Geomechanical Musings

Success comes at surprising times.

Here at Atlas GT we’re huge advocates for strategic planning. Invest extra effort into pursuing clients who have interesting and important problems and your practice will grow in an interesting and important direction. It’s a habit that we learned at GeoEngineers back in the ’90’s that has served us, and GeoEngineers, very well. Combining their commitment to strategic growth with ours has just yielded extraordinary success, which is the subject of this post.

So our old friend and collaborator Trevor Hoyles is the Pipeline Group Manager at GeoEngineers. Recently, he and I both were pondering strategic approaches to a large gas transmission project here in the Bay Area. Atlas was too small but temperamentally suited and proximal; GeoEngineers is arguably the leading HDD design firm in the US but lacks a Bay Area presence. We agreed to team up, present the GeoEngineers brand, and see if we could get some work. Boy did we ever.

So here’s the problem with Strategic Plans: The point of strategic investment is to disrupt the existing paradigm, make a dramatic change, grow rapidly. You never can know with certainty that the plan will work, but you hope for success, you strive for it, you commit yourself to the plan and by extension to the people and companies also investing in the plan. So when success does come, whether soon or late, you are absolutely committed to acting on it.

I think that Trevor and I were both thinking in terms of “if” we’re successful, when we should have been planning actively for “when” our plan bears fruit. “If we win this big project I’ll start looking for collaborators.” “If we win I’ll need to be careful not to take on any low-value projects that would crowd my availability.” I don’t know what GeoEngineers was planning, but I do know that they just won the geohazards and crossings work on the Pacific Connector Gas Transmission project in southern Oregon. They’re busier than ever.

So when one of GeoEngineers’ longstanding collaborators brought them in on a fast-moving component of this big strategic project, of course they agreed and staffed it, and of course I cleared my calendar and got out to the site right away. That assignment went well, as you’d expect given the team involved, and the Customer wants more of the same. Suddenly we’re successful to a degree that’s actually causing some discomfort. Of course we’re committed to success, but I’m learning that Atlas could have been better prepared for success.

That’s the lesson that I’d like to share with you all: expect to succeed. When we set our minds to something, and assemble a great team, more than likely we’ll succeed at it. We need to be prepared to succeed, pro-active instead of re-active. And that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend; making a better plan for handing the success that we had hoped for, but not necessarily planned for, when we established this part of our strategic plan.

Have a great weekend, everyone, and drop me a line if you’ve got solid pipeline expertise and like the thought of wintering in California.

Atlas 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.)

I 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.

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.

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.