Surveyors TAKE NOTE: Building in the wrong place!

URY914 · 12-08-2007, 05:10 AM

I took Friday off, but as you know the worst things happen on Friday AND when you take a day off. My Superintendent calls me at 9:30. (I'm the senior project manager) and says "the worst thing that can happen has happened". I'm thinking someone has died on the site, but he says the building is 20' too far to the East. WHAT? This is phase one of a two story office building and we have all the foundations in the ground, the elevator pit is in, and the electrical/plumbing u/g rough is in. We had the surveyor that did the original plot plans for the Architect layout the building when we built the pad and we had him back to check it before we poured concrete. We did everything right. The Super thought something was out because the civil guy's waterline tie in was off and not tying in at the right location in the building but he used his own layout and not the surveyors.

The surveyor was out and checked everything again and everything checked in the field. Lead man gets on the phone with his office and the problem is found. Its seems the field crew was given the WRONG POINT OF BEGINNING! Originally the property was smaller and the building was not able to fit on the property as the Owner wanted it. They were able to go back and purchase 20' more feet from the developer of the property. The building was moved and the project went forward. When it came time to locate the point of beginning to layout the building NOW they used the PREVIOUS location. This is a "green field" project, a new building on a virgin site with no points of reference when you're standing looking at it.

The surveyor has excepted complete responsibility and has agree to pay all costs. I don't think he realizes were taking $150-200K, three weeks of general conditions time, rent for the Owner, redesign costs, etc, etc, etc.

And this was going to be a nice little simple project for me....
I got a meeting on Monday at 8:00am.

MotoSook · 05:58 AM

I feel for you Paul. It's not your fault. Stuff like that has happened to me, and it was never easy to sit in a meeting and tell a client what happened.

I recently had a client that contracted the survey company themselves for a hot job. They didn't know what to ask for and the survey company probably hadn't done a whole lot of jobs like it. So I got junk survey and poor cad drawings that took weeks to straighten out. On top of that, the client kept pushing to get the job done, but there was no way in hell, I was going to release the construction prints when we couldn't agree on where the piles were to be driven.

Last week I got a picture of another project where two contractors couldn't connect too pieces of pipe when one was already there waiting for them to tie into!

I finally got out of project management...too many idiots to have to rely on sometimes and clients can be too unreasonable. Been at the new job for a few weeks, and I haven't broken or thrown a pen or pencil, torn anything up or slammed my mouse on my desk since. I use to sit back in my chair and stare into space while fuming in anger and disbelief at the stupidity of people and things. People at the old company knew not to come into my office when I got that look.

Good luck Monday morning.

David · David's Garage

I feel for you. I work in a large machine shop and invariably, ***** happens. We just tell ourselves it's just iron, whatever it is can be fixed. Nobody got hurt, that's the important thing.

vash · vash's Garage

in san francisco, i can show you a bridge column 2 feet off to one side. it is along what we call "the walk of shame".

Dan in Pasadena · Dan in Pasadena's Garage

I feel your pain. I am the Project Quality Manager on a major transit project here in L.A. and our DEsign-Builder built a wall; albeit a MUCH smaller issue than yours, 18 unches INSIDE the dynamic envelope the trains will occupy. They voluntarily demo'ed it of course.

What do you suppose happened? Yup, they re-rebuilt it STILL 5" inside the dynamic envelope. Yes, I made them demo it AGANI! I'm REALLY popular with them these days. Best of luck with your client.

URY914 · 12-08-2007, 09:16 AM

I got a feeling that the surveyor will spend the weekend trying to get out of it somehow. It's a American way.

scottmandue · 12-08-2007, 09:45 AM

Gee, I guess I don't have it so bad...

I walked into the air and space gallery (museum) to start the place up this morning to find a three foot square of drywall had gotten wet from rain leakage and broke away from the fourth level (about sixty feet up). Fortunately it didn't hit the Gemini or Apollo capsules that are underneath it but it clipped the corner of a kiosk and shattered into a bazillion pieces making a big mess... I had to shut down the first floor of the gallery in case anymore drywall decides to fall and someone has rented that gallery for a party tonight... not my problem but I feel bad about it.

Porsche-O-Phile · Porsche-O-Phile's Garage

Surveys are typically the owner's responsibility unless you have specific provisions in your contracts with the architect and G.C. to the contrary (unlikely), so this will end up being a fight between the surveyor and the owner over the cost of the change.

This kind of stuff ALWAYS happens on design-build jobs. It's generally not a very good way to work (quality control suffers due to compressed timetables) and one of these days people will start figuring that out. For now the owner will have to eat it and pay the G.C., hoping to recover the $$$ from the surveyor's insurer later - that's what I'd expect anyway.

Sorry to hear about it.

Chuck Moreland · 12-08-2007, 10:34 AM

What was the surveyor's fee?

Hard to imagine him covering the cash to put it right. Perhaps he has insurance to cover these things.

Paco Anton · Paco Anton's Garage

The same thing happened to me last month ... but with n interesting final twist.

I work as COO of a small/medium construction company. We specialize in industrial biuldings made of prefabricated concrete (warehouses, workshops and such). We usually build for individual developers who buy plots in industrial parks.

We just finished two of these for a client when a guy walks to my on-site engineer and tells him that we just built one of the two buildings in his plot instead of our client's. This was so because all the plots are the same and we were one plot to the right from where we should have been.

Fortunately we had a letter from the surveyor validating the location of our work. In the end the surveyor bought the plot with the building on it form the owner and our client commisioned us another building in his vacant plot (on the surveyors money), so we ended doing 3 buildings instead of the 2 planned. Now I call that a good sales tactic!!!

911Rob · 911Rob's Garage

Wow!
At least you had a surveyor! His E&O insurance will cover it; but they should be notified asap.

I had a buddy in Edmonton, BUILT a shopping center facing the wrong direction!
Yup; it was a Superstore, they contracted to build 3 all at once..... and went broke because of it. I was building for Superstore in BC at the time and landed the deal for them in Edmonton; I offered to help but No........... their project manager wouldn't hear of it.

Anyway, they had their $25/hr super lay out the building. No one ever picked up on the fact that it was being built facing the wrong direction until almost completion. It was never moved as that location didn't matter; but man what a headache!

TerryBPP · 12-08-2007, 01:26 PM

This is why surveyors are required to carry $250k worth of liability insurance.

If you surveyor is worth a ***** he will use GPS and a good benchmark. We have very reputable surveyors and always refer them for the construction surveying but 9 times out of 10 the contractor uses the cheapest surveyor they can find. Most don't know their head from their a$$.

MBAtarga · 12-08-2007, 01:36 PM

The surveyor's name wasn't Jim I guess?

juanbenae · juanbenae's Garage

at least green concrete breaks up easy.

T$

legion · 12-08-2007, 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MBAtarga

The surveyor's name wasn't Jim I guess?

My thoughts exactly. Jim seems pretty thorough to me. Given the circumstances, I see how this kind of mistake is possible though.

tdatk · 12-08-2007, 05:50 PM

I read quite a few years ago, that in Chicago, two contractors were building a tunnel between two buildings and were to meet in the middle. They missed by a few feet. I certainly understand how this could happen, but I'd like to believe they spent quite a bit of time surveying and such so this wouldn't happen.

legion · 12-08-2007, 06:09 PM

A friend of mine used to be a project manager for a construction company in Chicago. Not sure who was at fault for this one, but they poured the concrete footing for a parking garage right around a natural gas shutoff valve. My friend was inspecting the footings and notice a natural gas line running into one side of the concrete....and out the other side.

flashgordon13 · 12-09-2007, 04:08 AM

I feel glad this stuff doesn't just happen to me. I work in a large mall and we are planning to build an additional wing. After spending weeks doing surveys with every engineer know to mankind, and going through all the permitting proccess, the big shots all get together to finalize construction schedules. I calmly asked if everyone was aware that our building is only 2 floors and there is no basement as shown in all the drawings? The expansion called for 3 floors and everyone was more than a little confused when I brought up this fact to them. It is beyond belief that you can not see such a basic thing. That meeting came to an abrubt end and it was back to the start. We are still waiting for an answer from our home office. I would love to know how you can still have a job after such a monumental screw-up.

URY914 · 12-09-2007, 07:40 AM

Some of you may have missed the fact that we hired the surveyors that laid out the property and building for the Architect. He was working for us, the general contractor when he located the building corners. His name is on the construction documents as the surveyor of record, he was involved in the purchase of the property and the permitting. If anyone should have gotten it right, it would be this guy.

Needless to say, last night's company Christmas party was a somber night for my Super.

stomachmonkey · 12-09-2007, 08:21 AM

My step dad was a VP for Citi Corp. He's an architect that managed all their properties from single ATM's up to the Citi Buildings in NYC.

They were putting up the corp office in S. Dakota.

Supervisor on site calls him one day flipping out. All the steel showing up is too short. Nothing matches the most recent plans he has.

After a couple of days of digging into it they found that some other big wig had called asking what the building would look like if they wanted to put 50% more bodies into it. The call had been answered by a fresh associate out of college and on the job only a few weeks. Wanting to please the big wig he had the system scale up the plans and sent them along.

A copy of those plans ended up making it to the job site.

In the end nothing was built incorrectly but it cost them a couple of days of down time.