Library renovations to be pricier
It’s a brief story about the renovation of a library in Montreal North, but what surprises me is that the expensive mistake – the breakage of a hydraulic conduit – “n’a pas pu être évité, car il était impossible de détecter ce conduit au préalable par géolocalisation.” Aren’t there engineering plans for buildings like this that should be consulted before someone starts digging?
Mr.Chinaski 11:00 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Going up to the end of the 80’s, most construction plans for engineering. were often “schematic” hand drawn plans. Until the widespread usage of AutoCAD, that’s how you worked. Same for electrical inside buildings.
This is why there are contingency budgets in project management.
walkerp 11:41 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Same excuse for the gas line that these incompetent and corrupt construction companies chop into on a weekly basis?
Mr.Chinaski 15:26 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Well yes.. and no. Perhaps they use this to their advantage, but having dealt with “info-excavation” (the company in charge of telling you what’s under the ground, yes the fluorescent paint lines that you don’t know the meaning of), they also are within the limits of their knowledge.
History is not keen in keeping good records of underground utilities and even if they have the information, tolerance of hand-drawn maps multipled by the scant construction techniques of the past are no good when you need half an inch precision in your digging methods.
Kevin 20:21 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Last summer Bell was digging in my back alley and their map for an underground line was about 2 metres off.
My neighbour told them that the map was wrong, but they didn’t believe him until they’d spent 6 hours digging and not finding what they were looking for.
It’s the difference between where things were supposed to go, and the guys who put down the line 40 years ago deciding that there was no way they were going to move the giant rock that was in the ground, so they went around it — and nobody updating the corrected map kept in the archives.