I had an excellent day yesterday in Oakland catching up with old friends and attending the SFGI dinner meeting. The highlight, though, was a visit to Tinkering Monkey to have the cool new Atlas GT logo etched onto my long-suffering briefcase. You guys who need promotional swag should definitely know about Mike and Paula, who do excellent work for reasonable, and fast too. Thanks to Eric at Cosmic for making the introduction.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
I had a really excellent time last week attending the Dispute Resolution Board Foundation conference and training in Seattle. The DRBF (http://www.drb.org/) is a small, sincere organization that promotes dispute avoidance and resolution on construction projects using the proven Dispute Resolution Board (DRB) method. Having participated in much larger, formal, and bureaucratic standards organizations, the DRBF conference was refreshing in their pragmatic approach to accomplishing the group’s mission. Training was provided by founding members, the attendee were a veritable “who’s who” of construction in the Pacific Northwest, and the excellent interactive format made the training quite effective.
At 47 years old, and with 24 years professional experience, I was the second-youngest person attending the meeting (one of the founding members brought his son,. an accomplished construction manager.) The group has recognized a need for younger members and is in the early stages, it seems, of taking action toa ssure that the organization manes a successful transition when the founding members are ready to reduce their involvement.
As an added bonus, a neighbor of ours back in Lake Oswego was there for part of the conference. Two goals for our move back to the Mainland were to reconnect with a broader professional community, so I could attend events like the DRBF conference, and to reconnect with old friends. It was particularly satisfying that both happened at the same event.
Good friend and longtime crewmember John Pfluke is in the Bay Area on another project and had time to drop by Atlas Geotechnical World Headquarters last night. While the visit was too short, it was an excellent opportunity for us to debrief from a field program that did not go as smoothly as we would have liked. None of Atlas’ projects are simple (if they were, someone else would probably be doing them), but it wasn’t technical or logistical difficulty that caused us problems.
It didn’t take long for the two of us to agree that it was our client’s project manager, and specifically his enthusiasm for “zero-sum” contract management, that lay at the root cause of our frustration. The fault was mine, fundamentally, because last August when I negotiated Atlas’ scope of work I naively agreed to reduce our level of effort and rely entirely on our customer to make preparations, clear utilities, coordinate access, and organize the overall program. As I should have expected, our customer chose to keep the preparations budget as a windfall rather than do the work upon which we were relying. We didn’t even make it to the kickoff meeting before I knew I had made a mistake. I should have forced a change right then rather than sending John to execute a plan that was simply not set up for success.
The chance to talk this issue through face-to-face was valuable, and affirmed that relationships really are Atlas Geotechnical’s core strength. We agreed that neither of us could have done anything differently once the program started, and I committed myself to avoiding customers who are unable to collaborate, meet their commitments, and achieve shared success.
And with that behind us, we had the rest of an excellent afternoon and evening to catch up on other topics and remember projects that went really well. I attached a picture of John after work in Majuro from our work at the ARFF last December. That was a complicated project in a challenging location, and it went off without a hitch. Atlas has a couple of similar projects on our books, some significantly more technical, and debriefing with John the cause of our difficulties last week was useful to me as I build relationships and negotiate contracts for these future projects.
Longtime collaborator Steve Mumma called the other day looking for geotechnical support on an interesting impact barrier project. Steve manages Geobrugg North America’s Security Division, though we know him from when he was an extremely helpful resource for rockfall protection projects. It’s always great to hear from old friends, and old friends with interesting geomechanical problems are the best.
Geobrugg is supplying the debris barrier for a new Formula 1 racetrack near Austin, TX. You’ve all seen these: wire mesh and horizontal cables supported by poles that catch pieces and parts of crashing F-1 cars moving as fast as 240 kph. The picture above, which I borrowed from the project website, shows the fence in the background. Performance expectations for such a barrier are quite different than for most structures: huge deformations and partial collapse are a necessary part of proper barrier function. The direction and magnitude of forces transmitted by the yielding, collapsing posts into their foundations change wildly during the incident, further complicating the geotechnical design.
It is widely known that conventional geotechnical computations underestimate dynamic foundation capacity, although this fact seems not to be very well understood by most practicing geotechnical engineers. The difference between theoretical and actual foundation capacity has its roots in the simple Mohr-Coulomb constitutive model intrinsic in most geotechnical computations. Assuming linear elastic behavior up to the instant of failure excludes energy consumed by volumetric strain as the failure condition develops. Behavior that would never be allowed to occur on a conventional footing is actually an important attribute of dynamic loading on a properly functioning debris barrier.
We did a couple of days worth of computations, enough to get the correct outcome based on technical merit, without having to resort to uncommon constitutive models that would have led, inexorably, to time domain numerical modeling. While that type of work is like candy to the crew here at Atlas, it wasn’t necessary to achieve a positive outcome for the Formula 1 racetrack project. We are grateful for the chance to reconnect with Steve, for the confidence that Geobrugg North America placed in Atlas Geotechnical when faced with an unexpected issue, and for the chance to do challenging work in support of interesting infrastructure projects.
Atlas Geotechnical is very pleased to be part of the research team that the California Strong Motion Instrumentation Program (CSMIP) selected for a 2012 Data Interpretation Project focussed on the behavior of port structures during long duration seismic shaking. The award is mainly because Dr. Steve Dickenson is our team’s principal investigator. Steve has long been a recognized leader in port seismic design, and his practical approach to validating the numerical model used by the engineers at Halcrow was likely the winning feature of our proposal.
A research project like this is an excellent example of the diversity that Atlas Geotechnical has been working to achieve. In addition to the chance to work with Steve and with Halcrow, this project offers a chance to meet the port engineers at Oakland, Los Angeles, and Long Beach, and also to present to the CSMIP committee a couple of times in the course of completing the research. The work kicks off in early July with visits to the ports to collect reports and as-built data.
As a boutique earth sciences consultancy working on unusual projects all over the world, Atlas Geotechnical has never had a simple explanation of what work we do or what type of company we are. A defining characteristic of Atlas, in fact, has been our ability to deliver high quality services in response to almost any requirement, on any schedule, anyplace in the world. While our flexibility helped us cement durable relationships with those customers whose projects often had unique requirements, at the same time being so flexible complicates explaining Atlas to potential customers who are not already familiar with our work.
Rebranding was necessary to simplify the explanation of what Atlas Geotechnical is and what we do exceptionally well, in support of our 2012 goal of re-integrating into the west coast engineering community. An ever-growing customer base encouraged us to improve our outward presentation as the next step in our business evolution. Our core values, though, the characteristics that differentiate Atlas from conventional consultancies, remain unchanged. Durable, long-lasting, personal relationships with our customers and crew will always be a defining characteristic. Our commitment to technical excellence and engineering rigor is intrinsic; we don’t know any other way to practice engineering. And the flexibility and responsiveness that enabled all the growth, success, and great experiences up to this point, is still our strongest attribute.
The visual impact of the new logo, the simple clean lines on this website and in our deliverables, even this place where we can share little bits of the ongoing story, are all aspects of that desire to reach a wider audience through better accessibility and a simplified narrative. We’re hopeful that explaining our unique approach to engineering will make Atlas more accessible to a wider range of customers and collaborators, ultimately creating new opportunities for us to do excellent work on ever more challenging projects.