Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Well, its fri afternoon and I am coming to the end of my second week at the design office and have come to the conclusion already that this is not for me. The office is entirely open plan even the managers are scattered about without any sense of order but it is a pretty soul less place. Everyone seems very focused and confident in what they are doing and it almost seems like an event when someone gets up and goes to the toilet – which is me the majority of the time as I am now back on coke zero to try and get through the next 6 months so I piss regularly!

As for the actual work, on my second day I was given an Invitation To Tender for a rail job and was told it needed to be in on 15 Jan and as the company is taking 3 weeks for xmas that means 6 working days. My first thought was that, thank god I don’t have to design anything yet and maybe this will be a good job to get stuck into and learn about the tendering process. The job was to relocate some 11kV feeders from OHW to undergroud and construct a new switch room and access track. Not a big job, but having thought I was going to the structures team to probably design bridges I suddenly found myself on a rail job tendering for an electrical job. I am actually part of the structures team but within the rail structures team and so this small project landed at my feet. In the end it was such a manic 6 days I am not sure I leaned as much as I was hoping as it seemed to turn into a bit of a phase 1 design exercise scenario! – not as bad as I did go home every evening. It has emersed me into costs again and how a tender is priced which was my main focus as well as pulling in all the relevent specialists to get there input. The tender required about five seperate sub-consultants and the same number internally from SMEC who all had to produce a methodology for their input along with assumptions and exclusions. I have learnt that if you have any doubt in your understanding of the tender documentation or just can’t be bothered to read it all then cover your self my saying exactly what you are providing within the lump sum cost. I was rather surprised at how rushed, or late the tender was issued before it needed to be submitted but I think this was more down to SMEC than the client. I suppose you need to be quite ruthless with the time you allocate to a tender as it is unpaid work with no guarantee of a win. I attended the client site inspection on day 3 still not really knowing what was going on and having had very little time to read the 965 page tender document issued by the client. An electrical engineer from a sub-consutant we were partnering with was going to attend with me but pulled out at the last minute and when I got there I think all the design consultants of Sydney were present. Having chatted to a few of them it became apparent they hadn’t read any of the tender docs and I think one guy was only there because he saw a a queue of people on the street and thought he would join us.

I managed to get the tender together with a few hours before submission and then had to present it to the Regional Manager to justify the price so he would sign it off. In simple terms, the in house costs or Direct Labour Costs as well as the reimbursables (sub-consultant fess) once a certain multiplier is thrown in gives you a contribution percentage. Corporate and regional overheads come in at about 36% total so anything over this is profit. Most jobs certainly in transport over the last year have had to be tendered at about 40% contribution to have a chance of winning and this tender was settled at about 42% with the total at AUS$ 716,000. I think the general consensus was that the price would need to be more like 650,000 to win but the electrical sub-consultant we have used is a little pricey. We just need to wait to see if we get this.

Following from that I have been given a RC structure where the basement column reinforcement has coroded and caused the concrete to break away. My job at the moment is to assess whether the structural capacity of those columns is sufficient. More on that next week I think.

Otherwise, the hours are so far pretty reasonable and I get to drive or cycle in every morning over the Sydney Harbour Bridge which is a pretty good view.  

Since my last update I feel a little more sane.  There hasn’t been an outbreak of personality in the office but at least I’m kind of getting it a bit more now.

Parson Street Bridge

 What has amazed me on this job has been the amount of preliminary work that goes into a tender submission, I have designed most of the abutment, retaining walls and wing wall at this stage.  Initially I thought this would be unpaid but potentially fee winning work however it seems that this is actually paid work, I’m told that civil work is usually paid tender work as opposed to building structures which sounds like tender work is unpaid.  Where the money for this comes from I can only guess at the contractor who presumably doesn’t get paid for his effort but must spend money on us in order to get a detailed design, in this case Graham.  This is a D&B contract to based on initial design by Atkins with Network Rail as the client.  The Atkins design is pretty much just a drawing with few dimensions on it which makes putting any real numbers to calculations difficult.

Things that have surprised me in this process:

• The volume of publications that are out there relating to all the stuff that I’m working on, for example the CIRIA doc on Mercia Mudstone, PD6694 dealing with traffic loads on bridges and modelling how they act on retaining walls. This is just 2 of the documents outside of the Eurocodes of which I’ve consulted about 4 different sections so far.  The bits that we practised on Phase 1 i.e. putting numbers to this stuff is the bit that the computer does the art here seems to understand where to look for guidance on parameters and conditions, interpreting the ground investigation and knowing what’s possible on site.
• The lack of clear direction, I think I mentioned last week that there seems to be a huge amount of stuff that just isn’t communicated, so happily I carried on doing the models I was asked to do.  I went into a meeting late last week with 2 associate level designers from Ramboll who didn’t have a clear picture of how it would actually be built, the tender process seems to drag a little because there hasn’t been a multidiscipline meeting to start off the process.  Such a meeting would have removed the need for me to design so much sheet piling because the contractor is unwilling to risk sheet pile refusal in the mercia mudstone during a possession.
• The point above is illustrated by me trying to work out the construction sequence and putting together sketches to show the stages.  I was quite surprise by how much was left down to the GEO dept and primarily me.  Ignoring John Moran’s repeated instructions to improve my sketching came back to haunt me slightly yesterday, at least the section technician is putting them onto CAD before they leave the office.
• STR checks on sheet piles.  So far I’ve been instructed to let the structures guys check the BM and SF capacity of sheet piles, which means in reality I’ve only designed the embedment depth.  I thought the Orator would be really ashamed of me at this point so read through some old notes and put together a quick section checker excel sheet.  Whilst this isn’t too thorough at least it gives me a chance to not make a foolish mistake.
• I’ve not seen a real check on my work so far, I’ve just been allowed to get on with it and have been expected to come back if I encounter problems.  An example of this is that at one point I had to assume the deck acted as a prop for the sheet piles, putting an axial load of about 1200kN into it, I’ve highlighted it because I figure it’s probably important to the blokes designing it but nobody seems worried right now.

In other news:  Riding to work this morning was interesting, I fell off about a mile from my house, it happened so fast I ended up in a perfect cycling pose just lying horizontally on the ground.

Wow, this is like pulling teeth.  Apparently nobody in the office got a personality for Christmas so it remains as silent as ever, social interaction is a sin.  

I continue to learn more about sheet piles on a daily basis and have been working on a new rail bridge somewhere in the West Country.  It is currently at tender stage and as seems to be par for the course design information is scant, nothing on the proposed drawings has dimensions some every sketch I’ve done has assumed or approx in brackets after numbers.  Basically I’ve been guessing at it.  I’ve also had to guess at the likely construction sequence too.  The bridge is going to be constructed in an area where Mercia Mudstone is about 2 metres below the surface, consequently the sheet piles won’t drive down into so the sheet pile wall has the structural characteristics of a wind break on a stone beach.  In order to make this thing work it needs to be propped under the finished road surface (the rail currently runs on an embankment and a new road crosses underneath) with RC axial members, the bridge deck itself I think will end up of as a prop too but I haven’t been pointed in the direction of any of the structures team so I’m not sure how much axial load I can put on it yet, I guess they haven’t designed the beams or deck yet.  It would all work fine if you could ‘wish it in place’ as the Orator would say but it’s going to need a serious amount of temporary propping in order to get to the finished product.  This is exacerbated by the fact it’s under a live railway and so work needs to work in a series of possessions.  I’ve done a John Moran favourite and drawn out lots of little sketches of what I guess the construction sequence is going to be.  Each of these stages is then accompanied by a separate file in WALLAP to prove that it works and thanks to Eurocode 7 each one of those is duplicated for both design combinations.  This interesting part thinking about actually doing stuff was this afternoon, the other 10 hours of work so far this week have been horrendous, I still haven’t worked out if these people are actually busy or just very good at looking busy, I can confirm that they are actually quite dull not just pretending to be dull.  Looking down the barrel of another 6 months of this I can safely say I’d rather be going on tour, you don’t need to do AERs on tour.

Sorry I’ve been a little unfair.  One of the principal engineers is just back from 2 months working in the Falklands watching a jack up rig drilling in rock for a new port facility.  He’s spent 2 months in transit accommodation down there and has spent at least an hour of his time whinging about it to anyone who will listen despite being on 20% more money than he would have been on in the UK.  Civvies can be amusing.

Now back after leave, it is time for an update on Phase 3.  I am now working in the USACE Baltimore District Head Quarters Mechanical Design Section and have managed to get my own office complete with window, a perk normally only given to section Chiefs, like my line manager.  So with this excellent start in mind I found out which projects I will be working on.

Caven Point Marine Terminal

This is the USACE New York District hub for their Operations Division to run research on the rivers and sea areas around New York.  On a nice point of land opposite a car recycling plant and the Manhatton skyline (complete with Statue of Liberty) it has a unique position with in the Army Corps. In Nov 12 it was hit by a 10ft high tidal surge produced by Hurricane Sandy.  Although the building withstood the surge all the documentation and equipment in the building was destroyed.  Now a shell with some tools and computers in it, $29 million has been set aside to create a new building to replace the current set up.  This project has a few unusual characteristics.  Firstly USACE is the customer, design authority and project manager and as such there is no contract.  This means that many of the normal contractual issues can be simplified ie last minute changes to designs by the user completed by group consensus,  but does also leave scope for issuses like last minute user changes!  The money is coming from a Federal fund set up to repair government buildings damaged by the Sandy specifically.  So far $6 million has been spent from the awarded $35 million hence our budget of $29 million.  However while we are designing to this budget if another government agency finds they could do with money from this fund the New York District must give it to them.  Consequently there is now pressure to get the money allocated to this project before someone else spends it!  New York District Military Design Branch has requested that Baltimore Mechanical Design Section help out because their own section is over stretched.  We will be providing the HVAC and Fire Protection designs for this building which is currently designed to 35%.  This means the building envelope design is nearly complete but no subsystems have been designed in terms of Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing. Normal procedure would see us comleting a 65%, with most Mechanical design complete, in 6 months and 95% ready to advertise publicly by this time next year.  However the Project Manager now needs a 95% design by mid Feb 14 in order to secure the funding.  This works out well for me as I should get to go through the whole design process (and complete my outstanding UK SPEC competencies) by mid Feb 14.  At the moment we have a blank canvas on the design.  We carried out a recce just before leave, met the design team and the end users who are actually fromthree departments: Support Staff who mend boats and look after the building, the Survey Staff who do the scientific research, and Construction Division who have admin offices there for the civil works programs they run in the area.  The new building must therefore incorporate a maintenance workshop, research labs (basic nothing hi tech) and office space.  The Office and Lab space is now to be raised 10ft above grade so that future events do not cause any damage, with all fittings in the workshop, which will be at grade to get boats in and out, at either 6ft or suspended on retractable mounts.  The building must also meet Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) and prove to be not only more efficient than the current building but with minimal or positive impact on the environment.  So plenty to think about!

View of Manhattan through the unseasonable weather

The Marine Terminal. Note the rust line on the walls which shows how high the surge was.

The ugliest building I have seen in New York. It is a 1920’s design and is an office block!

Nathan Hale Hall, Building 4554, Ft Meade
Hale Hall was a building belonging to Army Intelligence when it caught fire in Oct 2006.

The top floor was largely gutted and since then the building has been open to the elements.

Hale Hall Today.

Money is now available to get the building renovated and back in use as an administration building. A number of structural repairs will be needed as it still has no roof. It will also require a new HVAC system too. This will be my next project although there is no indication yet of the size of the budget. The initial meetings have only just started on this project so I look forward to site visits in full 4R because of the biological contaminants associated with exposure to the elements (racoon and bird poo!).

And in other news:
The transition to Baltimore has been painless although the commute on the light rail is interesting as Matt Fry alluded too in his blogs. The conversations can be very random! The District Christmas party was a unique affair. Not only was it a dry event, it was held at 1100-1500hrs! The food was a very good buffet Christmas lunch Caroline and I we were honoured to be on the top table next to the District Commander. Here I noticed another difference between the US and UK – the knife as part of your cutlery is very much ceremonial! After food there was reindeer racing, a raffle drawn by Santa (the District Commander) and some party games including one where I was the best dressed Christmas Tree thanks to the military guys in the District.
The weather has been pretty unseasonable with snow prior to and over Christmas and more since New Year. The Polar Vortex is coming tonight with temperatures expected to drop to -16. That might be another snow day!

After arriving last week, it has been none stop. Initially I found myself updating the drawings for Fisher Street (the Crossrail project).

However that only took a day, I was then tasked with doing a Cat 3 (external) check on some pile calculations. I was already worried about this task, then when I found out that the boundaries consisted of: 4 track line into Waterloo, Thames River and a 25 storey building. The most worrying of these boundaries was the railway line. The 4 tracks were positioned on a old brick viaduct, that had a 5mm capacity for settlement. Then I found out that the piles where for 3 x 30 storey buildings.

So I have now completed my calcs according to Eurocode 7. Initially I created the worst case scenario of the ground strata that would be encountered by the piles. From this I calculated both the shaft and the End bearing capacities of the piles. This was done by creating a spreadsheet (similar to the ones we did during phase 1) that has been setup, that all I have to do is input the dia of the shaft and the dead and live loads placed on the piles.I have then carried out a settlement calc using the Wallup software and the Tomlinson & Woodward approach. This has included both the long term and short term assessment. Both these conditions required differing inputs for the Clay and the stiffness of the wall (Secant Piles). I am now awaiting Skanska’s design to see if it comes anywhere near my cals. I hope they do!!!!!

The other big difference here is that each minute of the day has to be accounted for. That means that you have to submit a breakdown of the time you spend on each project. No more sending messages to Rich Phillips during the day, not if I want to keep the illusion of working.

I forgot to post a photo but here is my completed creation over the past 9 months!

After coming back from a great holiday in NZ I pretty much expected a complete bridge and was quite surprised at how little had been done. The bridge is very close to complete but when I left on Fri evening there were still the throw screens to install and a fair amount of concrete surface work on the barriers especially where the slip formed barriers meet the sections that had to be hand formed. When I went on holiday there were four very small concrete pours to complete which and `i had arranged and booked everything in which would have only taken a week so I am not sure what they have been doing for the other 2 weeks. As a result I have still been on site a lot more than I anticipated in my final week rather than closing out all the QA paperwork and closing documents such as the ‘red line’ drawings and RATM’s. I have forgotten what RATM’s stands for now but it is simply a spreadsheet that documents all the contractual requirements where I had to write or file the relevant evidence that proves we have met the requirements such as a work lot number or particular photograph.

My last post showed one of the slip forming runs with a missing portion. Well, we did four separate runs of approximately 18-20m and that was run 3 which we did on the morning of the second day. That was simply a product of pour concrete supply by the concrete supplier. The concrete mix was a 10mm slump mix and as such they limit the transport load to 3m^3 per ruck. Throughout the two days even with constant phone calls we had a very poor service to the point where I requested that the project rep came out to visit site. The gap in the barrier was where we were waiting over an hour between loads to the point where the concrete would have gone off in the mould so we had no choice but to break out a section and start agin when the next load arrived. They accepted responsibility and I informed them that I would be putting in a claim to hand form that section which would be back charged to them. When I left for holiday I informed commercial about this but I get the impression it was ignored as the Commercial Manager doesn’t like to rock the boat so close to the end of the project. In my opinion no one especially the supplier wouldn’t have had a problem with this as they fully admitted liability especially when considering other issues we had with them. We were supplied the wrong concrete mix on the first day which was a kerb mix not a type F barrier mix which had 10mm stone rather than 20mm. After I sent it back I argued that this was their mistake and after they checked phone records of the order they apologised but the mix did not work well at first. The first run formed very poorly in the mould with most of the top section missing and having to be formed by hand with a 6 man crew training behind the mould. The subcontractor was blaming a lack of air entrainment within the mix but when I requested the air content of the mix (min of 4%) they said they had no capability to test the air content. The subsequent runs were much better so something changed within the mix. We had a further issue when the supervisor asked one of the excavator operators working nearby to remove some of the excess concrete that had been picked out at the end of run 1. This was now quite hard and as we had a 300mm foundation which had not been separated or saw cut it resulted in most of the barrier cracking along about 2/3 of its length. This meant we ended up breaking out most of run 1 and hand forming in on Dayworks which was expensive.

The roadworks seem to have been pretty slow but were complete when I left aside from street furniture and line marking so it looks like following the Road Safety Audit early next week the road should open next fri before xmas.

I start with SMEC on mon which I am not sure I am looking forward to as it is just going to mean more office work but I am hoping the hours will be more sensible. My commute is certainly a lot shorter so I should be able to bike to work a few days a week. At the moment I have had no official confirmation of how my rent will be paid and I have no car having given back the Ute on Fri. Hopefully I will be able to sort out the details at SMEC face to face with HR as JH certainly don’t seem to be keen to help – I find it ironic that being here to increase my contractual understanding I am with a company that has difficulty in honouring a simple agreement with the RE!

It happened again!

It has been a ridiculously busy end to Phase 2. The main reason has been another formwork incident in the South Block. During the pour of the last slab on level 1 the deck dropped by about 200mm. I wasn’t looking at the time but heard what sounded like a baking tray warping in the oven (Nicky still baking like a good wife should!), and immediately realised that it was the metal formwork buckling. I ordered all those still dopey enough to be standing on the deck to get off the slab, called the site manager and H&S officer. I then paused the concrete supply in line with the QA procedure implemented after the last settlement. What followed was the usual excitement involving the unions and subcontractors making the incident out to be bigger than it actually was (The ABC news channel quoted one of the concreters who had “seen his life pass before his eyes”). 

On closer inspection it could be seen that the aluminium beam, on which the deck was bearing, had fractured causing the load to be transferred to the adjacent beams causing them to buckle. My first assessment was that it looked like a combination of over-loading and material failure. See image and calc sheet for sketch. The investigation found that the falsework was not constructed in accordance with design and the beam fractured because it had been overloaded due to an additional 800mm onto its design span. Though the falsework had been inspected by a 3^rd party engineer, it would not have been possible for him to see the error in construction due to a ply sheet obscuring the view. The decision is yet to be made on the responsibility for the incident, but I think it is safe to say that the 3^rd party engineer’s indemnity insurance and the formworkers are likely to take the hit.

What is interesting about this is the timeline surrounding the pour. The slab was originally planned for the Thursday, but was was delayed to the Friday due to a steel delivery issue, then further delayed to Saturday as the pour clashed with another large pour in the North block. It was then returned to the Thursday at 3pm on the Wednesday, resulting in an incredibly compressed timeline to complete of the slab (Steel was still being fixed in one corner of the pour as the concrete was flowing in the other). In my opinion this should never have happened, once a decision has been made it must be stuck to otherwise confusion reigns. The element being poured should always be ready the night before in order that quality and safety can be preserved (but maybe that is just my military head talking, as it seems to happen quite often here).

Though the incident would probably have occurred even if the pour had been on the extended timeline, it highlighted the lack of resources in the South Block and the pressure to perform to a demanding schedule. The advancing of the slab pour was dismissed as irrelevant in the investigation by the director who ordered it the acceleration – nothing more was said.

We are now left with this……..

 Pretty much everything I feared would be the result of the original settled slab (SBUBZ3) is now hapening to SBL1Z6. Jackhammers have been going endlessly in a vain attempt to recover some of the lost time. Ironically to save 2 days we have almost certainly lost a week. The construction director still wants to complete level 2 by Christmas – lets hope Santas little helpers can break concrete out!

I have been a little more involved with the commercial department recently. Mainly running through the monthly claims and assessing their validity before forwarding to the Project Director for authorisation. PCH has not been the best for experience in this element of professional development due to the separation of the commercial teams from the site team. This has got better over the months but it is still a difficult beast to work with. I hope to gain more contractual experience with BG&E in phase 3.

In my time at PCH, I have been responsible for pouring 42% of the concrete in South block (over 5,000m3), this was mainly used in 14 suspended slabs, but also in 290 columns and various other walls and stairs. I am content that I know how to sequence and construct a building but painfully aware just how much detail is involved in just the smallest element of a structure. It is clear that the devil is in the detail and an engineer must know the structure inside out to ensure it is built correctly. This is a learning point that I will take to phase 3 as minimising the different details is key to simplifying construction and hence improving quality.

I have mixed emotions leaving the PCH project. Whilst excited to be starting the design attachment, I do feel that I am leaving the South block team even more under resourced. Though this has been raised at every team meeting, the PM has been unable to secure the hire of a replacement engineer. Whilst not the most effective engineer in the world, I think the reduction of 33% of the engineer coverage, which can only be a cost saving measure, takes no account of the wellbeing and workload of those who remain and is likely to have detrimental impact on the continuity within the team.

After a brief meeting with BG&E last week, I will be moving into the waterways and bridge department initially, but will be a kind of ‘floater’ with the ability to get involved in anything that takes my interest. I hope to get involved in the city’s new underground bus station design, some bridge maintenance/design and try to get up North to work on some of the mining infrastructure.

In other news, this is the first time in my life that I have not been issued clothes for work, Tesco’s, the Army, and JHG all issued me a uniform. Now going into a swanky city office environment I have had to buy new clothes. It was a little like back-to-school shopping with my mum, but I came away with the obligatory office attire of tight trousers, and pointy shoes. I am not sure how long this will last before I break out a couple of polo shirts and the chino’s!

First week in the design office.

The first week has been a gentle break into the design office life. It is clearly evident that consultancies are scratching around for work prior to Christmas, highlighted by 18 consultancies bidding for a potential A$100k upgrade of a culvert in the Perth Hills. If it is deemed that the structure is already adequate after the site investigation, the contract will only be work A$30k. If it is won by BG&E, it is likely that I will take charge of the ‘Bob’s Crossing’ project (I see it as a warmer in the bank). The tender response is due in prior to Christmas, and I will be reviewing it tomorrow.  My thought currently is how to make the tender stand out from the others, which for a simple investigation is fairly difficult, however, a little research shows that the area is used by families for picnicking and kayaks for entry to the river, so potentially there may be an option to provide a simple jetty or slipway at minimal cost.

I am currently working in the waterways department, investigating the flood flows over 9 small bridges in the South of WA in an area called Denmark. The longest of these bridges is only 8m and barely 1.5m off the channel bed, but the flood index flows need to be calculated to design the crossings. My thoughts at the moment are that culverts would be the best solution for these rarely used tracks through the Jarrah forests. They will be quick and easy to install, have a good bearing capacity for large trucks to pass, and will be cheap to maintain. The contract is part of a panel contract with the Main Roads department of the WA government, so there is no competition for the job. It appears that the investigation is completed to size the crossing/barrels and then handed to the MRWA to do with as they wish. Pretty easy for the consultancy really, but done well and they will keep coming. As I understand there were issues with the last set of reports that BG&E submitted; different formats, different headings, elements missed. Most of this was due to splitting the jobs down to individuals and not checking effectively before issue. It appears that the directors have grasped this error and are leaning heavily on the QA and management of work packages within the teams. It seems like common sense to me but maybe I can bring a little coordination and admin (squaring away) to the party.

As suspected, I feel a little like a BeeGee walking around Perth CBD in pointy shoes and tight trousers, but everybody seems to be doing it, so maybe for once in my life I am in what they call ‘fashion’?

Many of you will already have seen this photo on facebook but for the benefit of those who aren’t regularly bored by photos of my wife and children here’s your opportunity to laugh at my expense.

So Day 1 Ramboll UK geotechnics team:  ‘We’ve got a couple of projects lined up for you to work on; one is the foundations for this bridge the concept that we’ve been given is pretty much unbuildable so I want to look at a sheet pile retaining wall option and the other one is a small domestic extension that requires a retaining wall design because the garden is on a slope.  So here’s how to get into the road bridge file, here’s a programme called Wallap that we use for this, why don’t you see how you get on?’

Whilst that sounds rather flippant, this is exactly how it felt.  Tonight I have been reading the Great Orator’s lesson notes in the vain hope of at least knowing the difference between drained and undrained parameters.  I’m going to the sloping garden tomorrow with a ‘panda probe’ which is an electronic stick to hit the ground with, apparently one of the team did an entire MSc thesis on correlating hitting this thing and SPT values, I haven’t met him yet but I’m sure he’s hilarious.

That’s all for now, I needed to share my despair, this time I really will get found out.