Home Seismic Retrofit Program

For the past several months, I have been in more face to face interaction with homeowners and contractors through a wonderful program called Seattle Project Impact. I get to know some of them more at a personal level from direct discussions and correspondence back and forth, which I enjoy. I usually do not have that interaction with owners beyond sending invoices and thank you notes for received payment.

The Seattle Project Impact is a seismic hazard reduction program for homes initiated by a FEMA grant in 1990s. It aims to encourage homeowners to consider seismic retrofit for their older homes. Some incentives offered by the city of Seattle includes reduced fee and much faster permitting process, simplified and easy to understand retrofit procedure for DIY-ers (Do It Yourselfers), and, in many cases, no engineering design is required. So, it is quite simple and basic. Similar program was established earlier in Southern California cities and works well.

Free classes are also offered to teach homeowners how to do retrofit, go thrugh the check list and obtain the work permit themselves. I met the volunteering instructors, Tony Holder and Tom Hall, several months back and impressed with their work and commitments with this program. I decided to work with them and homeowners by offering engineering design, when required, at a reduced rate.

(The photo above shows Tom Hall and Tony Holder teaching at a class at the Greenwood Public Library in early October).

The underlying principle of this type of program is that, based on studies, older wood frame homes for the most parts are capable to absorb violent seismic shaking but still vulnerable at the crawl space or basement level where their perimeter walls, also called cripple walls, have little lateral strength. Under intense ground shaking, these homes could fall off its foundation or drop down several feet due to crushed cripple walls. Any of these damages are quite expensive, as much as $50,000, to fix. Retrofitting is relatively much cheaper and is a preventive measure to mitigate these costly damages. For DIYers, the material costs approximately $3,000 for a typical home. Hiring a trained retrofit contractor (who has taken the contractor's training class) costs from $5,000 to $15,000 depending on the complexity.

It seems that retrofitting is a smart long term investment and at a cost that is small fraction of the house value. Besides, homeowners may be required by insurance companies to get their houses retrofitted prior to obtaining earthquake insurance or seeking reduction in their premium.

There are more than 200,000 homes in King County are vulnerable to large earthquakes. In Seattle are alone-where ground shaking can be more intense due to soft soil condition- the number of vulnerable homes reaches 125,000. So far, not more than a thousand homes have been retrofitted; the good news is the program has been expanding. There are more than twenty cities in the Puget Sound area that have adopted this program.

If you are interested to learn about the program and the upcoming free classes you can check out this link: http://www.seattle.gov/emergency/info/retrofitclasses.htm or call 1-877-2-BOLT-IT to register for the class.

You can also contact me if you have any questions at basri@b2engineers.com.

Satsop: Before and Now

I was recently asked by a manufacturer to help engineer a conversion of a big empty building to a production facility in Satsop. For someone like me who have lived here less than 6 years, this place did not ring a bell; I even had trouble with the pronunciation. Then I was told by one of the staff that it is a giant but abandoned nuclear facility in Southwest Washington near Olympia. "It is pretty easy to find. You will see these giant concrete towers as you drive closer to the site," he said, maybe sensing my wondering thought.

I took a site visit last week. Sure enough, I saw these massive concrete tanks with blinking lights at the top as I was approaching the site. It is a big empty land with buildings clustered in the middle. I read about airplanes approaching Sea-Tac airport use these towers as a guide.

The building I am involved with is a heavy duty four story one. It is at least 1000 ft. long by 300 ft. wide with massive steel columns and beams. A lot of pits with wall thickness of 30 inches. The framings looked oversized to me but certainly appropriate for a nuclear facility. I am pretty sure seismic upgrade is not necessary.

Back in 1970s, this whole unfinished nuclear reactor facility cost billion of dollars. This is when gasoline was about 25 cents per gallon. The project was borned out of the desire of a utility company Washington Public Power Supply System to supply cheap energy to the public. The project broke ground in the late 70s, later faced stern public oppositions in 80s due to delay and ballooning construction cost, at that time estimated up to 8 billion dollars to complete. It was formally shut down in the early part of 90s. The utility company defaulted on $2.25 billion municipal bonds it sold to investors to fund the project. It was maybe the largest municipal bond default in the U.S. history.

Today, many of the buildings inside now-called Satsop Development Park are occupied by technology and distribution companies, manufacturers and training centers. It is a positive result of a program run by the Grays Harbor County to rejuvenate the local economy and make good use of this enormous facility. The county have been trying for many years to lure businesses to the site by offering favorable lease terms and capital improvement, among other incentives.

It apparently works pretty good.

If I borrow from the Obama's campaign theme, that is a positive change.

Growing Traffic Problem

I recently attended Bothell Chamber of Commerce luncheon. The speaker was Kemper Freeman Jr., a well known developer of Bellevue Square. He indicated that he has invested significant amount of time and money trying to promote ideas on relieving traffic congestion in Puget Sound area. He had also served as a legislator several years ago partly because, he said, he wanted to have his and other private citizens' voice heard in public decision makings.

During the presentation, Mr. Freeman admitted he has business interest in this issue in a way that a better traffic would boast the number of shoppers coming to his malls in Bellevue. But he quickly said, "We have much bigger issue, bad traffic will eventually ruin our economy and the standard of living here in Puget Sound."

I wholly agree with his assessment.

I do not know much about traffic engineering. But I do know we have traffic problem which is ranked among the nation's worst. I think many of us, unconsciously or not, plan our day and traveling around the traffic conditions.

It is likely getting even worse. By 2030 the Puget Sound population is predicted to increase by 40 percent. I am not sure how this area will cope with that amount growth in traffic.
Should we all stay home or work from home?

I have read a lot about the construction planning of the billion dollars light rail (and its massive cost overruns), but as a lay person I do not see how that will relieve or address traffic problem that is pretty widespread, from Everett in the north to Puyallup in the south. I think we need something much more comprehensive than that.

If you are interested to read more about traffic issue, there are several good website to check out. One is www.truthabouttraffic.org which studies the traffic congestion in Puget Sound.
You can also visit Mr. Freeman's website: www. freemanplan.com to learn more about his ideas.

There must be a better way of doing this! (part 2)

If you search online there may be more than fifty software companies offering time tracking softwares. You can also download them for a trial. It seems there is a big market for it. They are not too expensive either, not in the thousands of dollars.
Not sure which one to try, I visited their websites and checked for online product reviews.
Internet (and Google) are amazing tools, aren't they?

I finally settled for one software, called Journyx. (www.journyx.com)
I know it has a funny name. I picked them because of the glowing reviews their received from the customers. And, it is free if you have less than ten employees.

After several months using it, I could not be happier, even after spending a day or two setting it up and customizing the timesheet configuration to fit my needs.

I am not sure why a product this good is given away for free. It is probably part of their marketing strategy.

I can easily enter every single hours, expense and mileage into the same software through my website, that is linked to my journyx database. (You can see it on my website under login/timesheet).

To tell you the truth, now I kind of enjoy doing this type of task - something I dreaded for so long - knowing that it is easy and fun and in many ways much less prone to errors.
My wife, who has been helping with purchasing and invoicing, love the software as well because she can always enter or review billing hours or expenses from her own computer.

At one time, a client who received my invoice wanted to know the details for that billing period. So I sent her the monthly report for the project including task descriptions (see the snapshot on the right side of this blog entry). She seemed very satisfied with that. On my part, I was so glad because I did not have to labor putting together a report or trace back every hour I spent fearing that I made mistakes in billing the client.

If you are interested to know more about Journyx or other time tracking softwares, feel free to e-mail me at basri@b2engineers.com. I may be able to steer you in the right direction.

No more time spreadsheet for me :)

There must be a better way of doing this! (part 1)

Some of us (maybe many) who are in consulting businesses struggle so much with timesheets to a point that we do not want to deal with them anymore.

At the same time we realize this time tracking on projects is a significant part of running a consulting or design firm. Simply because we often get paid based on the billable time we put into a project.

We all can do marvelous and expensive designs, but they will mean little if those hours we spent are not properly billed. We know that having accurate and timely created timesheets are crucial to the profitability of a business.

At my old company we had a lady who spent more than half of her time on weekly basis dealing with timesheets, expenses and entering them into the accounting database. It seemed that the time tracking system we used -which was based on spreadsheet- was part of the problem. It was prone to errors and mixed up since every item needed to be entered manually. And it was not automatically integrated with the accounting database which created another opening for human errors. I did not have good experience with it.

In general it takes quite a bit of effort from everyone before invoices can be sent out: starting from filling out a timesheet everyday and get it reviewed by managers, then the accounting department needs to go through it one more time before creating invoices.

I always thought: "There must be a better way of doing this!"

When I started running my own small firm, I made conscious efforts to improve my time tracking system. I figured I had to do this given that I have limited resources and time to back check everything or, worse, bear the impact of lost billing. My idea was that every billable hour and expense should be properly allocated and every invoice that goes out the door needs to be correct. I wanted a system that allow me at the end year to review my performance in term of hours and money spent for the business. The software should also be accessible from anywhere; I don't have to be in the office to enter my hours. In other words, it should allow me to work on it in the kitchen while heating up dinner, for example.

After doing some online research, I found that many large consulting firms employ so called web based time tracking softwares.

They will break

There have been almost daily newspapers reports on broken or breached levees during this ongoing Midwest floods that brought many small towns along the Mississippi river underwater.

I have been following the news and my reaction was "It happened before in 1993, didn't the government learn something?"
It was easy for me to be skeptic about the work of FEMA and other federal agencies particularly after their slow response during the hurricane Katrina. Some of the flood victims recently interviewed by the New York Times echoed this sentiment. In fact, they did not expect any help would come from the government in rebuilding their homes given the seemingly complex bureaucracies.

What I learned was that newspapers reporting can be one-sided. They often focus on what or who to be blamed for these people's miseries. Why did the levees break? How did they spend our tax dollars?

The truth is many thousands of these levees are old and have never been inspected since the 1960s. Their status was not well understood according to FEMA report in 2006 titled "The National Levee Challenge". Many are substandard, too low and were originally designed to protect farmlands. No inventory of levees and related floor control structures are available at state or federal level. Not even here in the King County where there are more than 500 levees according to Washington State Department of Ecology.

The FEMA report also says that more than forty percent of the U.S. population lives in counties with levees. So it is pretty clear that flood is a big threat. It will get bigger as the increasing populations put more pressure on greenfield developments. This levee issue must be dealt at every level of government starting with the local. And it is not fair to expect FEMA to check the quality and capability of every levee and floodwalls. They will never given the budget to do that either.

By the same token, homeowners should be more proactive in understanding the situation they are in. I believe it is their responsibility to find out if their house is in a floodplain. If in doubt, get a flood insurance or move to higher ground! Because you can't count on the levees. There is a good chance that they will break.

Have a good written contract and get it signed!

A month ago my insurance carrier sent me e-mail about a free seminar they were planning on various professional liability topics. Frankly I do not usually enjoy to sit in this kind of presentation and listen to horror (and sad) stories about architects and engineers taken to courts for all kinds of reasons: from construction delays, over-budget projects to leaking windows.
Several years back I attended one and came out regretting my choice of profession. All we were told that we were in risky profession and vulnerable to legal issues. Given that we make relatively little in this business, the risk seems to far outweigh the reward.

This time I decided to attend partly because my carrier promised some sort of reduction in the premium if I would go.

After one hour bus ride to downtown Seattle on usual rainy morning I made it to the seminar on time; the traffic was not bad. The seminar turned out to be a good one, at least from my perspective. We had about four to five different sessions covering topics such as current trends in legal issues for A/E firms (I know this sounds bad!), managing clients' expectations, new issues that come with the increasing popularity of LEED, etc.

At the last session a local Seattle construction litigation lawyer spoke about alternative dispute resolutions. Then he made a very strong case about something that was repeatedly echoed throughout the seminar: to have good written contract on every project that limits our exposure to legal problems by introducing additional contract provisions such as limit of liability, statute of limitations and standard of care provision. There may be some others. And do not forget to have it signed by the client! (Notice to proceed by e-mail may not be enough). You may say these provisions would cause annoyance and put your clients in an odd situation. It might. However, these should also help educate our clients about what to expect from us and our insurance coverages. It is better to be upfront now than battling a combative client later!

We know lawsuits can always happen. They often go after those who can pay for the damages rather than those who did something wrong. In some cases, we are not able to avoid them and many factors are beyond our control. We can however reduce our liabilities. I heard that only a few A/E firms can survive from a major litigation because it is very expensive to defend. I would agree with that.

Our best defense at the end of the day may rest on the questions: "Do you have a signed contract?" and "What are the terms in your contract?"