Good afternoon and welcome to
the thirteenth annual Schnabel Engineering lecture.
My name is George Filz, and I serve as the Director of
Virginia Tech Center for
Geotechnical Practice and Research.
I'd like to begin by recognizing Allen Cadden.
He will be introducing today's speaker.
Allen is a Principal Engineer, and the Director of
Strategic Development
for Schnabel Engineering Associates.
Allen Cadden is a great friend of
the Civil Engineering Department
in general and the Geo-Tech program in particular.
He sponsors many activities,
including Schnabel's membership in our center;
he is sponsoring this event
and many other things including the food and
the alcohol which I invite you
all join after the presentation.
We're grateful for all things that Allen
does to support our program,
so please join me now in
thanking Allen.
Please go ahead to introduce yourself. [APPLAUSE]
Good afternoon everybody.
It's Election Day.
Hope everybody took the opportunity
to exercise their right.
I trust everybody who laughed about it was a good thing.
I just want to mention that and make sure we're
aware of that before I [NOISE] dive
into the second most important event for the day,
introduction of Schnabel's lecturer.
Thank you, Dr. Filz [inaudible] .
Sandy, you're here somewhere?
Thank you very much for helping organize
this, and Taylor for organizing dinner last night.
We really appreciate that.
Some of you might know a little bit about Schnabel.
Schnabel has been around for over 60 years.
We're 60 years young,
I like to say or maybe I'm
60 years old, I don't know which one it is,
but we're getting there.
We have about 20 offices,
mostly on the East Coast,
but we work on projects across the country overall.
They're a little bit unique as
a geotechnical firm and a civil engineering firm,
we've actually worked and done 100 countries.
I've worked in other countries over
the last decade or so.
Over the 60 years, we've grown quite a
bit and changed a little bit the breadth of our services.
We've moved from digital.
We are solely geotechnical engineering firm,
just a little geosciences,
dam engineering, underground engineering and
house have become a significant part of our work.
Our vision is to improve the lives
by engineering solutions and managing risk,
complex, and destructive challenges.
Civil engineering is
an exciting business to be in these days.
I don't think we're ever going to run out of
interesting challenges and everyday seems to be a new
one from the near failure of Oroville dam last year to some of
the innovative transportation
solutions that we're hearing
about from the boring company in [inaudible] ,
I think we got a lot in
store for us here in the future.
With these exciting problems comes
the different non-engineering challenges
that you would likely face in your career.
We host this lecture each year to bring
you different based off
of our profession outside of
the academic halls that regularly hear.
Although the nice thing is it's very practical education.
You will see clear to appreciate that.
These lectures, many of them have been
recorded and are available in your library.
But they present different aspects
of a career in civil engineering.
Take this
[LAUGHTER]
[inaudible].
they typically share their stories with
their careers and they also do a little bit
of pontificating and stuff,
what you might see as your careers begin.
Things have changed so much in my career,
I don't even want to venture to
guess but you're going to see throughout here
so it's a good basis to start from right now.
Today we're actually bringing you a friend of
mine and of Schnabel engineer, Mr. Brian Vella.
Mr Vella has support Schnabel Engineering over
the years and at one time
served on our board of directors.
For over 30 years,
Mr. Vella has focused his practice on
heavy in commercial construction matters.
He has dealt with
contract formation interpretation issues,
as well as resolution of disputes
with litigation, arbitration mediation.
He gravitated to contractors, engineers,
and owners throughout all phases
of construction processes,
on projects across the United States and oversees.
Issues that included deffective specifications,
different site conditions with
accelerated delays, inefficiency plagues.
Mr Vella has written
numerous articles and book chapters and
is a frequent speaker of construction related topics.
Just as in law practice he's
an adjunct member at
the University of Virginia School of Law.
He is a member of the bar in the Commonwealth of Virginia
and in the District of Columbia,
he served as members of the Board of Governors,
for the construction of law section
in Virginia State Bar.
As an active member of
the Association General Contractors of America
and the [inaudible] amongst other organizations.
We are honored that Mr. Vella joins our past
twelve lecturers here at Virginia Tech.
Today is the topic
subtitled'' How engineering put
my kids through college''.
I wish it could be the other way around,
however, it's nice to know that we're helping out.
Thank you and welcome Mr. Vella [APPLAUSE]
I did all my electronic gears, squared away here.
Thank you Allen and it really
is a privilege for me to be here today.
I'm having a little fun with the first slide.
In terms of sometimes there
can be a little bit of tension
between the engineering community,
and the legal community.
We're going to explore some of those reasons
today and talk about some of the projects that
I've had the privilege to be involved with.
Some of which involve folks that are in this room.
Despite the fact that there are sometimes some tensions,
I've often been told that you need to start
off of talk like this with a little bit of humor.
Many of you are getting ready to graduate.
You're going to be engineers, and
the one thing you need to
know to be a successful engineer,
at least at the start of your career,
is a good lawyer joke.
So I'm going to tell you the oldest lawyer joke I
know, maybe new to a lot of you, but here it goes.
At the end of a long and distinguished career,
a lawyer passes away, and he gets to
the pearly gates and
finds that there's been a bit of a mix up.
His name's not on the list and so they say we're sorry,
but you're misdirected and they send them to hell.
He gets to hell, and he finds out the conditions
there are just hellish.
It's very unpleasant, but he does what engineers do.
He looks around, assesses
the situation, and he gets to work.
Soon enough, he's got the air conditioning
up and running, and he's working on
a chilled water system.
They look down from heaven and think,
"Oh no, we've made a mistake here.
We can go back to the books."
They get it all squared away,
and God speaks down and He says,
"Send up my engineer.
There's been a mistake. We've got it reconciled,
send him up", and the devil says to God "Oh,
no, we like the engineer.
He's a good hand, and we're making
a lot of progress here.
I think we're going to keep him".
God's a little bit angry at this point.
He says," Listen, I'm not going to
tell you again, you send him up,
or I'm going to sue",
and the devil just laughs, he says to God,
"Right and where are you going to find a lawyer?"
[LAUGHTER] Hear that when
I've often told my friends in Schnabel
who I'm privileged to have
both as friends and as clients,
that there's nothing I like better than lawyer jokes,
particularly when I'm on the clock.
If you know of any other lawyer joke send them to Allen,
send them to Walt, and the next time
that we get together for a client meeting,
we'll spend the first hour or so telling lawyer jokes.
The truth is I'm a little bit envious of engineers.
You guys take on challenges, and you
accomplish things that a layman like
me or lawyers that are not trained in
hard sciences can't even imagine how
you work your way around these things
many times. You do great things, and
it's a tribute to the engineering community that we
enjoy the standards that we do in
this country and the luxuries that we have.
My esteem for engineers is probably
best summed up by the fact that my daughter's dating one,
he'll be graduating from Texas A&M in
a couple of weeks with a degree in engineering,
and so good enough for my daughter, good enough for me.
Enough about me. The question is,
as part of this lecture is,
so where is it that your world intersects with my world?
How can it be that people who do
things and build things have
a relatively constant opportunity
to come in contact with the legal community.
I want to explore some of those things today.
I had to find my clicker here for slides.
How many of you have had
some involvement in the construction industry in
some form or fashion? Lots of folks.
The first slide I want to show
you is probably self-evident.
Construction is contracting.
It's risky business, and there are risks
that are somewhat more obvious ones.
You have worker safety, potential fires, floods,
lots of things that can impact
a construction project once it's underway,
that can be very costly and very difficult to deal with.
Those things are typically
dealt with though, through insurance.
A contractor or an owner carries
insurance policies that allow
these kinds of risk, generally,
to be dealt with in ways that
don't necessarily require litigation,
or going to court, or arbitration.
The kinds of projects that I tend to be involved
with are those where
there's a dispute between the parties,
and they tend to be larger complex projects.
This is the old World Trade Center.
But you can see the number of cranes that are involved,
the logistics of getting materials,
people in and out.
This is the new World Trade Center
right in the middle of New York.
You can see it's going up with
all sorts of activity around it.
This is a channel project.
This is why I say I'm envious of engineers.
If anybody could ever explain to me how you make
a tunnel under the English Channel,
to me, it's just awesome stuff,
but it's a huge undertaking,
and when even small things get off track,
the dollars involved can be astronomical.
A tunnel boring machine,
which is used on this project,
those pieces of equipment are so
incredibly expensive that any idle time at
all can quickly amount
to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
This is a project in which I did work.
It was probably two and a half years.
This is the Jamestown-Verrazzano bridge
across Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.
It had a lot of neat features to it.
One was this heavy lift system that would
take precast spans and lift them into place.
But when you're dealing with
barge mounted cranes and marine equipment, again,
the cost on a daily basis to
a contractor is hard to get your arms around.
So if there's any idle time,
there is anything that delays a project like
this for any period of time at all,
it's going to cost
somebody a significant amount of money.
Generally, those kinds of things
are not covered by insurance.
You have to look to your contract to see how the contract
assigns the risk of delays and changes to the work,
and that's generally where I get involved.
The courts have recognized that on projects like this,
except in the middle of a battlefield,
nowhere must men coordinate the movement of
other men and materials in the midst of
such chaos and with such limited certainty of
present facts and future occurrences
as in a huge construction project.
This judge got it.
This judge understood the complexities of
scheduling and the logistics and
the costs associated with a large construction project.
I find that this judge is very much the exception.
Many times we are in court with judges who have had
no more exposure to
a large construction project
than any other person off the street.
They may be well-versed
in divorce cases or traffic cases,
or other kinds of disputes they hear on a daily basis,
but when they're confronted with a construction dispute,
they're very often out of their element.
But in this case, the judge understood it.
Here's a good example of, again,
we're going back to
the reconstruction of the World Trade Center.
You can see this is like a military operation.
You've got equipment, you've got people.
On this project, you probably have
500-600 craft labor people out there,
not to mention the need to bring in steel,
concrete, haul off the rubble.
All of that has to be
coordinated while you're not impeding traffic
and otherwise inconveniencing the rest of
the operation and the commercial world
that's happening right around us.
You can see there are great number of
buildings that are still functioning,
and people have to get in to work each day
and carry on their lives.
This is the kind of project in which I have
gotten involved and had
a 30-year career on behalf of contractors,
helping them prosecute claims.
What that means is,
we will be asked to come in,
most contractors have a job cost report
of some type, they can tell,
we're 30 percent into this project
and we're already burned
through 50 percent of our budget.
So we're $20 million under water already,
and there is no sign
that this is going to get any better.
We're behind schedule, and the question is, why?
Why is that happening?
Is that happening as a result
of something for which the contractor is responsible,
or something for which
the owner and/or an agent of the owner?
In many cases, that other party,
and we're going to talk about, is
the engineer, the architect.
If you take nothing else away from this,
understand that change is equal dollars.
If a contractor starts
off with his plan, and it's unimpeded,
and it goes according to schedule,
and everything goes great,
then they make a profit and everybody is happy,
and I never see those cases.
Those are the happy ones.
The ones that I see are the ones
that don't go according to plan,
they don't go according to schedule,
and there are changes.
Changes can be additional work, doing work differently,
doing work out of sequence,
taking longer to get work done because you're waiting for
an answer to a design problem
that's come up during construction.
But in any event,
change is equal dollars.
Change is relative to what?
For those of you who had
some involvement with construction contracting,
this is the 101 level diagram
for explaining who the parties are generally,
but at the top of the pyramid you have the owner.
The owner decides that they want something,
they want a building,
they want a bridge, they want an airport,
they want a dam, whatever.
The owner is the one who sets the criteria,
what is it that they want,
and when they decide what it is they want,
they then go to the architect engineer.
What this chart is poor in
showing is that below the architect engineer,
just like below the contractor, you have subcontractors,
below the architect and engineer,
are many sub-consultants.
You may have a geotechnical consultant,
you may have a structural engineer,
you may have a MEP engineer,
but all of those engineering entities
work with the architect to meet the owner's objectives,
and then they pass their work product up to
the architect who's responsible to coordinate it,
makes sure it all fits together, works together,
it's compatible, and it gives
the owner what the owner wants.
The path goes from the architect up to the owner.
Now the owner takes that package,
that design package, plans,
specifications, and typically, a geotechnical report,
and puts them out to bid.
On a typical project,
sometimes they negotiate with a particular contractor,
but let's just say it's a typical circumstance
where the owner now takes the design package,
puts it out to bid,
gives it to the general contractor,
and the general contractor and
the owner come to an agreement.
They come to an agreement on
price, and they come to an agreement on the schedule.
The contractor says, "Look,
I can do this project for you.
It's $35 million, it's two and a half years"
They sign off on the contract,
and neither one of them really pays
too much attention to all the other terms and conditions.
For the lawyer, the price
and the schedule are almost irrelevant.
Those are commercial terms.
What I look at when I look at a contract is
how does the contract allocate risks between the parties?
Does the contract have a different site condition clause?
Does the contract have a changes provision?
Does the contract say that there's
an indemnity requirement that if one party is negligent,
that they're going to indemnify the other?
All of those contract provisions take the risk of
a large construction project in attempt
to assign risk to different parties.
Now in practice, each of
those parties will do their level best to
avoid responsibility when a problem occurs.
So despite what may be written in the contract,
how a contract is read and
interpreted results in people like me getting involved.
On a large project,
if there's a conflict with the design documents,
and so a duct bank runs right into
the same spot where a concrete pile is,
and there's no coordination
that's going to overcome that.
Somebody with an engineering degree is got to sit down,
figure out how to reconcile that conflict,
and the process of doing that takes a matter of weeks,
and then you have to reorder material,
and all of that ends up delaying
the schedule for some period of time.
The contractor is going to say to the owner,
"You owe me money for that.
These plans and specifications are not my responsibility,
you gave them to me."
The owner is going to say, "Well,
the contract says that the architect gets
to make the first pass at whether
or not this is a change or not,
so let's ask the architect,"
and the architect looks at it and says,
"This contractor is just trying
to get a change order to get additional money.
We think that this was just a pure coordination issue,
and so the responsibility's on the contractor."
So you have this loggerheads about how to
deal with a problem that has to be dealt
with if this project is going to be delivered.
Many times, the parties can work it out.
In fact, the great majority of times parties work it out,
but sometimes they don't,
and when they don't,
many of you probably don't remember Mike Tyson.
He was a boxer who was fairly notorious guy,
he was a bad guy.
You've to be a bad guy to have
a tattoo like that on your face.
But he has a great quote,
that everyone has a plan
until they get punched in the mouth.
The contractor has a plan,
he's got a scheduling, he's got it all figured out.
He's got his equipment lined up, material ordered,
everything's ready to go,
and then he gets punched in the mouth,
something happens that was unexpected.
This is another little cartoon that I've
always found interesting [LAUGHTER].
You got your plans,
and you think you're doing the right thing,
but it turns out that that's
not what the owner wanted at all.
He wants the moat on the outside of the wall,
not on the inside of the wall.
Those are the kinds of conflicts that obviously,
this is a cartoon version,
but it's not far off reality sometimes.
You can get design documents that
the contractor is working
to build and building in accordance with the plans,
and that's really not what the owner wants.
The owner now comes in and says,
"I'm going to direct you to do additional work."
It's going to cost more,
it's going to take longer on the schedule,
and who's going to be responsible for that?
Well, let the lawyer sort it out.
When parties can't figure it out themselves,
they turn to the court system,
they turn to the Lady Justice
to go out and hire lawyers on both sides who are
going to sit with
their clients and try and sort out contractually,
factually, legally, who is responsible
for changes on a project that
has cost sometimes tens of millions.
The largest matter that
I've personally been involved with
was $130 million problem on
a project to transit project in New Jersey that
had literally hundreds of issues to try and sort out.
There wasn't one single thing,
it was 103 issues at
the end of that project that we had to try and go to
a judge who didn't know anything
about construction to get resolution on.
I'm not going to tell you that the court system is
necessarily the best forum to get things resolved,
but in our system of justice,
that's where you go when you have a contract dispute.
Again, back to this little diagram.
The courts have assigned
different responsibilities to
different players in this play.
The owner, as we talked about before,
first goes to the architect and commissions
a set of plans and specifications
in a geotechnical report.
Those are provided by the architect to the owner,
the owner then provides them to the contractor.
The contractor says, "There's a problem here.
These are not well-coordinated, and I'm stuck.
I need answers and it's costing me money."
Well, the courts have looked at that and said,
"Well, as far back as 1917,
the United States Supreme Court said that,
"If the contractor is bound to
build according to the plans and
specifications prepared by the owner,
the contractor will not be responsible for
the consequences of defects
and the plans and specifications."
It's a no-fault deal.
If I'm a contractor and I get a set of plans and
specifications and there's a problem,
I don't have to figure out why there's a problem,
or who's responsible for the problem,
I simply go back to the owner and I
say to the owner, "There's a conflict.
You can see on sheet X and sheet Y,
and we overlay those things,
here's a conflict, and I need resolution of that.
I'm not a licensed engineer,
I'm not licensed to practice architecture,
you need to direct me on how to proceed."
So it's a very low bar for contractors to get over,
to prove entitlement to additional compensation.
Their remedy against the owner is
simply to show there's a problem,
you gave me these plans,
it's your problem, pay me.
Well, the natural response from an owner is to say,
"Well, I'm just an owner, what do you want for me?
I don't know anything about it.
I didn't prepare these plans and specs.
I certainly didn't prepare the geotechnical report.
So if I'm liable to you, Mr. contractor,
then surely the architect and engineer is
responsible to me as the
owner," and the courts have said,
"No, that's not necessarily the case."
Architects and engineers belong to a pretty good club,
that's also lawyers and doctors are part of that club.
Professional service providers.
The law does not require perfection of architects,
or engineers, or doctors, or lawyers.
As a provider of professional services,
you're held to what's called the standard of care.
The standard of care is,
you're required to do
your work and to exercise the care and skill ordinarily
exercised by other members
of the engineering profession in
performing professional engineering services
under similar circumstances.
It's almost a peer review thing.
You can deliver a set of plans and specifications to
an owner that unquestionably
have errors and omissions in them.
That doesn't make you financially responsible,
unless those errors and omissions
arose because you didn't meet the standard of care.
It's a point that's hard to prove.
It's hard to demonstrate many times.
If an engineer or
an architect has just flubbed it somehow,
they've missed some provision of the building code,
well, that's a pretty easy call.
You could say, well, they didn't meet
the standard of care because
any other similarly trained engineer
faced with the same problem surely would have checked
the building code before they
stamp that set of drawings and deliver it.
But a lot of times engineers and architects face
circumstances and they're facing
problems that are unique.
They're different, they're one-off kinds
of problems and there's
no textbook you can go to and say,
here, follow this formula,
you surely would have gotten the right answer.
Many times the owners left in the middle.
They have a claim coming upstream to them
from the contractor for additional compensation,
but they really don't have an avenue to
go and chase the engineer or the architect
unless they feel like they can make a case that there was
an error or omission that arose
because of a breach of the standard of care.
In your profession,
you will be held to this standard of care.
You have to think to yourself in the product that you
produce and if you get to
the point where you're a PE before you stamp things,
are you doing those things?
Have you taken all the precautions and thought through
the problem in ways that
you believe that your peers would agree with you?
That yes, that was a reasonable course of action.
Now, if you give
an engineering problem to 10 different engineers,
you might get three different results
or four different results.
It doesn't mean that the result
that you came up with was wrong.
Because they may be
four different reasonable results because of
different ways of attacking the problem.
This is where the standard of care
can be a little bit murky in terms of determining,
have you met the standard or
have you not met the standard?
This is where lawyers get
paid to take on these kinds of cases.
Let's talk a little bit about how this works in practice.
This is a project
that I got involved with maybe 20 years ago.
In fact, it was my introduction to Schnabel Engineering.
In a moment I'll explain how that is.
This is a project called Pentagon Row,
and it's right across the street from the Pentagon.
At the time it was a new project,
you see these all the time now,
but this lower level is
a commercial level and it's concrete and CMU,
it's all masonry and it's owned by owner A.
Above it are stick built or wooden of heart structure,
and it's owned by owner B.
Owner A has their architect
put together the plan for the commercial,
[NOISE] and owner B has
their architect put together
their plan for the apartment level,
and then those two sets of
plans went to the engineer record,
the architect of record,
who is supposed to coordinate to make sure
that the part sitting on
the concrete was coordinated and everything fit together.
They also provided a geotechnical report to our client,
so my client was a company called
Foulger-Pratt and they contracted to build this.
As I mentioned before,
part of what the owner gave them was a set
of plans and specifications
and a geotechnical report that talked
about water conditions at
the site and where the groundwater was,
and what they could expect in
terms of dewatering and etc.
They arrived at a price,
they agreed on a schedule,
Foulger-Pratt went to work,
and the water conditions
at the site turned out to be a little
more challenging than what
the owner's geotechnical report had indicated.
The geotechnical report said that there was water,
groundwater was at level X,
nothing unusual, nothing extraordinary,
and when they begun the activation,
they found artesian conditions at the site.
In order for me,
as the attorney to help make a case for my client,
that what was encountered at the site was
different than what was
indicated in the geotechnical report,
we go out and get
a consulting engineer, a geotechnical engineer.
In this case, it was Gordon Matheson at Schnabel,
and that was my first introduction to Schnabel.
Gordon did a tremendous job and ultimately helped
engineer a fix that resulted
in redoing the foundation system for the structure,
a different mechanism for dewatering the site.
It was a very, very costly and
time-consuming problem to overcome,
but what nobody knew at the time was that was
the tip of the iceberg for this project.
Once we got out of the ground,
I wish I had more photos
on this project because now we're up at the roof level.
What happened with the plans
on this project is that you had
the ground level concrete and masonry structure,
and now when the apartment building design
was placed on top of it,
it fit within the same footprint,
but internally, the designs were not coordinated.
Where you had elevator openings or stairwells that
couldn't be moved because they were in
the underlying structure already cast into concrete,
now the contractor is charged with laying out his work
and the space available
to layout the rooms and the layout,
the apartments, was not consistent
with the underlying concrete structure.
The architects response was,
"You just go coordinate it. Figure it out."
Well, [LAUGHTER] as a contractor,
that's not your prerogative to go figure it out.
The problem was, in order to make the adjustments
to make everything fit on this concrete slab,
you needed to move walls and move things around
features internally within the structure, bearing walls,
for instance, that you
can't just say to a contractor, "Well,
I know that's a bearing wall, but
move it a foot and a half to the right."
There's nothing [LAUGHTER] under to support
it if you move it a foot and a half to the right.
Or if you move it even six inches,
even if it's not a bearing wall,
you've diminished the size of
the room that you've now laid out,
so that may not meet code and it
no longer qualifies as a bedroom.
I mean, all of these things are
the responsibility of the architect to resolve
these things and coordinate all of that so that
when the contractor is
handed this set of plans and specifications,
it's like being handed a recipe if you're a baker.
You're not supposed to use any particular ingenuity.
You're supposed to follow the recipe.
If it says, two cups of flour and two eggs,
you'll say, "Well, yeah,
maybe I'll take some liberties here."
You follow the recipe and you get
exactly what it is you are tasked with delivering.
Here the contractor was trying to follow the recipe,
and the recipe didn't work.
It was uncoordinated.
There were conflicts.
Finally, there was an area
up here on the roof because when you
carry all these changes
and modifications up through the structure,
what the architect then didn't
account for was what impact is it going to have
on all the ridge lines and
the intersecting roof lines
that were a part of this structure?
There was an area here that was just open
to the weather for months that was
referred to jokingly as Area
51 because nobody knew what was going on there.
Nobody had an answer for what was going on there.
Finally, the contractor said,
"I will not spend
any more of my money until you get this resolved."
The owner terminated the contractor, and we ended up in
a $50 million dispute over who's
going to be responsible for delays to the project,
late opening, loss of rental revenues,
all things that cascaded from the fact
that the architect hadn't
bothered to coordinate these drawings.
The architects sat back on the sidelines and said, "Well,
you're the owner and contractor you
need to figure that out, that's your problem."
I would submit to you that
that architect did not
meet the standard care in this case.
That's just one example
of a matter in which we had been involved.
Other than the artesian conditions,
it wasn't terribly specific to geotechnical matters,
but here's one that is.
This is in Ellis Square Park,
which is in downtown Savannah, Georgia.
Well, it looks like a park,
now this is the finished product.
All of this is sitting
over a four-story underground parking garage.
The city wanted a garage
and they had an old concrete structure there,
it was really an eyesore.
They had this concept for
this very nice pedestrian friendly park.
So they put together
a geotechnical report and
a plan for the construction of this facility,
and they put it out to bid,
and part of that geotechnical report
was issued by a company called WPC.
WPC report number 1,
on an area this size
the owner decided four borings was adequate.
That's all they needed to accurately forecast what
those underground conditions were going to
be on this project site.
Now, this site is right in
the middle of some very old buildings
in the city of Savannah.
Unreinforced masonry buildings that
couldn't tolerate much in the way of movement.
This was the deepest excavation that had ever been
attempted in this part of the city as well.
They were embarking on a high risk venture here.
They were going deeper than anybody ever had to excavate,
and they were doing it in
close proximity to buildings that,
this is not some greenfield project
out in the middle of a cornfield somewhere.
This is in the middle of the city.
In any event, they provided four borings.
They asked their geotechnical engineer to
give them four borings that they
provided to the contractor.
Of those four borings,
one of them met refusal before it even got to the bottom
of the proposal excavation,
that was boring over here, boring Number 1.
Boring 2 showed a little bit of
soft clay at a certain elevation,
but the rest of these showed sand and clay sand
certainly to the bottom of
the area where the the excavation was intended to go.
Further the geotechnical report,
and I will read all of this,
but they interpreted
their own borings for the contractor.
A lot of times a geotechnical consultant won't do this.
They just give the contractor the raw data and say,
"I've given you the borings,
you have to make your own conclusions
about what the conditions are."
Well, here they looked
at their own geotechnical investigation.
They said, fine sands were
predominantly encountered in
the upper 70 feet within the borings,
and that's finding is consistent with
the general soil conditions in the area,
so they said, we found what we expected to find,
its sand, and we're going to give you
earth pressure design parameters that you can
use to calculate the Earth pressure
in the design of the sidewalls of the basement,
which was the partly dry.
They looked at the data.
They said it was sand,
they gave these design parameters,
and so the contractor proceeded accordingly.
The whole idea was now we took this and modeled it.
If you were to take this area
and you'll recognize this shape before we're done here,
but it's like two squares.
If you were to just take
it and pull it out of the ground,
this was all sand
in the upper 70 feet according to the report,
where there's one pocket of
soft clay and then underlying by a layer of morel.
That's what the contractor thought that they
were getting themselves into.
The idea for this project was,
before any excavation started,
they will go around the perimeter and install
a soil cement mix wall down to
the bottom of the proposed excavation.
Then within that soil cement wall
they would put soldier piles.
Then as the excavation proceeded down to a certain level,
they would install tiebacks to hold
this wall in place and allow the excavation to perceive,
that was the plan.
This was the machine that was used
and this is the, sorry.
This is the constructed wall now.
Our client was a Japanese company called Raito,
and they had this very sophisticated
soil cement mixing machine.
You can see it's three augers around
the entire perimeter and make this wall.
You can see up at the top,
these are the soldier piles taking up.
While the material was still liquid,
after they had drilled down, injected cement,
they would pull their machine out and set soldier piles.
You can also see that there are
some rows of tiebacks here.
That was the intention,
which was to excavate and to keep this project safe,
and in no danger of having excessive movement.
When work began on the North side of
this project up here,
the tiebacks, when they were putting them in,
the spoil was coming out of this hole were not sand,
they were getting soft clay, very,
very soft marine clays started coming
up when they were doing their work up in this area.
They stopped work and said,
"We need more borings."
They went to the owner and said, "Give us
more borings of this area,
because we need to know what's going on up here.
We think we've got a different condition that may
take different means and methods, as a contractor."
Sure enough, when we looked at
those set of borings, the new borings,
this three and this one over here,
show now a very distinct layer of
soft clay along that Northern boundary of the property.
Now the plan to proceed and design this wall and plan
the excavation for sandy conditions
had to be modified significantly.
The contractor shifted operations away
from the North wall and move down to the South wall.
They were doing jet grouting up in the area of
the North wall and had to
shift their resources over to the South wall,
and begin excavation there.
This row of masonry buildings here,
there was a woman who used to have a cooking show on TV,
her name was Paula Deen,
and that's her restaurant.
This was like a big,
big tourist draw in the City of Savannah.
It was very, very important to the owners,
not only of the building but the city elders there,
not to disrupt this operation,
not to do anything to dampen tourist trade.
God knows, they didn't want things shut down
because of this construction operation.
Construction is moving along in that area,
and again, we're down now near the bottom,
we're right about the 30-foot level.
You can see a row of tiebacks,
and there's a dewatering well here.
Things seem to be moving along reasonably well.
This gives you a better look at
the close proximity of these buildings to this wall.
You can tell if there's any movement at all,
it's not going to go well for that set of buildings.
This is the South side,
back over here is the North side.
Again, this is the North side,
they're doing the jet grouting up here,
excavating in the South.
Ed Cording was one of your prior speakers here.
Ed living in Savannah at the time,
he's one of the preeminent soil mechanics
and geotechnical people around,
and he's walking his dog and
he starts talking to
the construction guy is saying, "Look,
I'm seeing cracks up here and this is
outside of the limits of the excavation,
we're outside of the hole now
and there are cracks that are appearing in the ground."
I'm not sure that these photos
are doing this justice here,
but I've got a better map here.
Seventy-five feet West outside of the excavation now,
you're starting to see cracks
developing in the sidewalks.
There's another building that was even further away,
102 feet West of the excavation wall,
and so the alarm bells started going off.
What is going on here?
Dr. Cording went out
and mapped the cracks that were occurring.
We looked at the excavation that was here.
This is the jet grouting that's going on up here.
This is the role of these Paula Deen
and the other masonry buildings here,
and Dr. Cording is seeing cracks.
Seventy-five feet outside of
the excavation here behind the wall,
and 102 feet or more behind this wall.
That foretells some very,
very potentially some serious things for this excavation.
Ultimately, another consultant was brought in,
Dr. Alan Marr, and you'll see his name up here.
Dr. Marr was brought in to do test
pitting in this excavation.
After digging a series of test pits,
what Dr. Marr found out was that this wasn't
all sand down to 75 feet.
He had inter-bedded soft clay and
sand, and those strength parameters for
that material were markedly different than what had
been indicated in the geotechnical report from the owner.
Now the contractors faced with,
"This is a very different scenario
than what we thought we'd gotten ourselves into.
What do we do now?"
Luckily, Alan Marr is
a top-notch person, and Ed Cording is a top-notch person.
We looked at them, we model these things.
These are exhibits that were used in
the trial of this case because the owner said,
"This is your problem.
I know we told you we use
the word clay in our geotechnical report.
I know we said it was only in one spot,
and I know we didn't say it was near the bottom of
the excavation. I know we gave you
soil strength parameters for sand.
But nevertheless, because the word clay
appeared in our geotechnical report,
then you had fair notice of
what you're getting yourself into.
This is your problem, contractor."
After about $12 million,
we end up in court trying this case to a jury,
and I'm proud to say we got every penny.
But this was one of the exhibits to show the difference
between what the condition was
anticipated based on the WPC report
and the conditions that were
actually encountered based on the test
pitting that was done by Dr. Alan Marr.
The implications again were,
now we're going to rotate around here,
so give me a second.
We're just looking at this from different angles.
What does this mean
from the standpoint of constructability?
The first thing that we had to do is figure out,
is this even a safe condition that we're working in?
What our geotechnical experts told us was
that if conditions had
been as described in the geotechnical report,
then as you went from level B down to level C,
you should have about a quarter
of inch lateral displacement.
It would be concentrated between the B and C levels.
You wouldn't have displacement
at level B, no additional displacement.
No displacement close to the bottom of the soldier pile,
which is this extending below here,
and very small surface
settlement close to the wall up here in the active zone,
which is not what we were seeing in the field.
Remember, the cracks that we were seeing in
the field were 75 or 100 feet back from
this wall indicating that there
was something happening here that was not anticipated.
One of the things was I always assume that,
well, if the wall's in trouble,
it's going to deflect into the hole.
This is the excavated side and
the wall would would deflect this way.
One fact was observed was this wall was moving out.
It was moving out,
and I'll show you here in just a minute,
I've got some better diagrams.
The actual movement [NOISE] from 30-40 feet,
the inclinometer showed displacement over
the height of a wall into the bottom of the soldier pile.
I keep [LAUGHTER] clicking the wrong button here.
[NOISE]
This whole wall was
moving and the tie back for not doing their job.
The whole point of the tie back is to
keep that wall from deflecting and
moving and from the bottom
of the soldier pile to the top of the wall,
you're seeing movement and that movement indicated that
there was readings below the bottom of the soldier pile.
If that's true, if they're so
moving below the bottom of the soldier pile,
and you're seeing cracks 50-100
feet behind the excavation outside the active zone,
up here, you've got a very different situation.
You've got a very serious potential
for a global instability problem.
The factor of safety
that was calculated if this excavation
had continued down to
the design level at 45 feet would have been below one.
At that point, when these calculations were done,
the excavation stopped completely,
and the contractor begin bringing soil back into
the hole to shore up and
placing soil back up against the wall in this area
to add support to the wall and to
arrest any further movement of this wall.
Ultimately, again this is
a diagram that we did for the trial,
but this was the phenomenon that we were hoping to avoid.
Ultimately, the fix was to take this soil
mixing machine from right to
turn it perpendicular to the wall,
build buttresses to the wall,
concrete buttresses that held that wall in place,
until you could excavate down through
those and lock everything in
place with slabs on grade.
Ultimately, the project was built,
and you saw a picture of it at the beginning,
it turned out to be a very lovely park,
but it came at a high cost.
Again, the geotechnical expert in that case,
who prepared the geotechnical report for the owner,
I don't think it was his fault.
We got the report that didn't
accurately describe the conditions,
but it was the owner who said,
"Look in this great big area,
I think four borings is adequate.
One of them met refusal.
One of them you can just take and toss.
It had three borings and the owner said,
"I'll take that risk."
When the chickens came home to roost,
so to speak, he didn't want to take the risk.
Anyway, that ended up going to a jury trial.
As I said, that's how it ultimately got resolved.
This one goes under
the heading of no good deed goes unpunished.
Schnabel was involved.
University of South Carolina had
a successful Collegiate Baseball Team.
They won the College World Series and they decided,
we need a first grade stadium.
They had some property that they owned.
You can see the outline here.
You can probably see some of
the topographical marks up here.
This existing piece of property was one that
they targeted for construction.
Schnabel went out and did a geotechnical report.
They made a preliminary set of
recommendations that in that area,
where you can see that was falling off,
that there were construction debris
had been reported years ago, and it wouldn't be
suitable for structural support and
will require complete removal and replacement.
Then did a final recommendation saying
the construction debris area will
require complete removal and
replacement or further investigation to determine
the most cost-effective course of
action to stabilize the area.
The geotechnical engineer provides
all of that to the architect.
The architect in this case did nothing with it,
didn't write it in little plans and specs.
As a result, the work on
this project proceeded without
regard to these recommendations.
This was a stadium afterwards, ultimately built.
It's a first grade facility.
It's really a great facility.
The area that we looked at
earlier [NOISE] up here and you can
tell it's an area level
was draining off down toward the river,
but there was a depression in
that area that had been filled with junk earlier on.
That's the area where problems began to occur.
Now we're looking out along the left field line,
here's some bleachers that sit over
a concrete garage structure where
they put their field equipment
and maintenance equipment and all that stuff.
Then you have bleachers
in a little concourse area out here.
If you walk out there,
this little seating concourse area,
you begin to see and there's the bleachers again.
Cracks, not thermal cracks,
cracks and all the concrete that was happening out
there and this was
a year or two after the construction was complete,
so it was a sign that things were
happening and they were happening
fairly rapidly after construction.
This wasn't after 20 years.
Again, this is the area that is for the intersection of
the concourse and the left field bleachers, more cracks.
[NOISE] There were all sorts of measurements taken,
trying to get a sophisticated reading on it.
Here now we're outside along that same left field line,
crack gauges that are put in place.
But here even to
the untrained eye you can look down there and eyeball it.
Concrete is not supposed to sag like that
that's a bad thing to see.
In looking at this,
you can tell that the settlement in this area
was extreme and that's
the source of the cracking, was right there.
Again, [NOISE] in the area,
these are the bleachers.
This is actually the roof of
the garage structure underneath.
Now we're underneath looking up,
and the roof of this structure needed repair,
the floor of the structure.
There were several millions of dollars of repairs needed
to stabilize this brand new facility.
What the university did was to go out and sue
everybody that they could get
their arms around, including Schnabel,
who had provided the geotechnical report
that the university was
using to point to the other project participants saying,
look, here's a report that
the geotechnical engineer told you.
You need to go out and replace that mark
and you couldn't build on it yet, you didn't do it.
They're saying to the contractor, you're responsible.
They're saying to the architect
you're responsible because
you didn't follow Schnabel's recommendations.
Then they said to Schnabel, well you've got insurance,
so you're in the mix as well.
Somehow, as I said earlier,
this is the no good deed goes unpunished.
Even very very good work by
an engineer that was used
by the owner to make his case against somebody else.
He turned around because money is
an issue and drags in another company anyway,
a company that clearly
had performed in accordance to the standard of care.
We know that Schnabel's recommendations
were not written to the specs.
We know that Schnabel was never
contacted regarding additional investigation.
We know that the owner's consultant,
they did a remedial investigation and confirmed that
the rubble fill had not been removed and none of that
consultants data suggests that measures
were taken to stabilize the rubble.
Nothing that Schnabel had observed and
recommended had been implemented and so he had a very,
very expensive problem that could have
been and was foreseen and predicted.
One more, Dulles Jet Center is one
that is not a complicated engineering issue,
but it's an interesting project.
It's a big parking garage
for private jets out of Dulles Airport.
It's just a metal building.
There's nothing particularly fancy or exotic about it.
Schnabel made some recommendations
about the foundations for the structure.
The designer for this building
did their design to provide for big open spaces.
You need a lot of span to accommodate
these planes are going to be there.
The owner says to the designer,
"Construct this and design it for
a 30-year snow load." How bad can it be?
How often do we get snows that are worse than that?
The answer is, here's a helicopter fly over after
these snow megaton occurrence that
we had two giant snow falls and rapid succession.
You can see that the roofs have
collapsed on those buildings.
Now on the inside,
this is a security camera footage
and you can imagine each one of those little snowflakes,
each one of those little infinitesimally
light snowflakes adding to the load.
You have to give this a minute or so.
But the end result
indicates that there were no problems with
the geotechnical recommendations made
by Schnabel on this project.
I was going to speed it up for dramatic effect,
but you're seeing it in real time.
They're watching this from a security office
thinking there's not a thing they can do about it.
[BACKGROUND]
[NOISE].
It's a mess. This was
the one that's closest to the camera,
but there were, I think,
18 jets in that structure at the time.
The initial pleadings where they
went out and sued
everybody who had had anything
to do with the constructions;
the landscape guy,
the [LAUGHTER] geotechnical engineer, everybody.
Everybody was in the pool.
$450 million was the original complaint
and jets are expensive.
So when you collapse a roof on a jet.
When I walked through with some of
the Schnoll guys, all of these jets,
because as you see that roof came down,
it contacted the tail section
and forced the nose up in the air.
Before they could do anything else,
they had to figure out,
how are we going to remove the parts
of the roof that are resting
on these planes without having
the planes collapse back down on the floor?
You'll see, here they built
these jigs that would be put in
place and jacked up to support
the nose section of each of these planes.
Here's another one and another one.
Again, as you can see from looking at this,
this was not a failure of the materials,
it wasn't a failure of design.
It was just that there was too
great a load on the materials that were put in place,
and that seemed to not satisfy the insurance company.
They had to pay for all these planes and now they were
headhunting for people to help pay them back.
That was one where [NOISE]
ultimately all the parties involved
in this had to get together and reach some resolution
and the insurance companies duked it out.
But one of the very last things I
want to talk about is there has
been some discussion about,
where do you see things going in the future?
We talked about this model,
which is the design-build model,
and more and more now we see the design-build model.
The designer, instead of providing plans and
specifications upstream to the owner,
the designer is now collaborating with
the contractor either as
a subcontractor or as a joint venture partner.
But now instead of giving design documents to the owner,
they're giving them directly to the contractor.
It doesn't mean that there aren't any more problems,
but from a contractor standpoint,
this is a much tougher haul now,
because now if you have
a problem with the design documents,
you can't just go back to the owner and say,
"Hey, there's been a change.
You owe me a change order
because of your defective design documents."
If the design documents are defective now,
the contractor has to turn to
their joint venture partner and say, "Mr.
Designer, your documents are a mess.
I've got conflicts and
it's costing me millions of dollars.
Get out your checkbook."
I don't want to say it's
new because design-build has been a model that's
been coming for quite some time,
but it hasn't been nearly as
prevalent as it's becoming the last couple of years.
So we're still sorting our way
out with how these risks are now going to be
handled when the designer and
the contractor are basically
now on the same side of the table,
and the owner can stand back now and
say, "This isn't my problem.
You guys work it out.
It's either a construction problem
or it's a design problem,
but the one thing I know for sure,
it's not an owner problem.
So don't come asking me for additional compensation."
Anyway, I know I've gone a little bit long.
I apologize for that, but I could do this all day.
I've told these guys,
lawyers get paid by the word,
so we love to hear ourselves talk.
Thanks for your attention. [APPLAUSE]
We'll just take a couple of questions.
[inaudible] [LAUGHTER] Any questions, please?
This could be one
of those things in your career,
you're going to realize it's all
about communication and the client selection.
You could do the best engineer in the world
and you're still going to need Brian sooner or later.
The question is on the engineering side.
On the first, starting the engine,
how can the contractor handle
the vibrations and noise coming from the [inaudible]
[inaudible]
Well, those are written into
the project specifications that you have to
stay within certain decibel levels.
You have to work within certain hours of the day.
You're allowed greater latitude in terms
of noise and things during certain hours and not.
Those things are very closely monitored, and
they'll come out and shut down your generator equipment.
They have QC and QA people that are out there constantly
monitoring all of those environmental things
in addition to the status of the work.
Thank you.
[inaudible] [NOISE] Is there
a limit to that at some point? [inaudible]
Well, it's a tremendous tool for contractors.
The Spearin Doctrine basically says,
as long as you can prove that you
were following the plans and specs,
you are not going to be responsible and it
doesn't make any difference to
the magnitude of the problem.
So if there's a bridge collapse or if there
is something that's really
catastrophic in terms of expense,
they can't do something that's obviously they
see a problem and they realize.
Like on the parking garage,
the contractor recognized that if
they had kept excavating that site,
something bad was going to happen.
[LAUGHTER] So they can't just keep going saying, "Well,
I know it's inevitable that this is going to happen,
but I've got to schedule.
So damn the torpedoes,
we're going to keep pushing ahead." You can't do that.
But barring that, if you're following the plans and
specs in good faith and
doing what you're responsible to do,
then the consequences of following those plans and
specs are not going to fall on the contractor.
Any other questions? Yes.
[inaudible] provided, I guess,
towards the standard of care for but it's
like they provided above
the standard or a really good
engineering attempt would have been successful,
what's the motivation to go above and beyond [inaudible]
You'll see that sometimes in
construction documents where particularly
now that we've gone into the design-build thing,
or contractors will say to their engineer,
now partner or subcontractor,
that you are agreeing contractually to exercise
the very best practices
without regard to the standard care,
whatever the most conservative,
if you want to call it that.
They want belt in suspenders.
They want assurance that you're not
just pitching to the average,
but you're contractually binding
yourself to something higher than that.
That's got really [inaudible]
implications for designers who agree to that,
because their errors and omissions,
insurance policy covers [inaudible] the standard of care.
If they took on an additional risk
to hold themselves to a higher standard,
their insurance [inaudible] "We never agreed to that.
We didn't agree to ensure you that you are now going to
produce a [inaudible] plans and specifications."
These are cutting-edge considerations
that we're trying to work through
now as design-build becomes more of an issue.
There's more pressure [inaudible] a higher degree of
performance and a higher degree
[inaudible] from the design community.
Okay. Good. I have a couple of things for
Brian to thank him for his visit here,
a hat from Blacksburg that I'm sure you're going to wear
in Charlottesville [LAUGHTER] to see his daughter.
I'll wear it proudly. Thank you.
[inaudible]
Well, thank you very much.
[OVERLAPPING] Well, thank you.
[APPLAUSE] I appreciate that. [APPLAUSE]