Margaret Wente nailed it on the head in the Globe and Mail last Saturday when she hit on the deterioration of our built environment – “My world is falling apart – and so is yours. Instead of fixing and replacing what previous generations built, we’ve been adding party rooms”.
She speaks of the engineering failures that I often speak about in my blog postings: Outright failure and collapse in the built environment, and also inadequate performance of a constructed facility and its infrastructure.
I counted about 20 examples in Margaret’s litany of failures in the built environment. Everything from leaky basements to flooded elevator shafts and transformer stations, crumbling roads and bridges, boil municipal water advisories, deteriorating pipes and sewers, and faulty subway signalling systems. Anyone of us reading this item could add others from our personal experience and what we’ve heard. I could also add a good number from my consulting practice.
She also aired her views on the causes of the failures: Negligence and willful blindness, inadequate facility and system maintenance, ignoring needed repairs, inadequate urban planning, etc. She doesn’t seem to think acts of God has much to do with the deterioration, that He is not on the hook for the problems.
Some of this deterioration is certain to be resulting in forensic engineering investigations to determine cause. Some will result in civil litigation.
If I had no data at all but had to hypothesize as to the cause of any one of a number of failures in Margaret’s cataloguing plus our additions – yours and mine, I would have lots of places in the development process on which to focus. And some places would get more intuitive attention than others.
The process starts with:
- an owner’s concept, a good idea or recognition of the need for a structure,
- goes to planner,
- maybe an architect,
- then to a design engineer,
- a builder,
- somewhere in there, construction inspection services,
- facility operators, and,
- finally, maintenance people.
A case could be made for the premise that the farther you get from the initial good idea the less attention paid to the quality of the product. Not wantonly, but because of money – the need to design economically, the cost of things, making money, spending it wisely, making due with less than enough, etc.
Designers must design an economical structure, builders must be helped by inspectors to provide what they said they would for the contract price, facility operators must work within an annual budget, and maintenance workers must make do with their budget.
The farther from the exciting concept and down the process to maintenance the tighter the dollar gets. A case could also be made for the premise that maintenance gets the short end of the stick.
In forming a hypothesis as to the cause of an engineering failure, quite a lot of attention might be given to maintenance of the structure. But its construction would be deserving of attention too, particularly if there were no inspection services during construction.
Flawed engineering design concepts also cause problems – a foundation meant to be uniformly supported receiving only intermittent support. Then there’s flawed planning concepts – building on a flood plain which has been getting some press coverage lately.
There’s lots to choose from in forming an initial hypothesis during a forensic engineering investigation as to the cause of a problem in the built environment. Margaret Wente touched on some of these in her piece last Saturday and there are others.
References
- The Globe and Mail, July 13, 2013, page F2, Globe Focus, My world is falling apart – and so is yours, Margaret Wente.