Welcome to the bullshit known as my life

[The Assassin]

Here's an interesting article about an engineering project I'm one of the head consultants for (I am the lead consultant for Walsh Construction). Thank god none of this shit is my fault. If they only knew how big of a drunk I am.........

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0511020227nov02,1,4280491.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

NOTE: LINK DOESN'T WORK IF YOU ARE NOT REGISTED TO TRIBUNE.COM I POSTED THE FULL TEXT BELOW.

[larryhead]

"The story you requested is available only to registered members." Eff them... I'm not signing up. Paste it here! :)

[The Assassin]

Sorry, I didn't realize I was registered. Here's the text:

O'Hare's face-lift sags
Terminal facade work is $48 million in red, 8 months behind

By Patricia Callahan and Jon Hilkevitch
Tribune staff reporters
Published November 2, 2005

A construction project designed to give a "new face" to passenger terminals at O'Hare International Airport is up to $48 million over budget, eight months behind schedule and plagued by structural problems underground and overhead, a Tribune investigation has found.

While the city, its contractors and subcontractors bickered over who was responsible for cost overruns, steel companies threatened to walk off the job because they weren't being paid for all their work.

Originally pegged at $315 million, the project's price tag already is likely to reach at least $363 million, much of that because O'Hare officials and the airlines added more construction work after the price of steel skyrocketed. The city estimates that $15 million of that total will be needed to remedy cracks in steel welds, although airport officials vow to pass on most of that extra cost to companies they feel are responsible for mistakes.

The terminal facade work, funded through ticket taxes and bonds that will be paid back with airport revenue, is now expected to be completed in mid-September 2007. It was originally expected to be finished in January 2007. It's not clear what the final price tag will be.

The project sounds simple enough: Push out the walls of three O'Hare terminals to make more room for ticket-counter lobbies and baggage-claim areas, spruce up the inside of the terminals and construct a canopy over the airport's upper roadway to protect travelers from rain and snow.

The problems raise questions about the city's ability to manage the much larger and more complex $15 billion expansion of O'Hare. City officials vow that the overhaul, which is in its infancy, will be completed on time and within budget.

"You can't compare a cantilevered canopy to putting in a taxiway," said John Roberson, the city's aviation chief. "Show me a major project anywhere that hasn't run into surprises."

Roberson, who is a witness in a federal probe of fraud in city hiring and promotions, last week said he is resigning to head a consulting firm.

The Tribune reviewed more than 1,000 pages of internal city documents, contracts, change orders, project reports and contractor e-mails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, as well as lawsuits and liens filed by subcontractors who say they haven't been fully paid for their work.

Some of the biggest names in Chicago architecture and construction are involved. Helmut Jahn's firm, Murphy/Jahn, is the primary architect, and Walsh Construction Co. of Illinois, which built much of Millennium Park, was hired to construct much of the project.

About the problems with the facade and canopy work, Ric Krause, the Walsh Construction vice president in charge of the project, said, "Walsh is trying to work through all the obstacles and is trying very hard to finish the project."

Thomas Chambers, the Murphy/Jahn principal architect on the O'Hare facade project, declined to comment.

City officials say they normally haggle over extra costs in court, after a project is complete. But they were forced to deal with the overruns early because key aspects of the project nearly came to a halt.

"The problem was the [subcontractors] had gotten to a point where they wanted to walk off the job," Roberson said.

Complicating matters, airlines asked to alter the schedule of parts of the project. As a result, construction costs escalated, causing a $29 million jump in the project's price tag. A rise in steel costs alone made up $14.3 million of that increase. The parts that hadn't been rescheduled weren't subject to those spikes because contracts had locked in lower prices.

The facade project went awry shortly after it began in April 2003. Beneath O'Hare lies a maze of utility lines, pipes, old foundations, tunnels and other obstructions. Yet, the city's contractors were caught off guard when they drilled foundation holes that summer and hit abandoned walls that originally held back dirt to protect construction workers when Terminals 2 and 3 were built in the early 1970s, documents show.

The drawings the city gave to Walsh Construction never accounted for those walls. Patrick Harney, first deputy aviation commissioner, said construction workers in the 1970s were supposed to remove them but didn't. That forced the city and its contractors to remake the foundation anchors that were supposed to support the steel and glass front wall and canopy, documents show.

Instead of driving thick steel columns into the ground and filling them with concrete, the contractors had to use thinner, deeper foundation supports drilled all the way to bedrock to work around the obstructions. In drilling the deeper foundation anchors, workers triggered flooding that seeped into airport tunnels, documents show. Work on the new foundation supports alone cost an extra $3 million, the city says.

"As we all know, this is not the project that [the Department of Aviation] put out for bid, nor that Walsh Construction chose to bid," John Cornell, a Walsh senior project manager, said in a letter to the city's construction supervisor in March 2004. "It is a project riddled with subsurface obstructions that have changed our entire construction plan."

Walsh Construction is asking the city for an extra $4.5 million for other costs related to its foundation work. Delays caused by changes in the foundation forced the company to complete parts of the project out of sequence, for example, forcing workers to hopscotch from one area of the airport to another rather than work on several things at once. Some crews had to stay on the job longer. When some of the earth-moving work was pushed into the winter months, Walsh said its earthwork and excavation expenses jumped, a consultant hired by Walsh reported to the city.

"Some are legitimate costs, some are not," Roberson said of Walsh's request. "It will go through litigation."

While the city raced to work around obstacles underground, bigger problems loomed overhead. Last fall, cracks began appearing in welding that held together parts of the canopy, airport documents show.

Thousands of feet of welding had to be scrapped and redone, said Joseph Manzi, a consultant the city hired to analyze claims that likely will be made against companies that worked on the project.

The city also hired Thornton-Tomasetti Group, an engineering firm, to investigate what went wrong. Thornton-Tomasetti blamed Werner Sobek Ingenieure--a German engineering firm hired by architect Murphy/Jahn--for providing "ambiguous and overly simplistic" welding details in the contract documents that governed construction of the canopy.

Werner Sobek failed to detail how changes in temperature would affect the size of the welds, among other problems, Thornton-Tomasetti concluded.

Werner Sobek then signed off on welding plans that failed to account for the temperature changes, pointing out the deficiency only after cracks started appearing, Thornton-Tomasetti reported.

Werner Sobek, owner of the engineering company that bears his name, disputes the Thornton-Tomasetti findings, saying the problems had nothing to do with his firm's structural engineering. He said welding experts found that the welds weren't executed correctly.

"I would put a million on the table," he said. "If the welds had been done correctly, no crack would have occurred."

Several companies have done welding work on the canopies.

"The structure is totally safe," Sobek said. "The welds we're talking about are responsible for aesthetics and waterproofing."

He added, "I'm surprised why some people are making such a big thing out of it."

The $15 million for needed repairs to the welds is a ballpark figure and could increase, said Manzi, the engineering consultant hired by the city. Sobek called that figure "blown up."

As a result of problems with the welding, two subcontractors sued the city, Walsh Construction and Carlo Steel, another subcontractor, demanding money for work they said they did but for which they weren't paid. LB Steel, a structural steel fabricator, is seeking about $7 million.

Not everything that could have gone wrong did. In September 2003, Walsh Construction crews drilling for foundation work came across underground communication cables for the FAA air-traffic control tower. Had they cut those cables, which were not on the contract documents, they could have shut down the airport, since the FAA tower has no backup cables, documents show.

At one point, a structural engineering consultant complained that the glass front walls of Terminals 2 and 3 could be in danger of tipping over because of insufficient anchoring. "It would take losing only three glass panels ... to tip the structure," Michael Witt, a structural engineer with Larson Engineering of Missouri, wrote in November 2003 to the city subcontractor building the walls.

Workers had to strengthen the anchoring to head off that problem, Witt said.

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pcallahan@tribune.com

jhilkevitch@tribune.com

[Simolean2]

That stinks *waves a dismissive hand*

[withoutcanseco]

"The story you requested is available only to registered members." Eff them... I'm not signing up. Paste it here! :)

guys, come on.

fucking www.bugmenot.com

[Talking Sandwich]

there is a bugmenot extension for firefox too . .does all the shite for you.

(bugmenot is a service that compiles a shit ton of free passwords so you dont have to register at nazi organizations like the tribune)