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Comment by mtnGoat | Hacker News Reader

I spoke with an engineer working on a job site near Seattle for a tech company, their soil stability test holes kept failing inspection but they were allowed to keep retrying in other areas. It took 15 tries to get a sample that would pass, and the state inspector was ok with it. They didn’t want to cause issues for such s big company in such a large project. I was cautioned to not go near that building ever.

I’ve always wondered how many other buildings are in the same state.

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their soil stability test holes kept failing inspection

What do you mean by "stability test holes kept failing inspection"? If you're referring to geotechnical boreholes, there's nothing to inspect - it's a test of (among other things) soil strength. It's certainly possible to have soft/loose/low-strength soils (soft/loose solis frequently cause the borehole to collapse on itself, that's not unusual) but that doesn't speak toward safety. The building just has to be designed & constructed to account for that, usually by stiffening the soil and/or using a pile foundation.

I’ve always wondered how many other buildings are in the same state.

Given the loose soils and relatively high-water table in Seattle? Pretty much all of them. Structures can be built on soft ground, it just needs to be done right.

No. The point was that the engineers should have fixed the design, but since the job was already started, it would cost too much to change or delay, so others decided to keep testing to find a result to Cherry pick.

Also, no, not referring to buildings on normal engineering. I’m talking about buildings built with corners being cut. This was also not in Seattle and wasn’t low lying, was on a hill.

A quote I often hear referred to in inspections: "It's not our job to catch you, it's your job to follow the law". If someone wants to deliberately avoid certain inspections, it's not that hard.

But your friend's story doesn't make a lot of sense. The foundation would have been engineered for the soil that was there, not designed, then tested to see if the soil matched. Even cutting corners, it doesn't make sense to do the steps out of order. So I imagine there's more to the story.

Lots of things on massive projects don’t make sense. And of course there is more to the story, I was summarizing.

Sometimes what is on site is not always what was in the report. And sometimes land nearby becomes unstable and retesting is required.

Also codes change on projects that take years. The current data center they are building gets changed to the prints almost daily.

>using a pile foundation

of course you need piles deep enough, and boreholes soil test results probably factor into the decision of how deep it should be. The $100M fix for the tilting and sinking 58-story SF tower built in 2009 with "floating" piles not reaching the bedrock :

https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/SF-s-sinkin...

"The solution, likened to putting a bumper jack next to a flat tire, will involve the installation of 52 piles along the north and west sides of the tower. The piles will be beneath the sidewalk, 250 feet into the bedrock of downtown San Francisco, and be tied with the original 60-90-feet-deep foundation piles."

A floating foundation can be safe. But not if you dig a giant hole next to it and pump out all the water. SF quietly settled and paid for most of the repairs.

Soil stability and it's ability to support a building depends a lot on water situation.

>A floating foundation

reminded - back at University i worked summers on construction mostly doing foundations in Siberia in permafrost zone. The most memorable part of the quick introduction to the profession there was when they showed us several buildings which didn't have piles deep enough - most of those you could easily spot from a distance by the building shape defects like tilting, bended roofline, etc... because if piles aren't deep enough the foundation pretty much becomes really "floating" during warm season after several cycles of freezing/thawing.

Related, at a bigger scale, global warming affecting foundations in the permafrost zone https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/oct/14/thawing-perma...

Poor soils can be managed with good foundations. You can put a building on water with the right foundation design. In the case of an office, the safety factors in design are usually pretty high. I’m assuming soil sampling is for modified proctor density. Usually, the criteria for those are fairly arbitrary. Some soils are so sensitive to moisture content that density measurements aren’t very informative. Not blowing up a multi-million dollar construction schedule over a few mm of consolidation is probably a reasonable take.

Except in this case the person saying it’s screwed up is a licensed lead engineer on the project.

If he’s doing the CE&I and let it pass, then he has nobody to blame but himself. Knowing it’s wrong and certifying that it’s right entails a lot of professional risk in this industry. I suspect his concerns aren’t too serious or someone else is certifying the work.

One other situation I can imagine is that the risk is outside his domain. Example: I saw a company scrape flat clays out of a roadway and use that material as fill for slab-on-grade foundations of duplexes. I wouldn’t expect those to last long, but the developer is also the owner, so he’s only hurt himself. I don’t find the owner to be particularly sympathetic, I only certified the road construction, and the only person to report the poor practice to is the owner himself, who also hired the crew.

Startup idea. Reliable and effective whistleblowing programs for stuff like this.

I know absolutely nothing about whistleblowing laws, but, like, shouldn’t this be driven by policy? I get that lawmakers might not have whistleblowers’ best interests in mind but this feels squarely on Congress to me. Might be an interesting space tho. What do I know.

I think it should be on the government as well, but they don't seem to be willing to do it.

in what world is there a selfish financial incentive for whistleblowing?

Reduce the risk and increase the payoff. Not sure how, but those are the levers that need adjusting.

The insurance and mortgage companies should have been interested in the information but I doubt whoever had the information would have thought to contact them and, even if they did, I doubt the companies would have had a reliable process for receiving and investigating that sort of “whistleblower” claim. It’s even more complicated when it’s a condo building and there are any number of different banks and insurers involved, rather than just one. Everyone assumes someone else is looking at X and so they all ignore it a bit more than they should.

But, if you’re looking for the business niche, I’d guess they’d be your customers. Basically a “bug bounty” program for underwriters of tenancy in common real estate.

Pretty sure there's some law in the US where you get a percentage of the judgement if you whistleblow. Maybe it's specific to the finance industry. Someone help me out.

The SEC does.

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-266

Thanks

They’re called qui tam suits[1] and in the US they’re commonly brought under the False Claims Act[2] which can apply to any government contractor but Medicare Fraud is a big piece. The way it works is the “whistleblower” files a civil suit with the allegations and then the government can choose whether or not they want to take over the case. If the government think your allegations are solid and the potential recovery is worth their while they’ll take the case and you’re entitled to 10% of anything they ultimately recover. If, for whatever reason, the government decides not to get involved, you can continue the case on your own (but kind of on behalf of the government... it’s a bit weird how it works) and anything you recover goes to the government but you get 30% for your trouble.

The SEC also has a whistleblower program that another commenter has linked and, as of recently, they have really been paying out a lot of money to whistleblowers. Larger sums and more frequent payouts than we’ve ever seen before.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Claims_Act

I think market incentives to do the right thing is more helpful than an app.

Arguably this would be one of those market incentives to do the right thing by raising the expected cost of doing the wrong thing.

Yeah, a Code Enforcement department for a large municipality would pay for reporting automation. I don’t think it would prevent this event. It’s a condo, so the building is probably maintained by a POA. Who would have an incentive to inspect the building? Who has a contractual obligation for maintenance? POA members. Who has to pay for repairs? POA members. Who now has an incentive to avoid repairs? POA members. Would you dime yourself out to be on the hook for repairs that may exhaust your discretionary income for many, many years? Or would you “touch up the X-ray” as Warren Buffet put it?

POAs are a terrible idea and I wish they didn’t exist. Distributed ownership always seems to incentivize bad behavior.

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