter in settlement.
As a geotechnical engineer,
zero to coordinate, as I said, can do it.
But you'll find a way to do it because that's
a performance requirement for that type of
a facility so that they can still
be able to transmit and keep you connected.
Same thing we had some radar towers in Taiwan,
we had some problems
with it because we couldn't meet that criteria.
The criteria was so stringent that it was very
difficult. What do you do?
I know we use the term
performance-based and I always challenge,
and this is one of the discussions is if based on what.
[NOISE] That's the other challenge that I post
to all of you here is you cannot
understand performance and predict
performance if you don't
have a good track record of monitoring
it and having enough information
to be able to predict it.
Invariably what happens is monitoring,
maintenance and other kinds of things are not as
sexy as building something new.
I was involved with the three-plus billion dollar
Tappan Zee built project in New York.
There was budget for monitoring of
the new bridge while the old bridge was being demoed.
But when I requested budget to
instrument and monitor
this new three billion dollar investment,
I was turned down for a number of reasons.
This is something that I keep encouraging people
is as you go through the process,
also think in terms of the things that we need to do.
We do that in geotechnical practice.
I know we install instruments,
we monitor stability, we monitor pore pressure,
we have settlement platforms
and some of us who've been around
long enough will know that
every time you install a settlement platform,
that seems like a bulls-eye to
the bold guy who's moving the data
around and seems like he knocks it down every
time you install one.
But those are the things that we also need to be doing
as prudent engineers of
this practice that we
incorporate a lot of instrumentation and monitoring and
documentation and data collection to
be able to substantiate performance.
That's how you'll also gain some knowledge and
basis of performance of various towers.
Same thing on any other facilities, whether it's water,
wastewater conveyance,
storage, any of those facilities as well.
Every one of them has a certain performance.
Then the other thing I wanted to mention about
was you can have general criteria performance,
but can you generalize performance?
Because the performance and element of work
is based on the environment or the
setting in which it is.
You cannot take something that works here
in Virginia and basically say,
this is something that we will do in California.
Yes, to a certain extent,
given certain parameters and conditions,
but every environment is different.
We need to have good information and
data so that you can predict
performance and be able to define the expectation.
This is the list that I came
up with when we were doing the project in Utah.
The other thing that I always say is,
it's a little bit of a mixed bag in here, the first one.
Engineers are good at defining what they don't want or
don't like but it's hard for us to describe what we want.
Whenever I ask a young engineer to basically sit
down and develop performance criteria,
I say list down the things that you don't want to see on
this project and why.
Then we can talk in terms of yes or no,
and how do we come to a consensus and agreement.
These were the two or three things.
The first thing on the embankments, we said, okay,
you can build an embankment to carry
this highway so long as
you meet the settlement and
the differential settlement criteria and stuff.
I don't care what you build it with.
But we said no shredded tires and no wood chips,
because you are defining a box of performance.
You need to be able to at least say what you don't want.
That was my first go around.
In those days there were
concerns about fires and other things so
we said we're not going to
allow wood chips or shredded tires.
The contractor came up and we did all kinds of things.
We did lime stabilization, we had geofoam,
it was one of the largest applications
of geofoams to build
embankments because the anticipated settlements
in the Lake Bonneville set,
deposits was two three feet
based on the height of embankment.
We didn't want to load
the subsurface soils so we
said you can reduce the weight of the embankment.
They came up with geofoam,
that was one of the largest applications
in those days at that time.
That was allowed but even then,
there were concerns about performance of
the geofoam in an embankment
and what would need to be done.
We developed two layers of
protection from a glass main spill,
degradation and all those kinds of things.
We allowed it, but these two we didn't.
I know my good friend Cord is not here,
but we would not allow geopiers as
a foundation for bridges because we
were in a seismic environment and we
did not have enough information as to
the performance of a geopier in
a seismic environment and to sustain the structure above.
We said we won't allow geopier.
Didn't make some people happy but that was something that
we said we want and we
said we will not allow timber piles either.
We'll end up with a lot of pipe piles,
grill shafts were allowed,
pipe piles filled with concrete
or drill shafts. Those were permitted.
It's a question of when you define performance,
you have to make sure that anything can come into play.
This is something that you need to think
about when you're trying to define performance.
It's not only what you expect.
You also need to think about what not to
expect and make sure that you're covered either way.
This is something that I said,
how do you assure performances?
These are all the things that you need to make sure you
have handy as a tool.
Instrumentation, monitoring,
documentation, and also make sure
that you document these things and store it in
a format that you can retrieve it at a later date.
This was something else we learned is,
the data was documented in
a format that was not retrievable after a few years.
We learned that lesson the hard way.
[NOISE] Construction quality and
consistency on the payments,
we tried to monitor that with all the information,
but as I said,
once it's built, done.
But with today's environment of integrated delivery,
where you turn the facility over
to the concessionaire for a period of time.
They take and go through an extended effort of trying
to document a lot of these things so
that they have that information handy so
that they can make sure that they
maintain the facility in a good state of repair.
Anyway, so that's my $0.02
in terms of where the future is,
what we need to be looking at.
You have a good start as
a geotechnical engineer because we do this
already in a way based
on experience and observations and so on.
You need to be able to back it up with
good data to make sure that you are able to
substantiate your expectations because
I'm sure that's going to be
challenged by the contractor
or the builder or anybody else.
With that, I'm going to stop talking and saying,
I'll be more than glad to answer
any questions. I think I'm okay on time?
Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you Guna.
A lot of interesting points there
about how performance is going
to be changing the way we do projects in the future.
Are there any particular questions
that anybody has picked something up there?
One of the things that I noticed in
those last slides is we typically
design for strength criteria and
performance has just fallen out.
Now which one becomes more important?
If we're really worried about settlement,
can we cut down some of the strength criteria?
Yes.
Be more aggressive.
It's more performance. There's a question at the back.
[inaudible]
The question was, is there something that
ASCE can do to help go
beyond the construction quality
and assurance into instrumentation,
monitoring and collection of data and stuff.
ASCE as an entity can provide
policies to help large folks to do the things,
but we don't have
a contractual mechanism to be able to enforce it.
We can make these recommendations
to the industry through our industry leaders,
council leaders of our profession,
and reach out to other agencies to encourage them to
invest enough money up
front to be able to monitor these things,
but as a policy,
but not be able to enforce them.
Along with that point, would you agree that
the instrumentation we do on a project today might
be a contractual verification but the lessons we
learned are really going to save money down the future?
The future, that's where the benefit comes?
It is, but talking to
some other concessionaires and contractors,
I think it comes back to liability.
The contractors don't want to invest in instruments.
For one, they want to be done and gone.
We did have some of
those things built into a contract
and one of the contracts
where we said we want to install
retrievable sacrificial straps so
that the agency can retrieve it,
check it over a period of time to monitor
its performance but then I'm
told that they haven't done much with it anyway.
You can have contractual requirements
of installing it unless you
to contractually required
the contractors or the developers,
they're not going to do it because feel good about it.
Unless it's going to save the money
in terms of performance down the road.
It's one of those kinds of things that we as an industry
need to come together to be able to understand saying,
this is one of the challenges posed by
our industry leaders council ASCE is
to reduce the cost of
infrastructure by 50 percent by 2025.
The only way we're going to be able
to do that is to go back
to a performance type of a setting
where you don't have to go just
purely designed by strength and
not worry about performance
And hope that something works out at the end of the day.
The whole program costs reduction can only be achieved by
truly understanding performance and
how do you set this contract up.
Here's a challenge for you,
reduce cost 50 percent by the time you start your career.
The other questions. Yes back there.
[inaudible]
Yes.
The question is, are regulators more receptive to
performance criteria rather than fall
back on their requirements
as they've had it over the years?
That was the question?
Correct.
They're more receptive to looking at it from
a performance requirement perspective.
I've been on contracts where I've basically
told the Feds and these were projects funded by
the state which didn't require federal funding.
Anytime there is federal funding,
the Feds have a tendency to say,
"I'm putting my money into this, so therefore,
you will be complying with my requirements."
It's a question of control.
I always tell people control is an illusion.
Those of us who are married and have children,
we know what control means.
[LAUGHTER] That's the way of Feds trying to control.
I've challenged the Feds basically on
a few projects where it's
more performance and I said a simple thing,
like on the project that we started off,
they wanted us to come in
and drive the piles in 10-foot sections,
but the contractor chose to shop
well these hard piles and
bring them in 100-foot lengths and drive it
down because that was more economical for him.
But the Feds, they came back and said, "No,
you need to make them come back and do fill wells,
and test every well,
and have him do it in 10-foot sticks."
I said that was not the requirement.
We also need to be able to push back and stand
up in terms of what we truly believe in.
It's a question of a challenge.
Yeah, you can fall back and say,
this is what the regulators want and this is what
is prescribed in section so and so,
but we need to be able to challenge those things.
Same thing with drainage boxes.
Why would you want to just go with
the standard rectangular box versus
a round box which is more easy to
install and do things and so on.
We have done that, at least I've done it. It is doable.
Anything else?
You mentioned performance and you
mentioned production and cost.
Has there been [inaudible]
probabilistic framework to balance it?
I'm sure a lot of our members have,
but ASCE by itself,
we haven't taken on that stuff.
There aren't a lot of folks that are talking about
risk-based probabilistic type of
an approach, looking at things.
The insurance industry does that all the
time in terms of what needs and how it needs to get done.
But ASCE by itself,
we haven't done that yet.
We would encourage any of our members to look into it.
Yes.
Thanks. You were talking
about the project where you were trying to picture
modern and futuristic outlook and I was
wondering maybe if through those descriptions do you talk
about qualities and terminologies such
as artificial intelligence, automation,
data analytics, and so
on, and these kinds of things are being
implemented eventually like in civil engineering
or surface in the future,
I don't know what's your point in that?
Yes. That is something that we're also looking at it in
terms of all the things or elements that
go into our infrastructure.
This is one of my challenges to
the industry and to
the folks in the academy and others is,
for instance, I go back to pavements,
it's simple, I'm a simple-minded guy.
So if I go to pavements,
if we just keep talking about
surface course, base course, subgrade,
drainage, stability, aggregates, gradation,
we're going to be left behind.
Pavements are going to be a huge resource for energy
and housing of technology
whether it's for recharging batteries,
or harnessing solar energy,
or a lot of different things.
As civil engineers, that's my challenge to you is,
I want you to take control of that space.
Whether it's energy, transmission, collection,
or even supporting automobiles,
we need to be able to at least
understand and take ownership of the space.
Otherwise, you'll be relegated
to talking about gradation,
surface course, asphalt, concrete, and stuff.
So we are talking to folks about
all the elements of infrastructure and
all the technology that's going to go into it.
Yes, this is something else.
Also, we need to understand is,
how would these elements of work perform?
We have had some challenges from before where we
installed the traffic systems into the pavements,
and if it's not installed well,
it impacts the performance
of the pavement surface itself.
That's one of the things in
some universities where I've gone in and said.
They said, "Well, you have to embed
this thing three inches from
the surface for it to be able to function."
I said, "What's the optimal depth in which it has to be
installed so that it doesn't
cause falling or other issues to the pavement."
Because ultimately you'll be
held responsible for the pavement.
So you need to understand where these things go,
where they can go or cannot go,
how they will perform,
what are the implications to
the overall performance of the facility?
We're being pressed to be more integrated with
the entire design team and
more advanced technologies than we had been in the past.
Integration of systems, right, Jerry?
[LAUGHTER] Yes.
We have to take control of our own destiny. Yes, sir.
I have a question related to, say,
the future of some sectors in investigation.
You've talked a bit about
[inaudible].
All he's saying.
[LAUGHTER]
Are we going to be doing these many times as we've been
doing it past that, is my question?
That was a question that I asked your Institute Board.
I haven't had a straight answer yet.
[LAUGHTER] I guess the tools and
the technology is going to be different.
That's one of the things we talked about
driving down here from the airport was,
what's going to happen in terms of data?
Just forget the tools
of sampling and testing and so on and so forth,
just the existing data.
Because if we're talking about big data and we are
still stuck in time in terms of wanting more information,
and that's another one, I jokingly say this
but as geotechnical engineers,
there's not enough borings and testing that we can
get our hands on to be able to make a recommendation.
We have a lot of data.
Somebody at some point is going to get hold of
the data and as Allen pointed out,
he says, "Google is
going to produce geotechnical reports."
Because they're going to get
their hands on the data and they're going
to be able to use it and compare it,
and deliver the geotechnical reports.
I'm challenging all of you to get
yourself ahead of that game and
make sure that we figure out a way to stay in control.
Thank you, Guna.
Thank you.
Appreciate it. [APPLAUSE]