Monthly Archives: April 2013

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

Recently I’ve had a couple of interesting experiences simplifying technical topics for lay audiences. One for trial testimony and the other for a TED-style talk that I’m giving in a couple of weeks. Both require me to explain myself to an audience that lacks even the most basic understanding of soil mechanics.

The whole purpose of making presentations is for people to understand your point. But when you lack a common frame of reference, it falls to the presenter to adjust and create one.

Testimony this afternoon went well enough; I could tell that the jury was understanding what I was trying to explain. Apparently I succeeded in not frittering their afternoon away on detail. That’s mainly because I made only 2 or 3 points, not a hundred or a thousand. I think that Mr. Thoreau’s advice is exactly right.

I’m hopeful that by the time my next talk comes up, with another lay audience even less informed about my topic, that I’ll be able to simplify all of the thousands of affairs that affect municipal infrastructure down to 2 or 3, and fit the point of my presentation on my thumbnail.

There are no new refineries. Not in the continental US, anyway. So when you get a project in a refinery, it means you’ll be standing in the shadow of the Masters, the guys who figured consolidation rates with log paper and a sliderule. An observant engineer can learn a lot.

I told the plant engineer where I needed data, knowing that they would have borings right where I needed them. It’s a refinery. All refineries have a plethora of borings. Not knowing who would be combing through the dusty tomes I described all the best features of the classic old reports. Thick. It’s gotta be thick. And comb-bound with craft paper covers, ideally with a cut-out window.Maybe onionskin paper but likely not, as you didn’t send opnionskins to the customer, but rather kept them for your own files. At the Port of Oakland one time I saw a multi-volume report bound with twine. Possibly that would be too much to hope for.

And of course they had exactly the report that we needed, and it looked exactly like I expected (though not bound with twine). I could smell the dusty pages even though I was scanning through a PDF. The report was not particularly old, not truly “golden age” vintage, because we are working in Unit 2. The classic site characterization would have been done for Unit one probably right after WWII. Even still, the late 1960’s were a great time to be a foundation engineer, lots of borings but modern samplers, still lots of budget for laboratory tests including time-rate consols. And the report, as you would expect, is a treasure trove of solid information that was useful then and is just as useful now. It also has the quirky old stuff that you just don’t see anymore. Hand-drafted figures showing settlement rate predictions. Sketches showing the failure mode of triaxial tests. Consolidation tests plotted using void ratio instead of strain. Good times.

I wasn’t familiar with the company that wrote the report, and I was curious to learn more. They’re named after an individual, the same as all the great firms from that era, and they proclaim their founding date right in their logo. Tragically, the briefest research revealed that they had been gobbled up like most of the grand old consultancies. They gave up their brand in 2011, having done business for 90 consecutive years under the founder’s name. The shop only existed for me, though, for less than an hour. I didn’t know of them at all (though I knew their type), then I learned of them and admired their work, and then I learned that they had been agglomerated by one of the big generic testing companies that, honestly, makes a lot of good work for us here at Atlas.

It’s inspiring at the same time as it’s disappointing, appreciating their contribution to the practice of foundation engineering even after the company has run it’s course. As I do my little project in the refinery, enjoying the view from the shoulders of an extinct giant of a firm, it’s important to remember that some day my small contribution may be passed on to the next engineers working on the next refinery improvement project. In 50 years their report aged from cutting edge to quaint without losing any of its usefulness. Our reports may likely be the only tangible reminder that we were careful and innovative and did good work, and we should bear that in mind as we write and deliver our reports..

My good friend Phil called this week looking for geotechnical engineering support on another one of his interesting tank projects. Phil is an international expert in tank design, maintenance, and operation, and the projects that we’ve worked together have all been career highlights for me.

Storage tanks have the most interesting foundation issues of all structures. On the one hand, a structure completely full of liquid is orders of magnitude heavier than a structure full of air and people and office furniture. Only steel mills have higher loadings. On the other hand, though, the structures are extraordinarily flexible, at least in many ways, and can often accommodate settlements that the heavy loads induce. So deflection management, rather than avoidance, is the design goal. I’ve been inside tanks in Mississippi that look like skateparks on the inside, and where the interior support columns have threaded rods sticking through the roof so the columns can be lengthened with a torque wrench while the bottom plate and foundations settle.

These particular tanks, the ones that Phil called about, are being retrofitted to allow higher interior pressure. Even a couple of lb/in2 inside a tank 200 feet in diameter creates a huge force. The bottom plate is flexible, which is a good thing, but in these tanks the shells and annular rings are not anchored to the ringwall foundations. So adding pressure to the tanks will inflate them like a very stiff, very expensive balloon and lift the shell off the foundation. The engineering task is to design reliable, economical anchorage to resist uplift forces around the tank shell caused by increasing the tanks interior operating pressure. It’s not a large project, but the people that I get to work with and the practical solutions that I get to develop make these small projects some of the most rewarding.

We’ve been slammed this past month here at Atlas Geotechnical World Headquarters with two interesting and completely different dispute resolution projects.

The first, and more conventional, involves piledriving problems on a highway bridge project. (The photo on the left is not from this project. These piles are in Diego Garcia. I just like pictures of pile cushions burning). The highway job was big and the problem very well documented, and my involvement started with the customer DropBoxing me about a hundred PDA and CAPWAP reports. Yes, I did in fact do a brief joyful dance when presented with all that gorgeous data.

One fascinating aspect was that the project changed delivery methods, from Design/Build, to Bid/Build, but the B/B contract retained the D/B design. Reviewing the data offered me an unusually clear view of how engineers, appropriately, alter their design approach depending on the level of involvement they expect to retain during construction.

The assignment was straightforward: read all the materials, do a bunch of analyses, and figure out why piledriving was so difficult. It culminated in a report, which I was able to prepare on an accelerated but still manageable pace.

The second project could not feel more different. It’s a rainstorm-induced slope failure that closed a road and damaged both public and private property. (And no, it’s not the landslide on the right. That one is on Highway 1 and is a much bigger problem.) Mediation was not successful, and Superior Court rules move us rapidly to trial. While I support prompt resolution of failure issues, the pace makes thoughtful analyses challenging because none of the experts have produced reports. All parties are learning about findings and conclusions through depositions, and the deposition process does not facilitate coherent narrative. I’ve been attending the sessions that have geomechanical topics so that I can digest the verbal description of other expert’s assumptions, methods, and conclusions before immediately translating from jargon to legal so that my client can ask insightful questions. While the pace of the work is similar to the piledriving problem, producing expert advice without mulling over a written draft, even briefly, completely changes the feel of the work. A completely different skill set is needed, the ability to simplify and reduce, as opposed to the ability to carefully and thoroughly explain.

Interestingly, Atlas’s fees on the this landslide issue are roughly comparable to the fees on the piledriving matter, but the piledriving damages are more than two orders of magnitude higher. It seems like a direct comparison of efficiency: the piledriving issue has hugely more data that was neatly summarized in a group of generally similar reports. The slope failure project is dribbling out technical data in no particular order in the course of daylong question-and-answer sessions.

I think we should all be thankful that our society provides a formal and binding method of resolving disputes. Much like representative democracy itself, the process can seem inefficient and sometimes even unfair. But at least there’s a process with predictable rules, and the inefficiencies seem on the whole acceptable given the alternatives. Offering deposition testimony without having already formulated, refined, and produced a report summarizing my opinions was very different from the piledriving problem, where my written report reduces the possibility of mis-speaking, making a muddle out of a technical explanation, or leaving out important supporting information. In addition to the expected favorable results for both my customers, I’ve grown professionally from the experience of working two projects that should have seemed similar but where differences in pace and process caused them to be completely different.