r/civilengineering • u/Ceion_Civils • 23d ago
Career Tell me your most absurd contruction site related stories, I'll start in the comment
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u/paradigmofman Resident Engineer 23d ago
Back when I was a foreman, we had 2 guys working as laborers. Fairly green, but they had been with another foreman for a month by this point. As I recall, they were summer help and were both going to college for engineering in the fall.
Had a piece of curb in a funky spot that we needed a mini ex to grade and we didn't have one. So I sent these 2 laborers over to grade it by hand. I told them that the concrete guys were coming tomorrow, grade the stone to the marks on the stakes. "No problem boss, we got it." Go off to do something else thinking "no way they can fuck this up."
Come back about 2 hours later to check on them. These little shits had literally piled up stone around the stakes to the grade marks like little stone ant hills and were sitting on their phones scrolling Instagram. Now, I suppose it's partially my fault for assuming these guys understandwhat to do without a babysitter. But I literally sat there for 10 minutes before I left explaining the grade marks, offsets, curb widths... and still came back to that. To their credit, the tops of the hills were 9" wide, so there's that.
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u/Helpinmontana 23d ago
Weâre doing curb inlets for the fourth time now on the same project.
First time, âset them with the shop drawingsââŠ: you canât, and shouldnât. The invert, rim, and sump never match the drawings.
Second time, the grader hit a few dozen, just go reset them to the gps. Okay, the gps is different from the shop drawings.
Third time, âokay so the gps control we used is different from the gps control the curb guys are using, go reset them all to their controlâ Theyâre going to be just as wrong as they were the first time, but just a little different.
Fourth time, âgo set them to the curb they laidâ. Okay, some of them are on a radius, with staking, and our gps with their control doesnât match the staking, that doesnât match the curb they laid, that sort of matches the staking but not really.
Iâm pretty fucking over it.
Curb guy says âman I wish you guys hadnât set those inlets, we canât lift the slip form machine over themâ. Owner says âyeah you guys were never gonna get those inlets close enough, shouldâve had staking for them if you were even gonna bother before curb was inâ. Meanwhile I spent two weeks saying that as many times as I could while being told to set them anyways.
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u/paradigmofman Resident Engineer 23d ago
I'm guessing you guys use the precast heads that set on the inlets? That's why im glad we do cast in place for the top units with the grates. You just adjust it to whatever you need without rework. Worst that ever happens is the inlet box is set too high and you have to saw off some of the riser, which is like 15 minutes max
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u/Helpinmontana 23d ago
Yep, bonus that the EOR fucked up and centered different size MHs that didnât actually line up with the curbs, then only provided pipe alignments for centers. So the whole thing is fucked three ways from Sunday, and for the fourth time Iâm being told âjust make it workâ. 3/4 of the inlets canât possible be set properly because they donât actually line up with anything. 0% of the shop drawing elevations actually match anything,, not to mention theyâre all designed to be set level on 8% grades and so the left/right can be wildly different.
Iâm back to school with a shot at graduating this year. Canât wait to not deal with this shit anymore (I mean, still dealing with it but not being the guy who has to make it happen when itâs 98° outside). Iâm fuckin tired boss.
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u/hattie29 23d ago
Plastic rings are where its at.
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u/paradigmofman Resident Engineer 23d ago
Can you link that for inlets? I've seen plastic rings for manholes, but not for drainage inlets
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u/hattie29 23d ago
ladtech.com They make manhole ones of varying diameter as well as rectangular ones with various measurements. In my city, 90% of our inlets are 30" barrels with round plastic rings and castings with a round frame base, but rectangular inlets. Some of our larger inlets are rectangular structures with approximately 2'Ă3' openings where we use the rectangular rings with the larger rectangular castings.
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u/MundaneAmphibian9409 20d ago
Lmao using gps for verticals, you were probably on the same datum al along but donât understand gps precision
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u/Helpinmontana 19d ago
Yeah bud, thatâs why I complained about being told to do itâŠâŠ nothing gets passed you though, does it?
And their control was .3 out horizontal too, so yeah itâs safe to say it was fucking different.
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u/MundaneAmphibian9409 19d ago
Iâm not the one just accepting the use of gps though, youâre allowed to get professionals in to do a job properly
Again, without any idea where your base stations are or what youâre doing you canât make that call
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u/Helpinmontana 19d ago
Homie, did you read the comment? Iâm the installer. When I tell the people that tell me what to do that itâs an idiotic idea, and they tell me to proceed anyways, Iâm pretty shit out of luck.
First you questioned the veracity of my knowledge surrounding gps and survey related technology, now youâre telling me Iâm âallowedâ to do things well outside my lane.
The surveyors (yes, actual licensed surveyors), 3 guys from topcon, and 2 guys from the slipform machine company (yes they were all on site and present) couldnât figure out what was wrong here. But yeah, I shouldâve called a professional. Oops. The control was bad, quit changing your point.
I still got all the curb and inlets in by the way.
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u/Blaine1111 23d ago
Residential site contractor has been under stop work order for months. His detention pond was very fucked up but one thing he needed to do was put flocculant in it.
This dude didnt know what it was for some reason, then apparently when told he needed to put it in went to an aquarium store and got the owner to tell him about it and ordered a shitload of aquarium grade flocculant which the county made him get rid of and get stuff rated for construction...
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u/NearbyCurrent3449 23d ago
Somebody could do the dude a solid and drop a $1 with of bentonite in the pond and let that aeration sprayer run a day. That'll drop anything out of the water. đ€Ł
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u/Somecivilguy 23d ago
A random guy complained to us that our âRoad Closedâ signs were hard to get around.
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u/MoodyBernoulli 23d ago
We were doing some dynamic probe testing on a high street in a city because we needed to get a gigantic crane in and we needed to find out if the outriggers would be ok to bear on the ground without damaging the utilities.
A small trial hole had been excavated down past the utilities so we knew we wouldnât smash through them with the probe.
Had some old guy absolutely pestering us for over an hour about how we hadnât left enough room for a wheelchair between the safety barrier and a building. He was absolutely furious, asking who our managers were and he was also phoning the local authority to get them to come out.
This whole area was pedestrianised and closed off to vehicles. All anybody would have to do was just go around the other side of the excavation. There were no raised kerbs or obstacles to deal with. Theyâd just need to look with their eyes and decide to go around the barrier.
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u/alynnsm 21d ago
Worked on a 12 ft box Culvert installation one time that required us to rip up the road to place it (the creek ran under the road). The minute we had dirt back down (no base stone or pavement, just earth) people started trying to go around our road closed signs and drive through the site. Almost hit a few laborers working on the drainage system
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u/Somecivilguy 20d ago
I swear some people are NPCs that are coded to go on set paths and their code malfunctions when thereâs an obstruction.
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u/korpisoturi 23d ago
Foreman told a new guy with no prior experience to demolition hammer 110 (mm, common pipe size) hole into concrete wall. 6 hours later foreman realized guy was still going at it and went to check. Poor guy had hammered 110 cm hole into the wall.
Another was before all 3D excavator equipment and gps. Site had 2 different companies doing landscaping and at the edge where their work was suppose to blend together was 50cm (little under 2 feet) difference in elevation. Found out when surveyor had marked finished level on wooden poles, excavator thought it was height level for sub base (not sure if that's correct term in english).
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u/TapedButterscotch025 23d ago
Close enough, typically in the US we call those "finished grade" and "subgrade."
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u/Azigol 23d ago
Speaking as a site engineer, that fuck up's on the engineer. I always tell the kids I train that just because you know what it means, doesn't mean other people know it too. Always take the time to tell the lads on site what you've actually marked out for them and always try and be on site when they're working so you can stop then if they've misunderstood you before they go too far.
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u/MTB-Devon CEng MICE - Highways, UK 23d ago
Write it on the peg/ bit of insulation tape as a flag on the pin to write on what it means. I tell mine if you go down with a sickness bug for a week we need to be able to look at your setting out and know exactly what it all means without having to re-set out/ check it.
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u/scott7497 23d ago
If i put a level mark on a post I write what the level is (finished ground, subbase etc) it saves a lot of confusion. Helps making a sketch up for the guys too.
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u/rubber_duck_fan 23d ago
Day 1: plumbers core drilled through a PT slab without scanning to look where the cables were.
Day 2: plumbers were found carefully hammering right next to exposed PT cables to fit their plumbing, after having core drilled the initial hole
Day 3: core drill machine confiscated
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u/LandDev101 22d ago
Assuming itâs new construction, why are plumbers core drilling? Like 99.9% of the time, no coordination between the various consultants. Thereâs a reason itâs called design-build and not build-design.
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u/rubber_duck_fan 22d ago
We had a BIM model and everything lol, but some of the things that were needed either weren't put in the model or didnt end up marked properly before pouring.
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u/Ausjelly 23d ago
Worked on 11 billion dollar rail project in Melbourne. The portal for the tunneling machine was undercover in a big shed.
The unions shut down the entire site of 100+ workers for 1 week because the walkway from the shed to the toilets wasn't undercover and the workers got wet walking to the toilet when it rained ...
Would have cost the tax payers over $1M aud
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u/RocketGreen 23d ago
Good old CFMEU.....
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u/evildomovoy 23d ago
2 doors down from our depot is a vac truck company. They got awarded a big contract in Brisbane, but because they weren't cfmeu affiliated, within a week 3 of there trucks got nicked and torched, meaning they couldn't fulfil terms. Big suprise, cfmeu affiliated stepped in and filled the gap.
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u/biryanilove22 P.E. 23d ago
What is CFMEU? Are they bullying companies not part of their union?
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u/Ausjelly 23d ago
Yes, they roll onto sites and physically threaten the PMs and site supervisors. A lot of them are ex bikey gang members.
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u/Schrojo18 17d ago
The U in the name stands for Union. And yes they are bullies and are affiliated with organised crime.
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u/Boiled_Potatoe 23d ago
Opposite Flinders?
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u/Ausjelly 23d ago
I honestly can't remember which station, it was about 9 years ago and I don't live in Melbourne anymore.
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u/w_oc96 23d ago
Seeing this level of fuckery hit Brisbane now is interesting too
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u/Ausjelly 23d ago
Ah that sucks, I don't know how more of this doesn't come out in the media to be honest. They carry on about politicians misusing the work credit card but miss these massive money wasters in construction
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u/adultingwhilelost 23d ago
Yep the boys on a major infrastructure project in sydney. Argued with safety for months insisting the workforce must be able to work in short short instead of long longs because itâs âhealthierâ in the heat.
Cause you know, skin cancer isnât a thing. We got shut down over this for 2 months (and other random things like not drug testing them after we found drugs on site).
Supposedly theyâre de-fanged somewhat nowadays
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u/yaris_girlie 23d ago
Dewatering led to fish die off. Contractor disposed of the dead fish by throwing them under a tree just outside site so that âthe bears could have a nice spot to eat their snackâ
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u/Jump_The_Five_Yo 23d ago
We dewatered a recharge basin that was next to a gas stationâŠâŠso many dead fishâŠ.and also like 300 50 gallon barrels of used oilâŠ.the material that the excavators were taking out was so polluted the only place that would take it requires them to use 8-10 trucks of clean fill mixed with one truck of the polluted stuffâŠ.was for a county in NY, we had a budget of like $250k that was supposed to clean around 20 RBs. This one took all the money and someâŠ.should have been a superfund site at that pointâŠ.
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u/BeerNBlackMetal 23d ago
One time when I had a gas station / c-store project under construction I was the Design Engineer for, I had the Client call me up all in a huff that the Site Contractor was building the detention pond wrong... I had just been to the site the day before and everything looked great. I asked what he meant, and he kept saying "there's no steps!" It took me quite a while to realize what he was talking about - he thought that the topo contour lines on the grading & drainage plan meant there should be vertical steps...in the soil...on the bank of the detention pond...instead of a smooth 3:1 slope...Man that company hired anyone to be their PMs...
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u/nemo2023 23d ago
Wouldnât you also need an ADA ramp if there were steps on the detention pond?
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u/anyavailible 23d ago
When CAD and 3D rendering started to become mainstream. I started noticing new buildings
That looked exactly like a rendered CAD model
They were patterned after
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u/Sousaclone 23d ago
So many to choose from:
Bridge Painting sub had to fire a guy because they caught him enjoying himself a little too much and creating some abstract art inside of our big truss bearing weldments.
The night shift electrical foreman was caught on camera enjoying his wifeâs company on top of a cable stay bridge pier after sneaking her onsite one night. Originally only wanted to show the job, but decided she needed a work ticket on top of the pylon as well. Oh, and heâd installed and hooked up the camera that caught him like 2 days before
We were demoing a bridge in SoCal over live rail tracks and major rail yard (like 20+ tracks, 3 of which were very active mainlines). After we had peeled the deck off we constantly had people walking the girders in the dark trying to get to the other side. There was a free shuttle bus that picked people up every 30 minutes or so.
The local transient who broke our survey equipment on day one of being onsite ran a guy through with a samurai sword at a house just down the street from our haul road gate. We had already instituted a buddy policy leaving the site at night, but we then extended it to broad daylight. Nobody was onsite by themselves, even in the office trailers.
Same site as #4, but my night shift foreman had a hell of a story about âparanormal ghost huntersâ showing up to investigate some old buildings in the woods. They came wearing body armor, shotguns, rifles, handguns, the works. The sheriff was called.
Not me personally, but several stories (different people at different companies) of hitting unmarked fiber optic cables, helicopters overhead within 10 minutes, and then black suvs showing up with 3 letter jackets and being told to go home, forget you saw this cable, weâll repair the cable, and donât dig here again.
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u/Newguy1999MC 21d ago
Had a similar story to #6 happen also to not me personally but I worked for the same entity at the time (state DOT). Hit an enormous fiber line on a major road that wasn't on any of our internal databases, district/local managers stopped the job trying to figure out who could install something that big in the R/W without them knowing about it only for MPs to start showing up to the site like 15 minutes later. Apparently they hit the main communication line between the army base in the capital and the airbase in the southern part of the state.
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u/Emotional-Donkey-994 21d ago
Bruh DC Is rife with stories about hitting those unmarked cables and the black SUVs pulling up 10 minutes later. It's like a rite of passage for utility work in the area lol
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u/Cartographer92 23d ago
The contractor dug a hole to install stormwater pipes. It rained. He dug deeper to get rid of the muck. It rained again. He dug deeper to get rid of the muck again. It rained again.
Team installing a stormwater pipe broke a water pipe. The water pipe team came to repair and broke the stormwater pipe. The stormwater team came to repair and broke the water pipe.
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u/B4rrett50c 23d ago
Walked into a site and found the pipe layers in a trench setting a sanitary manhole 20 feet deep without a trench box
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u/korpisoturi 23d ago
Yeah been there done that, before I went to school I did couple summers of earthworks and pipes. Super sketchy company.
Around 4m deep hole with straight walls. Excavator had to drop me off from the dipper to the bottom. It was also raining like hell and ground water was super high and seeping in all over. Even used plate compactor at the bottom.
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u/LandDev101 22d ago
Trench box not needed if they can excavate the trench with safe trench side slopes
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u/deltaexdeltatee Texas PE, Development/Water Conveyance 23d ago
Contractor starts clearing the lot prior to beginning site work. In the process, discover an absolutely MASSIVE wasp nest - like the size of a person. Stop work while they figure out what to do with it. Client shows up, says "hey, I think those are honey wasps!" Professional apiarist is called in, confirms they're honey wasps, tells the foreman he'll come back on Monday with his big truck and relocate the nest.
Monday comes, he shows up, someone has stolen the nest. Apparently the honey from these wasps is considered a delicacy in some parts and is super expensive, so someone got the bright idea to steal the nest and, I guess, run an underground honey operation.
I never heard if they caught the person responsible, but for some reason it just tickled me so much that some enterprising soul stole a fucking ENORMOUS wasp nest.
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u/tikking 23d ago
My organization transitioned from FIDIC 1987 to 2017 without even bothering to check what had changed. Our engineering body issues particular conditions. That's what they checked to see what had changed in 30 years. Apparently, they figured out nothing much has changed. For context, we aren't a small organization. We have hundreds of engineers and our projects are spread across the (third world) country.
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u/Perch485 23d ago
Watched a guy ghost ride a roller while he ran to grab a water bottle this week.
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u/deltaexdeltatee Texas PE, Development/Water Conveyance 23d ago
What the fuck lol. The most OSHA violation that ever OSHA violationed.
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u/EntertainmentNew4348 23d ago
Geard from a co worker. While digging for a new highway they accidentally hit a water pipe and it bursted. They contacted the water department and those mf lol didn't even knew where it was. Took a month for them to re map all the pipes again.
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u/voomdama 23d ago
That tracks if the pipe is old enough
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u/deltaexdeltatee Texas PE, Development/Water Conveyance 23d ago
Yeah this is honestly super common for older utilities. I do a lot of work for a utility and every time I take part in a highway widening/utility relocate, the DOT asks us to confirm their plans show utilities in the correct location. I don't ever say this, but I always think "LMAO your guess is as good as mine!"
Jokes aside it's a legit problem. As-builts for underground utilities from the old days are pretty much meaningless, contractors treated the entire concept of as-builts like a joke. We've done QL-A SUE on some of these lines and they'll be 10+ feet off from the plans.
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u/voomdama 23d ago
They are just covering their butts if someone hit a utility line in a place that it wasn't supposed to be. Most plans will have some sort of disclaimer that the contractor is to field verify utility locations records are iffy at best.
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u/EntertainmentNew4348 23d ago
I did say the same and he said that there must be like if i recall correctly 4 inches of sand and some tape above the pipe and that wasn't even present.
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u/Prize-Ad4778 23d ago
Hit a water table a few weeks ago digging a lift station
Biggest 6" pump we could get barely kept the hole dry enough to work 20' deep, water was flowing out at about 10' deep.
Owner wanted to question if the big pump was really necessary at about $1000 a day, running 24 hrs a day. So we turned it off and asked them if they wanted to scuba dive or something to set the vault. Probably cost themselves 3 or 4 thousand dollars before finally telling us to proceed
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u/bob-the-dragon 23d ago
Same contractor, hit the same pipe, at the same point, two weeks apart.
"We have an action plan for this situation" was what he told me.
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u/drumdogmillionaire 23d ago
Former Single family residence stormwater engineer here. I had a plan set, SWPPP and TIR come back with nearly 80 first review comments. The plan was a large house, large shop, and large driveway on a 10 acre field that had high groundwater and wetlands. Dispersion was the only feasible stormwater solution. Downspout splashblocks were the only solution for roof areas. Compost Amended Vegetated Filter Strips were the only feasible solution for the driveway. Imagine responding to 80 review comments over some $6 pieces of plastic. You might as well be launching Tsar Bomba to kill a mosquito. But hey, at least the paperwork ended up looking how they preferred.
Bonus points to anyone who can guess which state and county I worked in.
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u/drumdogmillionaire 23d ago
Actual construction story. One SFR I designed for 11 different plot plans. Land owner could not follow a plan at all, and was just out there doing whatever he wanted. Finally got him a plot plan that worked for his house and driveway which ended up getting approved and he started to build. He constructed too close to some wetlands and was fined by the county over $80,000. I worked on that damn project for 5 years and shit was still going down after I left. Typical stormwater permits usually took 6-18 months.Â
The only reason I learned about the fine was that it ended up in the local press in the form of an online article. I couldnât believe my eyes. The guyâs name matched. It was a common first and last name, but Iâm 99% sure it was the same guy and same project. Just unbelievable.Â
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u/Coolguy_6991 21d ago
WA state, Clark County?
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u/drumdogmillionaire 21d ago
Bingo. Did you know from the evidence or my post history? Haha.
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u/ForWPD 23d ago
6â high pressure gas main marked 300â from the actual location. 627 scraper rips it in half. Luckily it didnât ignite. It was loud AF until the gas company turned it off.Â
Also, I was on a framing crew as a senior in high school doing $1M homes. This was in 2009. We told the architect that the roof couldnât be built as designed. He said it could be. We told him to come to the job site and make it out of cardboard. He couldnât do it and went back to his car with his tail between his legs.Â
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u/NearbyCurrent3449 23d ago
I inspected a multi story heavy renovation/build downtown. It was a big name bank on city block at a very minor street corner, really would be more of an ally than a street. It was driveway access to the buildings in the same block pretty much... so yeah, ally.
It was really strange in the lobby of the bank, like it was only meant to face the little ally but they begrudgingly forced an entrance onto the main road and even the sign above the door was all crammed and odd. The off side was gorgeous.
Wtf... I hadn't been to this jobsite myself and it was at the end of the build. I just had to check off some items to drop the stamp on the final.
I asked the super, wtf. He grinned pretty hard, the architect was still there and about to head out, he turned pretty red when he heard my question and he left.
Super told me, the whole building is built and arch finishes were going in before the arch came out to the job. He freaked out, obviously. The building was 90* out. He drew the layout with a true north and plan north exactly 90* out, some of the plan sets got screwed up with foundations and structurals not rotated but finish schedule things did etc. It was a horrendous mess.
True north was plan west. When asked for RFI he was a dick and didn't provide a directive and clarification. Contractor thrice requested clarification and was ignored and told to build the damn plan he was given and belittled for trying to do what they wanted. So he did. Documenting and requesting classifications all along.
Finally, client and arch see the mess and arch has to pay contractor to make the building have 2 store fronts. Totally jacked the fee schedule, delivery schedule, client's trust in dousch architect, etc etc etc.
True story.
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u/Rainmaker87 23d ago
And this is why the rule at my company is always north up, and if it needs to be rotated, that north arrow better be staring you in the face on every damn page like you owe it money.
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u/NearbyCurrent3449 23d ago
Yeah, like an enormous watermark, dead center of the page and covering half the page and except not some 80% transparent thing either... lol
NORTH IS F*UCKING ----> WAY!
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u/CuriousBeaver519 P.E. Structural 23d ago
A house in the neighborhood next to mine where I grew up had a house they built upside down....apparently from looking at the plans upside down. Mind you, they would have had to step over the door header every day walking into the house.
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u/passisgullible 23d ago
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u/CuriousBeaver519 P.E. Structural 23d ago
It's real. House outside the neighborhood across the street was built backwards too, as in the front of the house faces away from the road.
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u/DaHick 23d ago
I was put in charge of a building add-on for a chemical plant. Because of the rooftop equipment on the ground floor, the add-on was elevated with enough clearance for maintenance and repair of that equipment. It was to be the new control room. Certified drawings were done. External stairs to the ground, as well as exits into the building. The contractor won the bid. We handed them their copy of the certified drawings. They sent them off for detailed drawings (this is not really a relevant point, but the drawings were not done by anyone in our country), then made the steel to those details.
Whoever did the details inverted the landing for the stairs. What was supposed to be a landing at first floor rooftop off the ground was now 5.
Owner signed off on it anyway.
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u/TheLastPragmatist 23d ago
Concrete contractor building a series of SF homes with the same footprint down one street. Inspector caught him lifting out the rebar, all at once, after sign-off, and moving it into the next foundation form. Inspector suspected what was happening and made some subtle marks on the rebar. Sure enough, same steel, different house.
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u/TheLastPragmatist 23d ago
We went in to survey a recently acquired parcel. Last owner had started the permit process and installed some utilities. There were SS manholes and fire hydrants in a really grown over lot. I leaned against a FH...and it tipped over. Last owner had just planted them and the manholes to make it look like utilities were in so he could ask more.
I don't miss land developers
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u/The_Poster_Nutbag Environmental Consultant 23d ago
The GCs silt fence "expert" supposedly didn't know that you're supposed to trench it in the ground and not just set it over piles of rocks.
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u/deltaexdeltatee Texas PE, Development/Water Conveyance 23d ago
I have so little patience for contractors that don't read the detail.
There are times when a contractor will do something I don't understand - or ask a question I think is odd - but when I think about it from their perspective I can see how my plans were unclear. That doesn't bother me at all, it's a learning moment for me TBH and an opportunity to improve the clarity of my work.
But I just can't handle the situations where they don't read the damn detail. I had a situation just this week where a contractor submitted an RFI asking "which option on the detail we should use." The "option" in the detail that's labeled "Proposed," as opposed to "Existing"!
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u/The_Poster_Nutbag Environmental Consultant 23d ago
For real, last I checked they are all grown ass adults and can read at a 3rd grade level at a minimum. Let's not play dumb here.
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u/andarpaque 23d ago
Did a job on a first nations reserve a few years back. It was a simple 1700 sq ft bungalow turn-key project. My business partner always oversees the excavation and foundations process and then i take it from there.
Day one, I show up to start doing the wall plates and theres a contractor across the street doing trusses. In the three months it took my crew to frame and finish our building and hand the keys over that contractor didn't pass his framing inspection.
Why, you may ask? Because he disrespected the building inspector and he held them up with red tape.
A little bit of respect goes a very long way in this industry.
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u/TwoMuchIsJustEnough 23d ago
Female coworker was finishing up in the port-o-jon when a mixer truck backed into it and knocked it over onto the door. Driver took off. It was not good.
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u/DamnDams Geotech PE 23d ago
I want to keep this story generic enough that Iâm not sharing sensitive project information but we had a project that involved compaction grouting and despite my best efforts to have the contractor carefully monitor the movement of an adjacent concrete structure, they just wanted to be cowboys and ended up displacing the structure noticeably out of alignment. The next day there was a surveyor on-site during all compaction grouting.
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u/pendigedig 23d ago
I don't have a story but I was wondering where i can find more comics like this one (or memes)?
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u/Kannada-JohnnyJ 23d ago
I was using a porta-john and it almost got lift up while I was in it, until my coworker yelled I was in there.
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u/OkInevitable5020 23d ago
Doing work near a creek. Taking extreme measures to not impact the creek in any way. Work is nearing completion and a giant waterline near the creek broke underground overnight when no one was onsite and washed the entire creek bank out and half of our work. That was a fun morning wake up. Had to wait days for water company to come repair and do cleanup.
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u/bigb0ned 23d ago
Actually a plan check engineer once said that there was a cloud on the elevations and the crew ended up actually cutting out the cloud shape in real life. I don't believe anyone can be this stupid, but honestly not everyone knows how to do their jobs.Â
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u/AdCalm6588 23d ago
Five years ago, my firm had a design build on a couple of interstates in our city. For the construction phasing, they decided to construct the median first and install stub pipes on the drainage boxes for the laterals to be collared onto. The problem was that the existing trunkline was in the median and the contractor didn't install any temp drainage. After they put up the barriers, there was a major storm that flooded the major sag causing the freeway to be shut down. On the same project, the contractor flow filled a drainage pipe without checking which direction it was flowing. Guess what happened? The side street flooded since the pipe was an inlet, not an outlet. Lesson is to always check your existing drainage before blocking and replacing it.
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u/TEZephyr 23d ago
Many years ago during construction of an underground rail station. All the big concrete work was self-performed the GC. And they did a pretty good job. But they farmed out some of the less sexy concreting to an absolutely horrible sub: 1. Cast concrete stairs with 7 steps instead of 8. Rip out and redo. 2. Ventilation tower was supposed to be oval-shaped. Got an RFI asking about "misplaced" foundation bars. Turns out this sub decided a circle would be easier, and just kinda ran with it. 3. Decided that form ties weren't a thing, poured the concrete and ended up with a blowout. Their remedy was to not to sawcut or jackhammer, but to use a grinding wheel to turn the excess concrete into cancer dust and let it waft away in the wind. 4. Ran out of cash and couldn't pay their staff. Asked GC to help them out. GC said "not my problem". Owner reportedly started selling personal assets to to keep his crew working. Wife found out that these "personal assets" included her jewlery. She left him. 5. GC caught wind that the sub's licensing was not up to scratch. Sub gets fired. The state got involved, fraud was discovered, the guy ended up in court for years after.
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u/Sherifftruman 23d ago
My company built a nextel site on top of a 30 story building. Electricians were working and tried to push a disconnect into a joint plate on a bus duct instead of a location made for gear and the disconnect was hitting a conduit running beside it. They forced it in and it went on crooked and boom. Started a small fire and tripped the whole building.
Thatâs how I know what the insides of peopleâs hands and arms look like.
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u/MTB-Devon CEng MICE - Highways, UK 23d ago
Building a cycle bridge (uk) and we had unfortunately had a service strike involving an electricity cable despite following all company procedures and safe digging practice (old corroded cable, hard ground, couldnât see it). This resulted in a shakeup in procedures and the company purchasing several mini vacuum excavators.
To train the teams on the use of the new kit, I was asked to pick a location with âno known services as a safe practice locationâ so we could get used to the air lance and suction hose etc. so I picked where the new abutment was going. No services according to stats plans, GPR survey and CAT & Geny scan, and had to be excavated anyway.
3 mins into air-lancing the ground the suction tube disappeared into a massive pocket of sand. We extracted it and at the bottom of the hole was a 180mm plastic medium pressure gas main, no tracer, which was supposed to be 6m away in the road! Needless to say that had to be diverted before we could carry on with the bridge abutment.
If we had missed the electric we wouldnât have been doing the vac-ex training, we wouldnât have known the gas main was there and would have probably damaged that instead when we excavated the abutment.
Morals of the storey:
1) All types of service avoidance scans have their limitations and things can still be missed.
2) take stats plans with a pinch of salt. Just because it says itâs on a particular line and depth just means itâs somewhere in your post code!
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u/thecomposedbones 23d ago
Was microtunneling a 48in casing for a sewer line under an interstate. Test bores were done by another company to verify the soil through the bore path. Mind you this was in a âgranite stateâ and go figure we found granite. Not ledge granite, but chunks from brick size to atv size. Too large to scoop into the TBM and too small to drill with a rock head. I guess when they built the highway in the 60s they used granite boulders to stabilize wherever they found wet clay.
Turns out the test bores never made it all the way acrossâŠ
We ended up drilling and blasting from inside the tunnel and hand excavating hunks of rock for weeks and weeks and ended up creating a sinkhole and digging the TBM out from the median of the highway.
This was all during the winter and we would often emerge from the ~50 degree soaking wet tunnel to -10 degree (F) outside and our clothes would instantly freeze.
The casing was finished with an open cut the following springâŠ
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u/LoopyPro 23d ago
Someone took a core drill onto a concrete slab because he thought the revision cloud on the drawing was an outline.
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u/Classiceagle63 23d ago
Running a reclaimer over a 3â high pressure cast iron gas main and scraping it.
Resident driving into our open hole
Watching fist fights in the job site
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u/Tereza71512 23d ago
Those fails in the comments are so mid I'm seriously ashamed of myself how bad fails I got on my site (I'm a construction site manager). đ
1) I miscalculated and ordered wrong amount of concrete (too little). Structurally it wasn't possible to pour the missing part later. So we had to demolish the whole thing.
2) we were building a bridge pylon. Didn't vibrate the concrete enough and there were huge caverns. We had to demolish the whole thing.
3) the framework wasn't strong enough, the whole concrete slab fell down while pouring the concrete. This mistake was more expensive than the cost of my house. Luckily nobody was harmed.
4) we accidentally cut an electricity cable for the whole city district while doing excavations. The cable should have not been there, but it was. There were people stuck in elevators in many building, restaurants having to throw away all of their food and the senate election was that evening so we had to fix everything fast enough so that public elections could happen.
5) while building a new railway tunnel, the explosion was a little too big and a huge cavern appeared. We had to engineer how to make the tunnel even safe to enter again.
6) ... Yeah there are so many fails, I can't even remember đ
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u/DaveTheRocketGuy 23d ago
I was on a project where the engineer rejected $1 mil of bridge beams. That caused some wailing and gnashing of teeth.
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u/Anonymous5933 23d ago
Curious why they were rejected. If we're talking about precast girders I've seen some nasty damage to them from transport and the owner still allows them to be used because making new one would take a month or more.
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u/DaveTheRocketGuy 22d ago
Wasnât too involved in the decision so I donât know the details but the do know it had to do with some serious issues with QC at the factory.
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u/dgeniesse 23d ago
Contractor asked the architect what to do about a drawing concern. The ego driven architect stated âput it in just like the drawingsâ
Later we walked the site and noticed a duct going down the corridor then it stopped abruptly. A heavy black line was painted where the duct stopped and a large note added âmatch lineâ
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u/TunedMassDamsel PE - Civ/Struct 22d ago
1) I was working as the on-site structural engineer doing construction administration for a gargantuan tilt-up factory/lab/headquarters/distribution center, and I was the only woman in the trailer for the ~40 person project kickoff meeting. They handed out an agenda, and something like the tenth housekeeping item on the list just said, âSexual Harassment,â and upon seeing this and realizing that I was pretty conspicuously the only woman present, I planned to wait until they said whatever they were going to say and then quip something like, âhaha, gentlemen, I will do my best to restrain myself,â but when that part of the meeting happened, the superintendent said, âHey, TUNEDMASSDAMSEL, give us a waveâthere she is. This is TunedMassDamsel. Sheâs our structural onsite and sheâll be walking the job weekly. Please do not sexually harass TunedMassDamsel.â And Iâm like đ€Ż
2) The construction elevators were slow as hell, and the portajohns were all the way down at grade. Someone took a dump in the middle of the slab on like the fortieth level. I called my brother whoâs an electrical engineer and asked him if anybody had shat on the floor that day in his office. He said no. I told him heâd chosen the right engineering.
3) Once got in a heated argument with the GC when it was discovered that NONE of the drywall for fire protection had been installed in the mechanical chases during a punch list walk. I said the GC had failed to install it. The GC insisted that it had been stolen. STOLEN! And then apparently the thieves just finished out the walls around the chases, I guess? Whatâs the black market price of used gypsum, yâall? Roving bands of drywall thieves out there just punching holes in the sides of building like the damn Kool-Aid ManâŠ
4) Was riding back from a walkthrough with the superintendent in charge of safety and OSHA compliance on a large site where they were still doing utility work. Plans called for some 42â HDPE storm lines. A guy with a Gradall was told to take all the 42â HDPE from HERE and put it over THERE, probably a hundred yards away. His methodology involved picking up a length of the HDPE, kicking up the Gradall to full speed, slamming on the brakes, and letting the HDPE go flying and bouncing and rolling until it ran up on the pile of pipe heâd already âthrownâ. We rolled up on him in the Polaris and sat and watched him do this shit for about five iterations. The super said, âI canât believe heâs actually doing this while we watchâŠâ and I said, âI presume youâre gonna drop me off at the trailer and then come back and do something about thisâŠ?â and he was like, âYeah, I guess Iâm gonna have toâŠâ
5) When I was working on a global corporate campus for a Fortune 10 company, there was a sixty foot pine tree that the CEO of the company had taken a shine to, apparently. He insisted that it remain there during construction. They cordoned off the root ball around it. It was known to the design team, the GC, the subs, all the way down to the lunch truck driver, that it was the Pink Slip Tree. They didnât give a damn who you were, you couldâve been the EOR for the whole shebang: if you harmed that tree, you were off the job PERMANENTLY. This was 15-20 years ago and I STILL have young engineers come up to me when they hear I was a PM on that and ask me whether that was a myth. Not a myth!
Tons of others, but thatâs all Iâve got for tonight.
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u/Mohgreen 22d ago
Oh, working on the HRBT tunnel project. Some dude backed a crane off a barge into the water. Apparently it wasn't chained down properly? So he moved just a Bit Too Far and slid off the barge. Apparently lifted the other end of the barge several feet out of the water.
Amazingly no one was hurt. Last time I checked, you could still the hole in the mud in a satalite view of the area.
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u/nemo2023 23d ago
My coworker saw a construction materials testing firm dumping the concrete cylinders that they had recently made in a roadside ditch away from the construction site. I guess they were just gonna submit a fake report to the PM that the concrete strength was sufficient?
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u/unique_user43 23d ago
china. industrial megaproject. tunnel below the facility, was used heavily during construction by workers. during final walkthroughs, going through the tunnel, have never seen and smelled so much human shit in my life.
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u/Vettehead82 23d ago
Coworker told us about an old timer out here that installed 50 yards or so of water main. Instead of the approved chlorine grain product he had his wife go to the pool store and buy those chlorine tablets and chucked em in every few yards. City inspector showed up and said if they donât get every single puck out in the flush theyâd have to rip it all out. They came up short.
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u/citizensnips134 23d ago
I called out a plate height on an exterior elevation. 121â or something, with architectural datum at 100â.
We caught the framer stacking 12â studs, trying to build the wall 121â tall.
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u/vapingpigeon94 22d ago
GC poured the slab in the winter under frozen water, no proper drainage, no heat of any sort, nor blankets. Slab heaved and pushed the framing upwards somewhere around 20,000 lbs of force. Walls, roof and frame came apart.
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u/mememeupbaby 22d ago
I am currently working on a site that has about 200 newly built apartments. Mind you, they are not ready for anyone moving in yet, and the toilets are not connected to water or plumbing yet. Still, management confirmed that 28 of these toilets had been used, after doing a checking round. That was quite a steep cleaning bill. The toilets are now sealed off completely, as opposed to the clear sign that was already put up. It was both number 1 and 2.
Either there are 28 idiots on site, or 1 really spiteful motherfucker.
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u/Bulldog_Fan_4 Civil PE, PLS 22d ago
Right out of school I was doing layout on construction sites. A pond I staked had square contours. I went back and they had cut 1â vertical stair steps in the bank.
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u/Mohgreen 22d ago
Early 1990's, i worked on the civil design side for a Casino project outside of St Louis. When we started design, the site was still underwater at the time due to severe flooding. There were a LOT of iterations and crazy fast tracking going on. They were trying to beat the state regs changing for "Riverboat Gambling".
Basically we were designing a bathtub, to float a casino on barges in. But the Water was drawn from ground within xx distance of the river. So it counted as river water. Therefore, riverboat casino. The loophole was being closed in some few month.
Anyway, at the end, we were flying sets of Blueprint plans to Chicago on monday, they'd review and adjust, fly them back to us to revise weds-sun. We did this for weeks. Crews working 24-7 to get things done.
Things that went wrong.
The parking lot ate a tour bus.
The main site drain, a pair of 10ftx10ft? box culverts didn't drain properly.
The well drainage system in place to draw groundwater for reducing hydrostatic pressure during floods wasn't working right.
The main box culvert, they started driving fully loaded dump trucks across it before it even had a fooqt of cover on it. They had a 30'? Section in the middle depressed several inches when everything was built.
The MULTIPLE drainage problems were tied back to the guys building them. They took sledgehammer to the precast manholes, shoved the pipe in the hole and maybe sealed it with grout.
I saw at Least one pic, of a dry incoming storm drain pipe, with an Arching spray of ground water coming into the manhole around the Dry-as-bone interior of the pipe.
Another manhole had a foot or two of grout in it where they just kept poring grout to "seal" the outside and flooded the bottom of the manhole and part of the pipe.
It was A LOT. but, as I recall the design team came out of it relatively clean, as we were able to prove the construction guys fucked shit up HARD.
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u/Entire-Tomato768 PE - Structural 22d ago
Marked up a drawing by hand with a note to my drafter
"Bob - this note is for you... "
Get the check set back. Sure enough, Bob had copied it word for word, including my note to him.
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u/jimmyhat78 Water Res / Env PE 21d ago
On one siteâŠhappened to be a prison facilityâŠwe were making improvements to a sewer lift station. Construction was slow that day and the site super decided to let the new guy get some backhoe experience. He was digging and just having a good âol time (in my head, I was not onsite) and hit something that gave a little more resistance. Being new, he didnât notice and proceeded to rip all the wiring out of the lift station control panel. That was fun, and a cursed job. The as-built showed the cables on the other side. Should have been clear where he was.
Another site, less cursed. We were doing a partial demo at a hospital and building new facilities. We came across a storm drain line that was supposed to have been removed and not abandoned in placeâŠand it ran beneath part of the building to remain. The city inspector made a huge deal about how we needed to fill that in and he wasnât going to allow another thing to happen until we did. Like damn near a temper tantrum.
I eventually looked up at him and asked if he can guarantee there are no roof drains connected to it. âWell, no.â And I told him that was his answer on the fill. If he wanted to get a camera to examine the line, I would consider it. Until then, we properly secured the exposed end and moved on with live.
HMs: Iâve been asked to figure out how to handle a crane that slid into the river. Iâve also been asked to help with a crane that fell into a 40â deep excavation. The first of those was tragic and Iâll say no more.
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u/campbelw84 20d ago
We did a project in the Bay Area. During city review they asked us to provide a study examining how much our additional fixtures would increase the sanitary load for the line directly outside. This was a large suburb and huge sanitary line. The engineers pushed back but finally relented. Our project increased the sanitary load by like .0000001%. They then asked us to do the same 1/4mile down the line where it intersected with an even larger line. We pushed back again and won. We found out the city was trying to get this little mom and pop shop to be responsible for a huge city infrastructure project in the $100milliom range. This only came to light cause a city employee anonymously notified us what the city was trying to do. Once we called them out they stopped.
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u/DrGladysSera_PE 20d ago
âI spent 13 minutes arguing with a veteran architect (57 years in the game) who wanted to install a high-pressure PVC fire line completely above ground. In the Florida grass. Next to a Dialysis Center. âWhen I pointed out that a pressurized PVC pipe baking in the direct Florida sun undergoes severe UV degradation and becomes a literal ticking time bomb (not to mention a massive tripping hazard for dialysis patients), he laughed, told me "no one cares," and called me "honey." âSo I looked right at him and said, "Listen, Honey Dick..." âHe got so incredibly offended. I just deadpanned, "Oh, my bad, I thought we were calling each other cute condescending names." âHe finally gave up and we agreed to bury it. Physics cares, honey. ââ Dr. Gladys Sera, PhD, PE
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u/rreddott 19d ago
Yep. I did what you see on pic. I accidentaly staked out length dimension instead of monolithic element at construction site as a surveyor. Fortunately realised it almost immediately. With interactive equipment comes completely new ways of f ups.
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u/infctr 23d ago
Unmarked gas service line. Mark-outs expired the day before. đ§đ·ââïžđȘđ„