Monthly Archives: September 2013

image7921Atlas Geotechnical is actively seeking a finite element analysis collaborator for our rapidly expanding storage tank consultancy.  This work is plates and shells, not soils and foundations; SAP, not FLAC. The great majority of these assignments are short-duration, quick turnaround stress-and-deformation analyses of API 650 welded steel storage tanks that have foundation settlement problems.  If you’ve got chops or know someone who does, get in touch and let us know about your skills.

(And yes, I appropriated the GIF in this post from Adina, who make very cool software.)


2013-09-19 12.37.33I had an excellent day yesterday with GeoEngineers, Brotherton Pipeline and Snelson in Ceres, CA. The assignment was field engineering the entry and exit points on an intricate series of horizontal directional drills under a busy arterial street.  An extra bonus was seeing the fantastical array of tools used on pipeline projects.

My personal favorite is this little track-mounted crane+carryall. It’s perfect for picking up heavy stuff and moving it to some other place. Those of  you who have seen the equipment storage  shed here at Atlas World Headquarters know exactly what I’m thinking: we need one of these for moving Pelican cases full of soil sampling tools out of the way so we can get back to the fussy electronic monitoring equipment on the shelves. And once we had it here, of course, we’d use it for all kinds of other stuff like taking out the trash.

Overall, GeoEngineers, Brotherton Pipeline, and Snelson are doing excellent work on a challenging assignment, are working safely, keeping ahead of schedule, and are handling unexpected challenges as fast as they come up. We all know it’s not the tools but the people that make projects successful, and it’s a pleasure being involved with their project.

 

Keehi Lagoon Molassas spill-E.Miles1

Anything, in sufficient quantities, can be toxic.

One problem with prescriptive safety regulations is that compliance with the requirements is easily confused with actually addressing all of the operating risks. No prescriptive regulations, no matter how onerous, can anticipate all potential failure modes and consequences, leading to “unexpected accidents” when something fails in a way not anticipated by the requirements

As an example, last week an under-pier pipeline used to load bulk molasses onto tanker ships failed during a fill, dropping almost a quarter-million gallons of sugar syrup into Honolulu Harbor. It promptly sank to the bottom and displaced all the seawater away from fish and bottom-dwelling creatures.

Molasses is not a “hazardous material” like petroleum, and so the usual rules and requirements for marine transfers are completely different. No records are available regarding the age or inspection history of the failed pipeline, and no response plan was ready once the spill had been recognized.  If this had been a finished product pipeline at a petroleum liquids terminal, I suspect that the safety manager would know exactly the inspection history and would have executed a pre-rehearsed response using equipment and materials kept nearby just for that purpose.

Comprehensive risk management at the molasses terminal would have identified this risk and, ideally, resolved uncertainty about the age and condition of the pipeline before a critical failure occurred. The Honolulu molasses spill is another case history of losses that arise from incorrectly assuming that regulatory compliance is the same as thorough risk management.

Atlas is pleased to be working on a risk management project with Phil Myers at PEMY Consulting that addresses this issue head-on. The unfortunate situation in Honolulu Harbor is an object lesson for us on that project, making sure that we consider all of the risks in our Customer’s terminals and not just the risks that the regulators require to be addressed.

And for those of you who think that a molasses spill is unprecedented, I leave you with a photo from the disastrous 1919 spill in Boston.

BostonMolassesDisaster

The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

 

 

 

 

 

 

Golden Gate Branch YMF and Atlas Geotechnical are co-sponsoring a young members technical writing contest this Fall.  You all are aware, some of you more than others, how much emphasis I put on communication skills.  So here’s us putting (prize) money where our mouth is.  It’s going to be a marvelous time.

Also, we’re looking for a third judge.  If none of you volunteer I plan to hit up Cliff Craft, though I worry that his editorial style would cause many entrants to wind up in tears. Drop me a note if you’re interested and can spare a few hours reading and critiquing 500-word entries.  Maybe we can work out a cost-sharing deal for the awards banquet.

The announcement and rules for entry are here:

2013 Technical Writing Contest

Those of you who want to test your skills should consider dropping in an entry too.  You can’t win the prize money, but you could win my enduring admiration. Show us what you got; scribble up 500 of your best words and let’s see how you seasoned professionals stack up against the students and entry-level engineers.

Be Prepared

The Boy Scout motto is good advice for consultants too.

I suffered through an epic failure of a conference call earlier this week. As a part of an exceptionally interesting assignment I’m interviewing service providers to evaluate their suitability for a long-term contract with a major pipeline company. The candidates have a range of  size, location, expertise, reputation, and approach. It was, surprisingly, the high-end Consultants who showed up unprepared and crashed so spectacularly. To be clear, these were not “consulting engineers.” These were representatives of an international big-C Consultancy with a globe-striding reputation.

They hadn’t read the briefing I’d sent them, had no idea about the scale of the engagement for which they were interviewing, and were completely unfamiliar with the boundary limits of the analysis. Their sales pitch consisted entirely of generic statements about how qualified they are because of how big their company is, and how they were positive they could solve the problem as soon as I had fully explained the solution to them.  It took about 10 minutes for me to realize how astonishingly unproductive the call was going to be. I blame myself for wasting 8 of those 10 minutes with self doubt: “Surely, it’s got to be me failing to communicate in some way, because these guys are the best in the world at exactly the topic we’re discussing.” Nope, they had just failed to prepare and they wasted everyone’s time.

So it wasn’t a total loss. We were able to salvage the call by cutting it short and identifying different people in their huge, highly qualified Consultancy who had a chance of meeting my customer’s needs. I made sure to send the briefing along with the next call confirmation

It was a great lesson to me, though, since Atlas is so brazen about holding itself out to be such leaders in our industry. That reputation for excellence is fragile and needs to be nurtured. Show up prepared, every time, if you want for people to keep believing that you’re the right guy to solve their interesting problems.