Responsibility 9

[Calif]

Who bears the responsibility if a structure collaspes? Is it the engineer who designed it with no engineering license or is it the engineer who signs the plans?



The resisant virtues of the structure that we seek depend on their form; it is through their form that they are stable, not because of an awkward accumulation of material. There is nothing more noble and elegant from an intellectual viewpoint than this: to resist through form. Eladio Dieste

 

[Ron]

RE...we've all been there. Don't beat yourself up too much. In hindsight, we would all have handled certain situations differently at the time...but that's second guessing ourselves. In reviewing your postings for quite some time, you have a logical thought pattern similar to many of us. I doubt that you're prone to stupid or illogical mistakes...just the ones we all make! There are times that I look back on decisions I made 5, 10 or 15 years ago that I wouldn't make today...that's just career progression and experience.

Calif...the person who signs and seals is always responsible...he can't disclaim that and can't deny it.

It sounds like you're in a firm that will likely get sued at some point for mistakes. It is unfortunate that they don't see the liability of their poor practices. They go along without getting "caught" and assume their practice is adequate. When a failure of some type occurs, and it will at some point, they will have little or nothing to fall back on. I do this every day and I see the result of poor quality practices by engineers, architects, and contractors.

I have no hesitation about providing my opinion of deficient practices. I'm not perfect and perfect practice is not required as a measure of "standard of care". You just have to practice to that equivalent level of competence of other engineers providing similar services in the same locale. That's not that hard, but many engineers fail to do it.

 

[rowingengineer]

It is very rare that an engineer would check someone else’s calcs in my firm, Maybe wind turbine foundations (but I prefer rules of thumb and past project comparisons); our checking process is to concentrate on details and using secondary calcs (most of the time a quick wl^2/(2 to 11) and span on depth, height on depth) to suffice for this purpose. During my grad days I can’t remember my supervisor doing any calcs (was a while ago now so the memory is fading so I would be over stating the facts) he was an old hand I think he had such a feel he could tell something was wrong just by looking at it.

Most errors I find in colleges works are not in the sizing of members but in the process of development. I normally find errors when someone uses an overly difficult process to design something (aka finite element for simple slab) or in the details. The details are normally; insufficient information for the design, incorrect understanding of the loading arrangements, inappropriate application of a code for detailing, failing to understand the overall scope (aka design the slab for the vertical loading but forgetting to design the lateral paths)

Given the position you are painting the responsible party should be the engineer signing off on the drawings and all engineering advice is given under his supervision. Given this I would try to ensure you take all possible paths to ensure you work is reviewed by a second party before providing engineering advice to show you have met all requirements of your local ethic scripture.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

 

[rowingengineer]

Ron,
I think we were posting at the same time, but you do make a good point, no matter what you do, mistakes will happen.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

 

[IRstuff]

The signing and sealing of a design is the engineer's certification that he either did the work or supervised the work and that the work meets all relevant requirements and codes.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[rbulsara]

Think of , signing and sealing as only a statutory requirement(and it is). When things comes to litigation and assigning blame, it becomes much less relevant. If someone played a role in the design, whether or not licensed, he/she can be and will be held liable. By having someone else seal and sign does not absolve other designers involved of their accountability.

If nothing happens, no one gets caught and world goes on. So if you are agonizing over a hypothetical scenario or just ethical issues by your standards, either find another job or report to whoever you think is appropriate.

Rafiq Bulsara

http://www.srengineersct.com

 

[Ron]

RE...we generally do quick checks on the calculations during report review (we produce many more reports than design drawings). It doesn't catch all potential errors, but you have to trust that the process works and that anything missed wouldn't affect the final.

I have seen experienced engineers make fairly big mistakes when in a hurry (a recent one was miscalculating the dead load in a concrete slab analysis!!).

Oh yeah, RE....

A lot of what Ron writes is true.

EVERYTHING I say is true!!

 

[rowingengineer]

Ron,
Can't argue with that, never seen/heard you tell lie before. We are in agreement the biggest mistakes are always made when someone is in a hurry. I like the secondary calcs, because it means you don’t get lost in the story of the original cals and miss the minor but large mistakes, not perfect as you say, but nothing is.


An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

 

[Calif]

Ron and Rowing, do you not think there should be some standards of redundency in a firm to prevent problems? For example, I work using a structural software, now anyone who uses software realizes it is a black box meaning you do not know the internal mechanism that the software uses to get its answer. The software is limited in that it does not show you how it arrived at it forces for wind or seismic, but just gives your input data and some output data for you to look at. Now the program may apply too much or too little forces on the structure but how will not know that. You may have an error somewhere or need to adjust a value here or there to make sure it account for losses. Buying any engineering software, the software company does not bear any responsibility for problems the software produce and the engineer is the one who should use there judgement in determining whether what you have is adequate or under design. So all the responsibility falls on the engineer who may not have seen something? Who does not know what the software is doing? Who may not have the experience required to judge if something is wrong. There is alot of liability for the engineer and we should get paid big money for designing anything like doctors.

The resisant virtues of the structure that we seek depend on their form; it is through their form that they are stable, not because of an awkward accumulation of material. There is nothing more noble and elegant from an intellectual viewpoint than this: to resist through form. Eladio Dieste

 

[IRstuff]

The general rule for software use is that the engineer is responsible for ANY errors, be it from the software or from the operator. It is the responsbility of the engineer to perform due diligence in verifying any results from any software he may use.

What you describe is precisely why the EOR has the ultimate responsbility under the law. If he fails to review the results, then he fails in his fiduciary duty as a licensed professional engineer, whose responsibility is to the safety of the public. The PE is supposed to have the experience or the expertise to determine whether simulation results are plausible.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[Ron]

Calif...almost all states require that if you use software for engineering evaluation, you MUST validate the software by a manual calculation to show that the software works as intended. I would suggest that you do at least two validations of your software and keep them on file for quality assurance purposes. Those validations should be, at the least, a corresponding manual calculation of a simple beam and a corresponding manual calculation of a moment frame to see the moment distributions. You can do others (continuous beam, etc.), but you need to have in your files at least the attempt to validate the results of software.

This applies to any software...whether commercially produced or spreadsheets developed internally.

 

[rowingengineer]

Ron and IRstuff have the software question covered. However there is also a redundancy built the codes, making it unlikely that an ultimate failure will occur without an extreme event. However serviceability failures occur every day, this is where the greatest liability is present for an engineer.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

 

[beej67]

Calif: "There is more likely hood for unethical practice in a very small company compared to a larger one. "


I've found the opposite, but maybe that's because of the small company I chose to go to work for, and the large company I came from.




Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[IRstuff]

Ethics is a people thing, so I don't think it has much to do with the size of the company, other than as a purely statistical thing, e.g., P_failⁿ, where n is the number of people in the organization.

Certainly, large companies have had spectacular ethics failures, e.g., Northrop Grumman's B-52 inertial navigation fiasco, or Boeing's Missile Defense proposal faux pas.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[CTW]

Calif-
I picked up on something that hopefully you can clarify.

In your first post you wrote, "Is it the engineer who designed it with no engineering license or is it the engineer who signs the plans?"
I think with this sentence it can be implied that "the engineer who signs the plans" means this person is a PE.

But your post on 25 Jun 10 at 20:30 states otherwise.

"The person who signs it, is not even an engineer who practices it by career. He just signs off but he does not check it."

Based on this post, I'm assuming that "signs off" means someone is simply signing their name to the drawing as related to some internal approval.

Could you clarify what occurs when he signs off or sings the plans?

This leads to another question. What types of structures are these? From your posts, I'm not envisioning structures such as buildings but possibly smaller industrial structures or specialty manufactured structures.

 

[Calif]

Someone signing means that the person is an engineer with a PE but he does not practice in the field of structural engineering. He owns the company that does structural building design. The kind of projects are residential projects.

The resisant virtues of the structure that we seek depend on their form; it is through their form that they are stable, not because of an awkward accumulation of material. There is nothing more noble and elegant from an intellectual viewpoint than this: to resist through form. Eladio Dieste

 

[IRstuff]

If not structural, then what? He may already be violating the law if he's signing off on stuff that's outside of his expertise.

BTW, can you please fix your signature line, "resisant" is not a valid word.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[CTW]

Thanks for clarifying. That situation is pretty scary but I'm sure there are many others out there that do the same thing. It's guys like this who really drag the PE credential through the mud and aide in making structural engineering a commodity by lowballing projects and then blindly stamping them.

You stated earlier that you were yelled at for your mistakes and were not a very experienced engineer. These are two reasons to begin seeking employment elsewhere. You won't be able to get to the next level of your career if you stay, but I suspect you already know this.