California
Super Star Member
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2004
- Messages
- 14,939
- Location
- An hour north of San Francisco
- Tractor
- Yanmar YM240 Yanmar YM186D
Re the poorly loaded excavator - One of my 'Management Review' functions in the internal review office, state highway department, was to visit constructions sites and verify that the inspectors' project records were maintained complete and sufficient. This was for future resolution of any dispute with a contractor, and to assure that anyone who needed the project records in the future for additional design work was looking at documents that accurately reflected what had been built. I could usually cover 2-3 of these jobsites per day.
The night before visiting a jobsite in Los Angeles I saw on tv there had been a fatal crane accident at the site I would visit first in the morning. The TV report made it look like a jobsite crane had collapsed, or fell off the bridge, or something. I phoned in the morning to cancel - they didn't need more chaos that morning - and learned what had really happened: Some unrelated owner of a crane was driving on the freeway beneath the project when he hit the falsework (temporary structure supporting the concrete forms for a new bridge), and dropped a huge beam on his rig. It was a truck mounted crane with the mast pointed forward and resting in a saddle above the cab, and he hadn't secured the mast to the saddle. He would have had at least 2~3 ft of clearance going under the falsework if his mast hadn't bounced up out of the saddle just as he drove under these temporary girders.
I cancelled that site visit and picked another site randomly to review. ... your tax dollars at work.
California has an extremely low level of corruption in public works, at least at the jobsite level. These random project-record inspections help maintain that standard. But after I retired, I can't imagine how our Bay Bridge fiasco evolved. To oversimplify, the huge bolts cast into the columns to secure the deck to the columns were faulty and many snapped when initially tightened - negating the whole concept of withstanding an earthquake where stresses would be greater. The whole project was designed to maintain access into San Francisco (on a penninsula) after the Big One, major earthquake, and these failures revealed that the $ billions spent were wasted.
The night before visiting a jobsite in Los Angeles I saw on tv there had been a fatal crane accident at the site I would visit first in the morning. The TV report made it look like a jobsite crane had collapsed, or fell off the bridge, or something. I phoned in the morning to cancel - they didn't need more chaos that morning - and learned what had really happened: Some unrelated owner of a crane was driving on the freeway beneath the project when he hit the falsework (temporary structure supporting the concrete forms for a new bridge), and dropped a huge beam on his rig. It was a truck mounted crane with the mast pointed forward and resting in a saddle above the cab, and he hadn't secured the mast to the saddle. He would have had at least 2~3 ft of clearance going under the falsework if his mast hadn't bounced up out of the saddle just as he drove under these temporary girders.
I cancelled that site visit and picked another site randomly to review. ... your tax dollars at work.
California has an extremely low level of corruption in public works, at least at the jobsite level. These random project-record inspections help maintain that standard. But after I retired, I can't imagine how our Bay Bridge fiasco evolved. To oversimplify, the huge bolts cast into the columns to secure the deck to the columns were faulty and many snapped when initially tightened - negating the whole concept of withstanding an earthquake where stresses would be greater. The whole project was designed to maintain access into San Francisco (on a penninsula) after the Big One, major earthquake, and these failures revealed that the $ billions spent were wasted.
