Geomechanical Musings

First of all: Happy new year, everyone. I love that last Calvin & Hobbes strip and find some way to share it at this time each year. The new year really does offer a fresh start in a magical world, and I hope that with the recovering economy we all have a chance to go exploring in 2014.

Secondly, here’s an exhortation about New Year’s Resolutions: While the intention is good, the success rate on resolutions is only 8%. Reasonable people like engineers will use more effective change management methods. Make plans, not resolutions, if you really want to improve your practice.

Although most people call them “drawings” instead of “plans,” there’s a reason that costly infrastructure is built using a detailed set of plans that describes all of the pieces that need to be brought to a site and assembled in a particular order. Without detailed plans, no amount of wishing will create new infrastructure that meets some pressing need.

Treat your business the same way. Identify your requirements, assess your budget, specify the pieces that need to be assembled, and make a schedule with milestones for delivering the new program. Only with a detailed plan can you reliably effect change in your practice that achieves your goals.

Atlas Geotechnical, in addition to our ever-evolving 5-year strategic plan, will execute two focused strategic plans in 2014. One involves earning repeat business from a very large, well respected infrastructure design firm. Their projects have complex foundation problems at a rate and severity higher than other firms, which makes them an ideal match for Atlas’ approach to foundation engineering.

The other strategic plan is more speculative. We will attempt to build a 3-firm alliance to pursue means-and-methods engineering projects. The team members are all willing, but we’re not yet sure about the market size and the real potential for profitability. The first step in that plan is to confirm that the plan really is a worthwhile use of scarce resources.

Be assured that by the middle of January both of these initiatives will have detailed plans that include resource requirements, milestones, and performance expectations. Only with this level of planning can we reliably convert “I wish I had more cool projects” into “Wow, look at our marvelous backlog of cool projects.” I hope that each of you, by the end of this new year, can say the same.

Happy holidays, all. I hope that your year is coming to a peaceful close.

This quick post shares an observation from my recent trip to Canada. I learn new stuff every time I travel, and this trip was no different. Local etiquette regarding hotel climate controls and windows, for instance, varies widely. In the tropics you keep windows closed while running your air conditioning to avoid an indoor condensation rainstorm. In Edmonton, apparently, the most important reason to keep your window closed in subfreezing weather is to prevent bursting the pipes in your room. And here I was just trying to thaw my ears from the brief walk between buildings.

These signs are usually installed for a reason, so some prior guest actually left the window open and burst the pipes. What lodger, besides a sturdy Canadian who should know better, would be rugged enough to open the window for more than just one breath of fresh arctic air? And is there a fee for violating the house rule about keeping the weather out in the dead of winter, like there is for smoking in a nonsmoking hotel room?

I may never have answers to these puzzling questions, though I am looking forward to investigating further while up there working with the Enbridge crew in 2014.

Happy New Year, everyone, and have a prosperous 2014.

We feasted like champions at the 2013 Technical Writing Contest Awards Banquet

Last night’s awards dinner was a truly excellent event. The food was delicious, the atmosphere convivial, the guests each a delight to know. Conversation was lively, varied, and thoughtful. YMF President and USACE Engineer Rachel Coyner shared insight on the need for evolution in Civil Engineering’s participation in government, at least to the extent that the electorate relies on large infrastructure projects for their health, safety, and livelihoods. My only regret is that my seat at one end of the table prevented me from fully enjoying the conversation down at the other end.

I was particularly impressed with the varied backgrounds of our eight contestants. Men and women were almost equally represented, at least as equally as one could expect at an Engineering event (we had excellent conversation about that, too). So were east and west coasts, young professionals and students, PE’s and EIT’s, government and consultant employment. The one area where we truly lacked diversity was public transportation use: at evening’s close more than half the party walked down to BART together, and I may have been the only person leaving the dinner by personal car.

The contest succeeded by all measures, largely due to Shawna Gates’ persistence keeping me on task and Ally Disch’s extraordinary skills organizing the details. Special thanks go out to San Francisco Section Younger Member’s Forum for sponsoring the event with Atlas, for lending their organizational support as well as doubling the prize money purse. There are minor aspects that we’ll change for next year, of course, but I would be very pleased if future events carried on just like this for many years to come.

Invest the extra time in your practice, and let the lull end on it’s own schedule.

August’s frantic busyness resulted in an unsurprising shortage of billable work earlier than we had hoped, well before we head into the Holidays. This is not our first lull, nor will it be our last. As consultants whose revenues depend on other people’s projects, I believe that gaps of various severity and duration are unavoidable. The issue is not whether or not you’ll have slow periods, but what you do with your time when you catch one.

Most of you have experienced slowdowns of various severities, and we’ve all been able to continue our practices smarter for the experience. Our time is valuable to our clients, and it’s value is not diminished when we work on our own behalves. From that perspective a lull is an opportunity to invest, to improve, to emerge on the other side better prepared to solve cool problems and deliver excellent service.

Irv Olsen was a Dames & Moore partner and Portland’s leading geotechnical engineer in the 1960’s and 70’s. His marketing advice (related to John Martin, another remarkable GT) is a touchstone of Atlas’ practice: “If things get slow in the office, go see a movie. When you get back, someone will have called.”

Of course that’s not a panacea for all workload problems, but rather a charming acknowledgement that no specific action is required for a lull to pass. There’s no magical rain dance, and frantic short-term actions generally do more harm than good. Assuming that your group is implementing an effective marketing strategy you should stay the course; the lull will end much as it began impelled by forces outside your control. Irv and his 40 years of experience encourage all of us to take a moment for ourselves while the wheel turns, sharpen our saws so that we can start the next engagement with alacrity.

Here at Atlas World Headquarters we’ve been trying to seize this lull and maximize the value through long-term investment in our practice. These are the items that will benefit Atlas the most when the tide turns, when we’re busy again like we were this past summer, and when we can’t tolerate the distraction of being unprepared:

Dispute resolution marketing materials are finally progressing. Explaining Atlas’ business model and expertise is never simple, and well-considered written materials are proving to be very helpful. We expect significant growth once we earn a foothold.
Mathematica. Finally, Mathematica. The automated algebra software has such potential, and yet still befuddles me like a new language. A little extra time working through tutorials and developing templates is going to save a ton of time on shoring and ground improvement designs when the heat is back on.
Relationships. Those of you who read these musings know the importance of relationships to Atlas, and likely to your practice as well. The other day I finally caught up with an old friend and collaborator, a call that was long past due. I’m making one of those calls every day.
Project Descriptions: All the fantastically interesting experiences that we earned over the summer are now a part of our offering to existing and new clients. We need to convey that expertise through brochures and resumes, and we never seem to make the time required for thoughtful writing when we’re grappling with a complete workload.

Most of us can count on the predictable restorative period during the Holidays, beginning in about 2.5 weeks. I hope that you’re able to maximize the value of that lull as effectively as we are here at Atlas. It’s going to be an interesting, and hopefully prosperous, new year, and we fully intend to greet it well prepared.

Good friend and Atlas collaborator Steve Dickenson and I had a free day in Los Angeles after the California Strong Motion Instrumentation Program Seminar. When traveling with Steve, you can always count on a Port Tour, and the tour he arranged at the Port of Long Beach exceeded all expectations.

At the time of our visit, the Port had $300 million in active construction contracts spread across 9 general contractors. Doug Thiessen, the Port’s Managing Director of Engineering and, for the afternoon, our tourguide, showed us dredging, land reclamation, railyard construction, wharf piling, and bridge foundations. The amount of activity was astonishing and the coordination between projects, without disrupting Port operations, clearly requires a Herculean effort.

Two foundation projects in particular caught my interest.

Misaligned 24″ octagonal wharf piles at POLB Middle Harbor project

Middle Harbor Phase 2 Wharf Piles

The $1.2 billion Middle Harbor project is a multifaceted infrastructure improvement that creates advanced wharf face for the largest container ships in the world. More information is here:

http://www.polb.com/about/projects/middleharbor.asp

The photo at left is particularly interesting to me because it reflects the fascinating history of the Port of Long Beach. Many of you are aware that Long Beach is a highly productive oilfield and that historical extraction has caused tens of feet of subsidence. The piles supporting this part of the Middle Harbor wharf deck are misaaligned because of obstructions and rubble in the upper soil profile. The rubble fill was placed to correct fthe oil-related subsidence. I’m sure that the oil value is significant, but so is the cost of redesigning the waffle-slab wharf deck to accommodate the pile misalignment. Heavy and high-value infrastructure on soft ground is complex enough, and adding in man-made complications like subsidence and random fills makes this one of the most complex geotechnical conditions in the world.

Gerald Desmond Bridge Replacement

The bridge that connects the Port to Interstate 710 on the west is being replaced with a $1 billion, 250-foot high cable stayed bridge. The stay tower will be 500 feet high and founded on 8-foot diameter shafts up to 220 feet deep. During our tour Mr. Thiessen showed us all 3 casing advancers active on the project. Very powerful equipment vibrates and rotates a heavy casing like a giant biscuit cutter as the clamshell digs the soil out from the middle. The scale of this equipment is really impressive up close. Casing advancers are expensive to mobilize and only work on the largest projects. Having three of them on one jobsite is pretty exceptional.

Load testing is an integral part of high-capacity pile projects, moreso on critical infrastructure in deep sediments. The four Osterbeerg cells in this reinforcing cage are 24″ diameter. Cast into the test pile along with strain gauges and other instruments, the load test applies hydraulic pressure is applied from the surface to force the pile tip downward using the shaft above for a reaction. The design of the test pile itself is a fascinating subject, and seeing so many test piles with such high test loads was a highlight of the day.

Here’s a smaller test pile at the GDB project after the reinforcing steel, O-cells, and strain gauges are cast into the shaft. Each instrument will tell some part of a complicated and important story about how these piles transfer bridge loads into the foundation soils.

Overall it was a marvelous afternoon spent with good friends looking at some of the largest construction projects on the west coast. I’d like to thank Doug Thiessen and the Port for showing us around and getting us behind the scenes, and Steve Dickenson for arranging such an excellent guided tour.

Doug Thiessen, Managing Director of Engineering, and Dr. Steve Dickenson of New Albion Geotechnical