Geomechanical Musings

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.

Waikiki International Marketplace

Is that bikini-clad woman in the lower right carrying a set of construction drawings?

 

Final proposals were submitted this week for the Foundation Design-Assist contract on the International Marketplace Redevelopment project. Foundation design is particularly challenging at this site because:

  1. The parking garage planned for the back of the lot has column loads over 3,000 kips.
  2. An ancient stream appears to have eroded away the intermediate reef under some, but not all, of the new building, leading to a few foundations needing to be more than 185 feet long, and
  3. The iconic and historical banyan trees in the middle of the Marketplace need to be protected completely during construction.

It’s this last item that draws my attention on a sunny late-summer afternoon, when the temperature in my naturally ventilated office here at Atlas World Headquarters is topping 85 degrees F and my capacity for productive work has become asymptotic with zero. The trees are beautiful and iconic, but it is also terrifically difficult to install 150-foot deep piles from beneath the 20-foot high canopy. This tension between history and progress is one of the most interesting aspects of this very interesting project.

The International Marketplace is the creation of tiki-bar inventor Donn the Beachcomber, who built the original Dagger Bar at this spot in 1956 , followed by other tiki-themed restaurants as popularity skyrocketed. Duke Kahanamoku’s was here and Trader Vic’s too, a trifecta of early Waikiki tiki culture.  Donn Beach is also the esteemed inventor of  the Mai Tai, the Zombie, the Dr. Funk, and 81 more (essentially all rum-based) tropical tiki bar drinks, assuring his place in the mixology hall of fame.

The huge, graceful banyan tree that’s causing such logistical trouble for the IMP foundation contractor supported, at one time, Donn’s tree house.  Atlas staff working on the IMP redevelopment project have enjoyed tropical beverages in that tree after Donn sold it to Duke’s, who remodeled it into Dukes Hideaway. The historical credentials of this exceptional tree are not at all in doubt, and the the IMP redevelopment team is obviously committed to preserving the location of so much great Waikiki history. The exact solution is not yet decided, but have no fear that Donn’s tree house, later Duke’s Hideaway, is a central part of the IMP redevelopment project.

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Proper Mai Tai presentation, according to the inventor.

So as we depart work for a sunny, hot, 3-day weekend celebrating the end of summer, let’s all remember Donn the Beachcomber, the Mai Tai that he invented for us, and the great history of tiki lounge culture at our project site in Waikiki and all throughout the US.  Have a safe and happy Labor Day weekend, everyone. And for those of you with a tropical thirst, I leave you with this helpful link: http://www.hawaiibeachcomber.com/id13.html

The_Flying_MonkeysYes, of course we have a squadron of flying monkeys here at Atlas GT World HQ, ready at a moments notice to fly forth and do our bidding.

Well, really, they’re not monkeys.  That would be silly. They’re hardworking, bright young people with a commitment to project success. When they’re not working for us they’re out in the world helping other companies achieve extraordinary success. But when we need them, we have to but send out the word and the flying monkeys gather from the skies for a kickoff meeting.

This week, it was a long-anticipated litigation support effort that broke and, true to form, had essentially no time in which to complete some pretty complicated work. With only a few calls, and leveraging  goodwill that we banked several months or years ago, we were able to mobilize a great team for intense data analysis that allowed us to deliver Atlas-class customer service on a very compressed schedule.

Every company should invest in meeting and cultivating their squadron of flying monkeys. Whether it’s graduate students for summer field assignments or semi-retired engineers for tropical QC work, freelance, short-term working relationships are becoming the accepted, even the best, method of delivering technical services.

Our deadline is Monday. We and the squadron are  working through the weekend, and on Monday night after delivering our fact-saturated report we’ll be sharing a little appreciation with them for another job well done.

 

 

Majuro ARFF Seawater

Spring tides flooding through the new revetment at the airport fire station.

I’ve seen a flurry of interesting information about sea level rise in Majuro this past week. Though it doesn’t constitute an authoritative report, I thought that some of you would like to see what we’re working with.

First, I finally located those photographs of the spring tide flowing through the revetment at the new airport fire station in Majuro.  This only happens one week out of the year, and really only during El Nino years, but nobody living on Majuro can recall it happening at all before.

Second, good friend Pat Campanella at Lyon Associates shared this article with me:

Tides Swamp Marshall Islands

Third, the guys at Lyon shared some personal observations about the situation and how it affects their engineering designs in their June 2013 edition of the Imprint newsletter. I find that newsletter to be one of the best in our industry, mainly because of the interesting geographic reach of their practice but also because it’s brief and lighthearted, something to which I can only aspire.  I encourage everyone to subscribe.

Climate change and damaging sea level rise does not manifest as a gradual, recognizable creeping up of the waterline at the shore. Rather, as the article describes, damaging sea level rise affects developed coastlines as (apparently) sudden storm-related erosion and inundation. Damage occurs over a period of hours, much too short to allow any proper preparations. It will do things like flood the airport at Majuro and cut off air access for most of the country.  It will suddenly flood New York subway tunnels that have never flooded before. Just because higher water levels are not damaging our infrastructure in between storms doesn’t excuse us, the engineers responsible for defending that infrastructure, while we have time.

Problems need to be recognized and prioritized before they can be solved. Solutions to a problem of this magnitude will require significant time and treasure, which requires significant political will. Although we are experiencing more unprecedented weather in populated areas (heat waves in Europe, drought in Texas, hurricanes making landfall in Manhattan, and the intense rain in Ontario that fell yesterday), the general population still views these events as isolated, unrelated incidents that hopefully will just go away on their own. People are terrible at recognizing long-term threats. The problems on Majuro and other low island nations are now frequent enough that people familiar with the issues can recognize them for what they are, an pattern of increasingly damaging weather events that are all related to the higher sea level.

A few civil engineering projects are recognizing and addressing this trend, like the Treasure Island Redevelopment Project in San Francisco Bay and the Maeslantkering storm surge barrier at Rotterdam Harbor. Widespread recognition necessary to mobilize political will, though, is not keeping pace with the problem. Low island nations like the Republic of the Marshall Islands are a critical bellweather for a pattern of increasingly incursive storm damage before  it escalates and regularly affects continental shores. The observations that Lyon Associates is collecting are a valuable a tripwire at the perimeter, offering us a warning that something bad is coming. We have time to make preparations, harden our infrastructure, even change land use patterns on vulnerable coastlines, but only if we listen for and act upon the warning that Majuro is providing.