Underground Construction - January 2018 - 33

The more uncertain the existing conditions,

Improve
Performance.
Increase
Profits.

the more engineers need to compensate by
"over-designing" the structure. This has cost
and time ramifications. A great resource for
up-to-date research information on this topic is
the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in
Infrastructure Systems.
sults from this relationship: how
much of what the engineer wants
to do is allowed by the owner, and
what if it seems to create the possibility of negligence or not meeting
standards and codes?

Role
Project owners, engineers and
contractors all play a role in eliminating some risk by reducing
uncertainty, and for uncertainty
that cannot be reduced, managing
the risks presented by the remaining uncertainty. There are many
landmark court cases that set forth
decisions regarding these uncertainties and the project owner-contractor relationship. There are far
fewer that involve the relationship
between project owner and engineers/architects.
According to these cases,
during project development, the
project owner (or its engineer, if
part of the scope) is responsible
for providing details of existing
conditions on the site, or being
financially responsible for the
consequences of an inadequate
investigation. Project owners usually accomplish this by hiring geotechnical engineers to investigate
ground conditions and subsurface
utility engineers to investigate
existing utilities. The American
Society of Civil Engineers has
January 2018 Underground Construction

provided guidance documents to
help project owners with these
subsurface investigations and how
to portray their results on contract
documents. Geotechnical Base Line
Reports, and ASCE 38-02 (Standard
Guideline for the Collection and Depiction of Existing Subsurface Utility
Data) are two prime documents
for communicating the risks of
existing condition investigations.
The Engineers Joint Contract
Documents Committee, a joint
venture of ASCE, ACEC and NSPE,
along with more than 20 other organizations, has set forth clear and
unambiguous contract language
for these responsibilities of the
project owner, its engineer and the
contractor.
In our next installment, we will
look specifically at contracts, GBRs
and ASCE 38 as means to reduce
and manage uncertainty.
About the Author: Jim Anspach
is technical practice lead for Cardno
Inc.'s Utility Engineering and Survey
Practice. He serves as ASCE's Utility
Engineering and Surveying Institute
President for 2018. He is the incoming chair for EJCDC, and chairs the
ASCE 38 Standard Committee. He
is also a member of ASCE's Board
Committee on Claims Reduction and
Management.

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Underground Construction - January 2018

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