Plan Review - What happened? 1

[Aesur]

This is part rant and part wanting others thoughts.

Lately I have been noticing a change in plan reviews for both my projects and in talking with other engineers, below are a few things I have noticed.
1. 3rd party reviewers are becoming very common.
2. Plan reviewers are making ridiculous demands.
3. Many plan reviewer seem to have had their power go to their heads and are IMO abusing it.
4. 3rd party plan reviewers are not familiar with local design and try to implement more stringent criteria.

With the 3rd party reviewers, I am noticing typically their comments include things such as:
1. Provide seismic bracing for mechanical ducts, when by code seismic bracing is not required for the SDC.
2. Rejecting plans saying "while by law you are allowed to seal these plans, we cannot verify your experience ourselves and therefore reject these". The engineers seal is active and in good standing and has been practicing for many years without issue.

Comments from both 3rd party and city plan reviewers:
1. Many comments asking where something is in the calculations which require a simple response of, see keyplan on page ?? which shows that member is B?? and the calculation for said member is on page ??. ie the information is there, it's clear, but they just didn't look.
2. No deferred submittals are allowed - therefore requiring truss, I-joist, etc.. up front. One even required the PT tendon shop drawings.
3. Jurisdictions trying to get the EOR to seal shop drawings (not going to happen).
4. Correlate the member designations on your plans to the member designations in the calculations package, ie, B1 on plans is B1 in calculations, B2 is B2 etc... (as you can imagine this gets quite fun on some large apartments or commercial buildings with potentially hundreds of members). What can you do, give a few plan sheets with a long schedule with repeated beam sizes?
5. Contrary to 2 above, other jurisdictions had 3rd party reviewers that required items such as walk in coolers (inside the building) and other items like this be listed as deferred submittals. You can imagine how this went when they had no shop drawings nor calculations for said cooler and couldn't finish the project to get permits without jumping though hoops.

Finally, good luck getting ahold of someone to talk to, they don't seem to exist, no contact information provided, calling cities gets you in a loop of people who don't even know there is a building department.

Anyways, curious what others have been seeing.

 

[TLHS]

I don't know, dik. Especially on large scale infrastructure work I've started heavily questioning the idea of engineers as the last line of protection of the public. Not because engineers don't try, but because there's a bunch of regulatory stuff that's basically been offloaded to engineers as individuals rather than having any sort of enforcement or decision making regarding risk vs cost. I think there's probably value in re-examining the inherent conflicts of interest that we've created in the structure of a bunch of the engineering profession. There's a conceptual problem with the fact that we're supposed to be selling cost efficiency to our clients while also being the final arbiter of what constitutes public safety. Engineers should work in good faith to meet the intent of everything and create safe designs, but it really seems like there needs to be *somebody* that should be acting only from the public's standpoint somewhere in the process. Maybe that doesn't start until you're at some certain risk level (building height? number of occupants? hurricane or seismic zone?) but it feels like it should exist somewhere in the process.

BC's moved towards having project risk assessments as part of the judgement on when you need independent review, and I think that's probably a good call. It's not well organized, though.