Troubled welds on the Bay Bridge
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So there are then two things you have to guess at. First, how often they get caught (which is difficult, but not impossible to estimate) and second, how far below zero the expected financial payoff must be to change the behavior.
You also have to figure out what happens when they don't have the money (or the money is well-hidden). Do they just go into some kind of negotiated payment schedule like people who lose lawsuits? That might have no impact at all since their illegal earnings are likely to be hidden from authorities anyway (or can be if needed).
This is why I favor prison, because a prison sentence is much harder to "cheat" or nullify. No one lives forever, so prison is like taking a small chunk of a precious commodity away from someone. Additionally, if you are a big earner, prison is actually worse for you in some ways because you generally lose your income while incarcerated. This means that even very rich people or people who hide their wealth from the authorities can be punished effectively with prison time.
The administrative penalties could simply be scaled to be much scarier without needing to go that far.
Personal financial liability (piercing the corporate veil) with limited negotiation of terms (and since personal credit is usually factored into business credit, that bankruptcy will greatly impact your ability to do business), administrative dissolution of business, very very large fines, and so on.
If you actually want to deter this kind of crime you need to fine the people who are caught the amount of money they stole multiplied by the number of people who don't get caught. So you should probably be thinking 20 or 30 times the amount stolen.
Of course such large fines might take entire industries down with them so you're unlikely to ever see corporate crime punished as excessively as it should be.
Welcome to the world of government contracts, big projects tend to be vastly different than what is proposed or agreed too.
Hence I am confused as to why the controversy this time.
Frankly I am amazed at how much oversight there isn't on billion dollar plus projects. You would think there should be more than one agency, in particular neutral non government agencies that should be required to sign off on projects that crest a certain dollar amount.
This is not to say that big government projects are all bad, they do lay ground work for many private companies to build on. Look as Space X, it would not be where it is today if not for NASA but it is a better choice for many things that NASA because of its big government mentality are not good at anymore. We only have to look at the recent boondoggle that was the ACA's main website to understand that oversight by non politically aligned, no government groups, is warranted.
TL;DR.
Yes, a lot of China bashing going on, to redirect the ire from its rightful spot, inept government with no real oversight. There needs to be "civilian" oversight on large government projects, appointed by industry experts.
That's not to say that these are unique problems because the contracting firm was Chinese, rather than, say, French. However, in this case it is relevant to the overall narrative that the challenges exist, because they make it that much harder to proactively address quality deficiencies.
There really needs to be some sort of tie to performance. It obviously cannot be the same kind of tie to civilian/private performance, especially since even that system in this country is grotesquely inadequate. Your motivations should be that your retirement and success is directly pinned to some metric and system of government competition and accountability.
I think the first step would be to separate and limit raising revenues, i.e., taxes, from spending revenues. The legislative function in the whole vertical structure of the government needs to be separated into a fourth branch. It is bone-headedly ridiculous that those who decide on what to spend money, also decide how much to spend, and where that money will come from.
There are so many humongous flaws in our governmental structure that violate so many basic auditing, risk, and accounting principles; it's absolutely ridiculous.
This is far deeper than just the acquisition or bidding process. This goes down deep into the core fundamental premises of our governmental and even social structure. It is a deep flaw that was revolutionary in the agricultural era it was devised in, but simply is far beyond inadequate for today's world.
"Tony Anziano, chief executive for toll-bridge work, made at least 64 visits to Shanghai, stayed in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and spent more than $300,000 on travel during construction."
That obviously is not good and is a sign of a badly run programme, but it is also true that structures are built with a certain level of defects all the time. It sounds like in this case they may have made judgements about that which were questionable but accepting work (including structural) which has some flaws is not abnormal, the question is whether the judgement as to the materiality of the flaws was made for sound engineering reasons or not.
>After two senior engineers challenged quality assurance practices, Caltrans reassigned one and let the other’s contract lapse."
Yes, that does sound quite bad. It's by far the most damning thing, I can't determine from here whether they used good engineering judgement, but dismissing whistleblowers is bad news. It's not corruption though.
>"Tony Anziano, chief executive for toll-bridge work, made at least 64 visits to Shanghai, stayed in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and spent more than $300,000 on travel during construction."
Totally normal. Anyone writing "one of the city's most luxurious hotels" doesn't understand business travel in Asia where there may not be much between the tiers of "luxury" and "doesn't meet basic standards". Most of that money went on air travel, and I wouldn't want to travel back and forth to China 64 times in a short period. That's not a bribe, it's a punishment.
Admittedly, with this much travel they're going to eat into the savings from using a cheap contractor, not to mention the cost of accommodating their China team which was there full time.
This doesn't sound like corruption, it sounds like they foolishly picked a low bidder that couldn't hack it, tempers within the organisation started to flare when they realised how fucked they were and this guy flew back and forth way more times than was planned in a frantic attempt to fix the cluster-fuck before it all blew up in their faces.
Corruption doesn't necessarily have to be the acceptance of a bribe, though. The dismissal or re-assignment of whistle-blowers that are pointing out potential dangers in the project IS corruption; it's the dishonest use of authority for personal benefit, or to avoid personal responsibility for wrong-doing or negligence.
You're probably right, about the travel. 64 trips back and forth does sound like a punishment, and at ~5k per trip, it doesn't really sound that extravagant. Certainly not enough to think they were lavish bribe-trips.
Your last paragraph actually is a pretty good synopsis. This whole thing was probably a scramble to keep ahead of a badly managed project.
Caltrans faulted by practicing terrible project management.
If someone underbids the next contractor by $250 million on a job they've never done before, you're supposed to politely laugh them out of the room.
Edit: for the benefit of those now arriving, the title and link have been changed.
Most of the time, you can't, at least not for government projects. Because of procurement laws and rules (designed, among other things, to allegedly be transparent and to provide accountability), a government body is required to accept the lowest bid from the contractor that met all of the requirements. Seeking an "experienced contractor" is usually seen as code for "we want to use our friends" by a skeptical legislative body, so things like tenure and past projects can't be considered.
That has its downsides, too. A common complaint in the EU is that there is no way for small building companies to become large companies. Reason is that, to become a large company, you have to do large projects, and to get large projects, you have to have done large projects.
In the EU, when comparing offers, one doesn't have to pick the absolutely cheapest that meets the requirements, either. A slightly more expensive offer that more than meets the requirements (for example by having much less environmental impact, by requiring less closure time of a road, or by producing something that has lower maintenance costs) can windhover one that just meets the requirements.
I was recently involved in a bid for a government contract where we got perfect scores on all factors, but still lost the bid to a small company with little to no relevant experience, but who claimed they could to the job for a third of the price.
The usual workaround for this is in IT is to sub-contract the necessary portions to those with said experience, so that the packaged team has the experience as a whole, but while that might seem like a loophole, it generally isn't bad because it means that the ones with the experience are the ones doing the work that requires the experience.
Admittedly, this isn't federal, and I don't know how what the bidding requirements are for state work, but if there's no disqualifier for "never done this before", heaven help the state of California.
The lessons, not every job is worth doing and always allow margins for mistakes.
Just in case someone doesn't read the article. ;)
>As the project wound down, ZPMC reaped tangible rewards, sharing with ABF more than $250 million in cost overruns and incentive payments.
This is the equivalent of buying a startup's product on the chance they figured out how to provide value more cheaply. That's not corruption; that's basic market forces.
If the the contractor is not qualified they should be removed from the bid. In NY there was a list of contractors no longer able to bid state jobs that had to be checked as well.
Also, can somebody explain to me those flight prices? Spending over 10K on flights to Shanghai within a single month seems outrageous.
Also, the $10k is an outlier, and might well be two trips in a single month. The vast majority of his fares were under $5k, and there are some visits under $2k.
It's a huge project, there's got to be scheduled client side meetings, and those should be scheduled months in advance.
Is this statement: "It's a huge project"
Apart from getting far enough along in your career to be handling huge projects and therefore probably entitled to some cream, it also just doesn't make sense from a business point of view - save a few thousand on a flight, but the extra fatigue makes good decision-making harder.
Put another way: who should be using business class, if the decision-makers of a huge project shouldn't be?
I can vouch for this. It makes good decision making almost impossible. I've made a ton of trans-Pacific trips and jetlag has a much bigger effect on you when you've not been able to sleep or slept poorly on the plane. Business class really does help to reduce the jetlag.
If you're making me fly roundtrip to China in economy once a month, I quit.
I make that trip once every year or two and I hate hate hate the travel part of it. Being there is good, getting there and back is absolutely awful.
So I would say, either pay for business class, give me a raise large enough to cover paying for it myself, or find somebody else.
If you choose the last option, then you'll either have to get astonishingly lucky to find someone who doesn't mind being crammed into an Economy seat so much (does any such person exist?) or you'll eventually find someone desperate enough to put up with it, and what are the odds that such a person is also good at what they do?
Though I'm not sure that answers your question. Since I'm not showing similar projects.
It's nice to see software engineering practices being backported to more conservative and stagnant forms of engineering. 8)
Hehe, I had to read that three times before the coin dropped :)
The entire design was done assuming proper welds. When they accepted substandard welds, nobody went back and did the calculations that probably would have shown they needed twice as many supports.
The bolts made by an Ohio company broke and they maybe a danger to the bridge,
That this topic hasn't even come up, leads me to believe that the state inspectors have completely failed in their duties. With all due respect to Hanlon, the simplest explanation for such total failure is not "gosh they must be stupid!"
The owners (county and village) were good and wouldn't release payment for work that didn't meet the spec. The prospect of payment or lack thereof is a great motivator. Contractors knew the rules up front and it made our lives as inspectors for the owners much easier. Not that they didn't test you continually to see what they could get away with. These things start at the top.
Oragne County landfill Expansion (a landfill they built and then had to stop and restore wetlands) was before my time but companies lost a lot of money on it and it was a good cautionary tale. Google seems to have very little knowledge about it.
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110705/wire/107051072...
"California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the "Buy America" provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers."
It's still part of I-80, though. Are there not requirements for the bid process and construction standards independent of funding?
Obviously I have no link to point to or solid proof but here's what someone told me. Hearsay it may be but I will just throw it out there.
Initially it looked like a Japanese company was going to get the contract. However after a Californian trade mission to China (headed by ex-Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger) returned, the bid went to the Chinese firm. I was told it was quite unexpected.
Not saying Arnold Schwarzenegger was somehow convinced otherwise but I think it's possible one of his advisors were convinced otherwise and than convinced Arnold Schwarzenegger to give the contract to a chinese firm.
Hopefully the truth will come out in a formal inquiry. Hopefully.
It is a little hard to understand how serious it all really is. It sounds like inspections were quite rigorous. Past half way down the article, there's two pictures, one of the internals of a box girder, and right below it, a 10mm crack in a tack weld. I mean, the scale differential of the two images is amazing. I can't imagine cracks in the tack welds make a bit of difference in a bridge like that. The bridge looks incredible.
For example, a pole will be much weaker if there is an abrupt section change in the middle, even if it's a bigger section. This is counter-intuitive until you learn what the forces look like in metal.
Same goes for welding and cracks. Do you know what happens when a 19-ton propeller has a crack? It breaks while spinning and launches the weighted wing at a few dozen m/s. The French aircraft carrier is lucky the wing was sent to the bottom of the ocean [1].
Which leads me to the next topic: Will politicians state that welds are too complicated for them just like computer things?
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1325...
The story of these propellers is interesting. They were to be cast from a single piece of metal, and were precisely of the largest dimension fit for the largest metallurgy facility in France (because it's a top secret design, they had to be made in a domestic factory). However, the project was so delayed that the factory closed its doors several years before it to be able to build the propellers...
So another company got to build them, but they were so large that they had to cast them in several parts and weld them together instead of a single cast, which is apparently NOT best practice and hadn't been ever done before.
This is absolutely crazy. What kind of person hires a company to build a bridge that usually builds cranes? (A politician)
When I was still in college I met a Project Manager who was building a new building for my University. The project was going very wrong because they hired a residential building company to build a commercial building.
Dont force a square peg in a round hole. (No amount of money will help it fit)
that is my favorite here. Sounds like poetry.
>"Tony Anziano, chief executive for toll-bridge work, made at least 64 visits to Shanghai, stayed in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and spent more than $300,000 on travel during construction."
if tales of Chinese corruption and kickbacks is even a bit true (and knowing Russian corruption i tend to believe in Chinese too :) these $300K are juts unrecognizable under microscope peanuts compare to what was most probably transferred to some accounts on Cayman Islands and in some other peculiar jurisdictions.
I don't even buy a toaster without some kind of guarantee for the coming years and some kind of maintenance available.
Why doesn't the bridge contract have that?
China is the new bogeyman.
1. The company was "unaccustomed to the rigor of American construction rules" and "lacked basic quality control", leading Caltran to "relax U.S. standards when the firm couldn’t finish fast enough."
2. "ZPMC violated the job contract by delivering key documents in Chinese instead of English. ABF lacked sufficient quality-assurance staff to speak directly to its own subcontractor – also a contract violation."
3. "Counting the money spent on travel and living costs for Caltrans and its contractors, the suspension span consumed much more than the $250 million in ZPMC’s assumed efficiencies that made the Chinese steel so cost-effective." On living costs alone, Caltran "paid about $50,000 annually per person to rent more than a dozen well-appointed rooms."
Asked for justification, "Caltrans described the accommodations as "reasonable and appropriate" in a written statement. 'The hotel provided a government rate that was comparable to rates at other western hotels,' and followed bargaining agreements, based in part on providing adequate 'safety and support for employees far from home.'"
The typical pattern will be for the manufacturer to start sending back work which is totally unacceptable. When their partner protests, the manufacturer will grudgingly raise the standard to 'barely tolerable'. Time runs out, exhaustion sets in, decision makers don't want to draw attention to the fact that they chose the wrong manufacturer - so the client has to lower their standards.
Caltrans officials were amazingly naive and blinkered if they weren't aware of the long history of stories just like this one. Perhaps they did know the history, and they thought they would be protected by quality checks embedded in the contract, but that's just more naivety. Contracts don't have much power in that environment, particularly when your project is already falling way behind schedule.
Blaming 'The Chinese' though, is stupid. Caltrans was in charge of this deal. If they chose the wrong partner and didn't stay in control of things, they are responsible.
"Caltrans employees and U.S. contractors who supervised the job lived fulltime in Shanghai, and top officials flew there often. Tony Anziano, toll bridge program manager, alone spent more than $300,000 on travel.
"Part of that cost was for Anziano’s room at the five-star JW Marriott Shanghai Tomorrow Square for up to $470 per night, according to his expense reports."
The travel costs are an obscene waste of American tax dollars. Moreover, the fact that so many tax dollars were paid to a foreign company is offensive. Even if that company was at all competent, it shows a disregard for the American economy. For a project that puts American lives at risk, a demonstrated concern for the wellbeing of Americans is rather important.
The reason that the US doesn't restrict foreign engineering companies from getting government contracts is that it wants US companies to be able to bid on government projects in other countries.
Quick, name the current generation alternatives to the F35 and the country behind said alternative.
> Moreover, the fact that so many tax dollars were paid to a foreign company is offensive. Even if that company was at all competent, it shows a disregard for the American economy.
Competence is explicitly not the OP's point.
Seems pretty important.
WTF... I know a lot of us here are contractors. Tell me the last time you got paid MORE because you weren't doing your job.
The client could instead stick to the original contract and attempt to enforce any provisions in it about nonperformance/delays/etc. But that gives the client less ability to directly specify what measures to take now.
(This kind of thing happens in private-sector contracting also, e.g. in relationships between oil firms and platform maintenance companies.)
But the modus operandus is standard even for small agencies.
You get to bid for a project. If your bid is anywhere near realistic, there's no way you'll ever get it, because the competition will bid way, way lower.
So you put in a bid that you know will never get the project completed and/or will reduce quality well below what will ever be acceptable. However, the contract will be full of loopholes that will allow you to get away with it. You know that once your in, and once the project is far enough along, the client will have no choice but to pay you extra to do what actually needed to be done in the first place.
No, the client is not getting screwed. Especially when it comes to governments and major corporations, everyone knows this is going to happen. It's just impossible to get the project started for anywhere near the real price tag.
But even on a smaller scale, for instance a web agency with a 20K project, if you put in an honest bid you'll either never get the job or be forced to build crap.
From web shopping carts to bridges, people don't value good engineering and planning. Or at least not until they are confronted with the results of bad engineering and planning.
So there's the original budget and there's reality, and an entire cult of rituals surrounding bridging the huge gap between the two. And it is this ritual in which people on both ends take a considerable percentage of the top, so all the decision makers are vested in keeping this ritual going despite all of the well publicized failures.
If you are a contractor and you're not getting at least 50% more out of a gig than the original contract, you're not playing the game very well.
http://www.sacbee.com/static/sinclair/sinclair.jquery/baybri...
It's a pet peeve of mine when it's really a story about a story.
I had my hopes up this time since, after all, the URI contains the word "/static/"; but then I just realized it also appends the word "/sinclair.jquery/" later on...
Submitted url was http://news.yahoo.com/report-chinese-company-faulted-bridge-....
In this case, sacbee doesn't seem to have any comments at all (good for them!) but I don't read them often enough to have that fact memorized.
My comment was specifically about It's about the fact that the bar is at the top of the page. It's a completely different user experience than the standard scroll bar.
I have little enough vertical screen real estate. I don't need random websites throwing up redundant (and poor) approximations to ubiquitous UI elements.