The View From The Other Side

Jan called the representative from the piling company again today (the original one, not his senior colleague). Apparently after the discussions between them and the structural engineer on Wednesday, the latter promised to send some further calculations, but they haven't arrived. Now, where have I heard that before ?

I called up the structural engineer and asked him what the hell was going on. His version of this latest development is rather different. He claims that it is him that has been trying to highlight the unsuitability of the piling design, with respect to the rotational forces. It is only once he made contact with the senior guy in the piling company that he has made any progress. Further, he claims to have successfully faxed the requested calculations on Wednesday. He agreed to speak to the pilers as a matter of urgency, but came back to me a few minutes later to say that they had finished for the day. He has put another set of the calcs in the post and promised to pick this up again on Monday.

I came off the phone and thought about all this for a while. I called him back and asked for more of the technical details of why there suddenly seems to be a problem. He explained that he would have expected, for a foundation such as this, to have a zig-zag pattern of piles, and a wider beam (or even perhaps two separate ones) in order to accomodate the loading of both the house walls, and the retaining wall that sits beside it. With, effectively, two lines of piles, the beam structure and piles are much more resistant to the rotational forces exerted by the earth bank bearing on one side only of the structure. In his opinion, while having more piles is obviously more expensive, this is partially offset by a simpler and cheaper beam structure.

This all sounds quite reasonable to me, but I am not confident about who the root source of this concern really is. We can't get the thought out of our minds that we are being taken for a ride here. Every time we seem to be getting everything back on track, something else goes wrong. We are seriously thinking about seeking a second opinion before we go any further. We have been advised against changing the structural engineer at this late stage, but we are increasingly tempted to do so. After all, if he really had concerns about the proposal submitted by the piling company, why didn't he say something to us ? He is employed as our technical authority on this project so there is no way he should let us give the go-ahead until he is satisfied.