Page 139 - Civil Engineering Project Management, Fourth Edition

Civil Engineering Project Management
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11.4 Early matters to discuss with the agent
Items to be discussed will almost certainly concern the laying on of services to
the job – telephone, water supply, electric power and drainage. Even with use
of mobile telephones a land line is required as quickly as possible and the tele-
phone authority may need assistance in getting permission to run lines across
private properties. The agent may ask the resident engineer to approve pro-
posals for hard standing for cars and the routing of access roads.
The question of drainage and sanitation may prove difficult to solve. The
resident engineer has to watch that the contractual requirement to provide a
‘small sewage treatment works’ does not get whittled down to no more than
a tank and a soakaway, or a tank and an overflow to a near-by ditch or river. The
sewage works must be large enough to treat all the sewage from the maximum
number of persons who will be employed on site plus an addition for visitors.
If they are later found inadequate, it may prove difficult to get action if the
contractor feels that, given a few more weeks, the number of men on the job
will decline and the problem will solve itself.
The question of waste oil disposal from plant is a thorny one, and should be
brought to the agent’s notice. Discharge of used lubricating oil or waste diesel
oil to public sewers is usually forbidden; to discharge it through the site sewage
works will probably ruin their proper functioning. The discharge of even small
quantities to a watercourse will almost certainly be detected by the Environ-
ment Agency who will demand immediate rectification and the contractor may
be liable to a penalty and payment of compensation if damage has resulted.
The waste oil should be led to a pit and disposed of by tanker as the local sew-
erage authority advises.
The resident engineer will need to know what part of the job the agent
intends to tackle first, so that he can check any necessary setting out that must
precede it. The agent will need to know what are the local benchmarks which
have been used for the original survey of the area. If these are some distance
away, they may both agree that their staff should jointly arrange for a conven-
ient benchmark and base line to be set out near the job.
The next topic may be the programme as a whole, and this is the first of many
discussions that will occur on that subject. Sometimes the agent wants more
information from the resident engineer so that he can continue making his
detailed plans, or he may have perceived some problem ahead which he thinks
might be avoided if the engineer would sanction some action not exactly in line
with contract requirements. The resident engineer had best give only a guarded
opinion if this is his first acquaintance with such a proposition.
The resident engineer should be wary of discussing, too early, design matters
or alteration of the contract requirements, because he may find out later that
there are good reasons for the design requirements being as shown in the con-
tract documents. Too early a desire to assent to some proposal by the contractor
can lead to later trouble, when the assent has to be withdrawn as a result of
increased understanding of the job.