Who is liable for locating a building on a Construction site?

Hey guys I am looking for a little ammo.

I am in a battle with a large firm that will not answer my RFI's about the locations of the buildings on a very large construction site. 
I have been given the following.

One Grid Line / Grid Line intersection for one of 13 Buildings on a site.  They are all connected by a main concourse.  The given control line has two monuments fly tied and the said control point has a North Bearing.  The length of the control line is 70 feet.

This site is roughly 1,400 feet in lenght and roughly 800 feet wide. 

I have been adomant that this is not enough to determine the deisigners intent with regards to the building locations.  I have requested ties to the site coordinate system for each building.  I asked for 4 for each building.  I could live with two.

I have been fighting these folks for 4 months now and they have affectively delivered nothing.  Their stance is they don't want to take on any of the surveyors liability for this site. 

My stance is I have enough liability in ensuring I can locate the buildings accurately according to their design.  They need to be clear on the buildings locations on the site. 

We are not designers.  We are Surveyors and are not allowed to design.  By us placing these buildings on the site we are affectively outside our proffesional liability and have moved into the designers role.

I would like to have some Ammo / Support to enter into this battle. 

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Regards,

At the risk of asking a bad question, what does your contract say is your responsibility and their responsibility?

If your contract doesn't say anything about it, what does the large firm's contract with the project owner say about their responsibility?  If you do not have a copy of that contract, I strongly suggest you get it.  There could be requirements in it that will shock you.  (This is the case far more often than most people realize.)

Remember, that construction contracts nearly always have requirments of both the general contractor and all the subs.  Almost never can the GC absolve the subcontractor of a responsibility.  This despite the fact that very often the subs never see the main contract or know anything about the previsions therein.

Larry P

Hello Matt,
This is an issue that is becoming more prevalent in every part of the country.  Liability suddenly has become the sole domain of the surveyor. However, just because there is a surveyor onsite does not remove their responsibility for constructing the project in substantial conformance with the plans. Distances from property lines should be given to any adjacent building corners as a matter of course. The engineer of record is the responsible party. He should step up.
azmaps

Ditto what the others have said-

But, what is it exactly that you were hired to do; stake the grid lines only or are you to stake the buildings?

Either way, it would seem reasonable to expect that you receive a full set of constructions plans with the approved Site Plan that indicaes the placement of the building/s and their location relative to one another and the setbacks.

After all, everyone is on the same team attempting to accomplish a goal of seeing the project to completion with the least amount of problems.

Ron~

Thank You Gentlemen,

Yes this is a good one. 

If I was to take this to the County to get a permit they would most definitely shoot this down.  There is no "Site Plan" for this site.  There is not one tie to any boundary on any plan.  We have a control diagram with one Grid Line x Grid Line tie with a Northing and Easting and a 70 foot bearing. 

My task is to draft every building relying on the paper plans alone and connect all thirteen buildings to the main concourse and hope that it all fits.  I have completed this work and I am requesting that they provide us with other tie points to verify we have put the buddings in their anticipated location.  It took 8 RFI's to just be able to draft the buildings.  To many missing dimensions to draft the buildings. 

This is a Federal Job so asking to see the Design Teams contract is probably a no go.

I really can't even say what it is for. Lets just say there is the Owner.  The owner has contracted with two entities to construct this project.  The Design Team is one and the General Contractor, who I work for, is the other.

Only the a Federal Government Entity could purchase plans this inadequate.  Part of me thinks it is comical.  The other part is very disappointed at what they purchased with our tax dollars.

The Design team is a group of three 800lb Gorillas and they are artist at giving the bare mini um to push their exposure on to others that are willing to take it without realizing the true issues at hand. My idea is demonstrated briefly as a "For instance 6 months from now."

We discover an issue and they redesign and update their plan set and give a site tie.  We reply that it doesn't fit with the buildings location and then they reply that isn't where we wanted it.  Then we say opps.  I don't say opps. They would be justified in their response since they have never said where they want these buildings.

My goal is to get them to tell us where the buildings are and then they will have to design to that.  They have way to much room to wiggle at this point.  I have my hands full maintaining control on this site not to mention ensuring all these buildings actually tie together.

I would prefer not to share the details of the contract.  They signed a T&M with us for multiple years as a Prof. Consultant with a firm escalation date.  There is no limits to what they may ask us to do. Primary contact is for the control of all buildings on the site and to manage the control for the site during the project.  As-Builting everything that is constructed as well to the governments acceptance of course.  That is the snap shot of the project and contract.

No where does my contract stipulate that I am liable / responsible for determining the location for the buildings on this site.  I am responsible / liable to ensure that they are constructed in conformance to the approved plans.  The approved plans do not specifically locate the buildings and definitely do not tie them to the site or boundary to the site.  I have never seen a set of plans this lacking in the most important information.  Where Are The Buildings On The Site?

Hi 
      Can you produce a plan of  with building locations showing their offsets to each other and to a couple of boundaries? 
   Make shure that there is a disclaimer on the plan stipulating that  locations have being derived from plans blah blah and is to be used for the setout work .

Cheers Chenzo

I suppose then, I would document what you do and when you did it, as per the terms of your contract, and send out an invoice.

Magic Words

This is a Federal Job so asking to see the Design Teams contract is probably a no go.

This is probably not true. The Feds generally have to be transparent. The exceptions are "National Security" and a few others. I don't know where you are, but there is also something called "The Federal Exemption". Local agencies don't like it, but having been on both sides of the issue I can tell you it exists. But it does depend on what type of federal property you are working on.

The working theory is often "Once it's on federal property, the feds make all the rules."  So, it is more or less up to your "Project Engineer",  "Project Supervisor" or whatever they are calling the head stud duck these days to get it straightened out for you and signed off. Once the feds sign off, you are in the clear as far as liability for the location. I have seen this challenged, but not successfully.

Yes! I wrestled with amateurish federal plans off and on for over twenty years. I am not surprised nothing has changed. I could go on about the reasons for this, but it would drift quickly into P&R.
MLB

There is a professional issue here for the Engineer of Record that could bring sanctions from the board. If he has produced a set of plans that are not cmplete and buildable, then he/she has not fulfilled their professional responsibilities. It doesn't matter that the project is Federal, the Engineer must still fulfill their professional responsibilities.

If the Engineer of record is unresponsive, then I would make a copy of the plans and all correspondence with the individual and make a formal complaint to the board for teh state shown on his seal on the plans. North Carolina is not at all amused with Engineers pulling the kind of trick you are wrestling with, and I'm sure many others aren't either.

Richard L. Hardison, PLS, PE,CFedS
Waynesville, NC

Geodeticmatt:
The length of the control line is 70 feet.

This site is roughly 1,400 feet in lenght and roughly 800 feet wide. 

I have been fighting these folks for 4 months now and they have affectively delivered nothing.  Their stance is they don't want to take on any of the surveyors liability for this site. 

My stance is I have enough liability in ensuring I can locate the buildings accurately according to their design.  They need to be clear on the buildings locations on the site. 

We are not designers.  We are Surveyors and are not allowed to design.  By us placing these buildings on the site we are affectively outside our proffesional liability and have moved into the designers role.
 

The way I see it, you have two issues, and neither is surveyor liability unless you proceed to stake out a 1400' x 800' site solely from a 70' control line set by questionable methods.

The first issue is one of licensed practice, professional responsibility, and performance.  As you pointed out, you are not licensed to perform building or site design, so the matter of insufficient information provided to determine the placement of the buildings on the site is one of design liability.  If the building designs were supplied to the site engineer with insufficient data within themselves, that is a matter between the site engineer and the architect and has nothing to do with the surveyor at all.  If the building plans were sufficiently complete but the information was simply not properly indicated on the site plans, that's the civil engineer's failing by issuing an incomplete design.  If you take it upon yourself to attempt to complete that design, it is still design liability, but as unlicensed practice, not as surveying.

In short, the civil engineer is the only one licensed to prepare the site plans.  It is his/her professional responsibility to ensure that the plans are complete.  He/she has failed in the performance of supplying plans adequate for the construction of the proposed facilities.  The engineer must supply enough information for you to fully determine the relationship of the building locations to the project boundary and to one anothe.

The second issue is one of inadequate control to provide positional certainty adequate for the placement of buildings and other improvements on the site.  If the buildings are no longer than the control line, the distance to the furthest building corner is no farther away than the control line is long, the relationship of the building locations to the project boundary is not critical, and you have a distance check along the control line that is within the tolerances of the building construction, the control may be adequate, but probably not.

You said the points were fly-tied.  Assuming your local terminology is near the same as mine, that means that the points were each single tied from another control point or each from a separate point, possibly with a repeated angle, but possibly not having even that little bit of redundancy.  They may have been observed to a prism pole or a tripod mounted target.  Coordinates may have been established by a single RTK observation.  fly tie can mean any of these things to me.  For site control for anything beyond rough grade, any of these methods is inadequate.

Knowing nothing of the control these 2 points were established from, you know that they could easily each have a positional error of up to 0.03' if the field crew was moderately careful, and that the centering error for each is independent of the other, resulting in a control line that could be short, long, or skewed by several hundredths over that 70'.  That does not take into account the quality of the control they were located from or the quality of the observations made to locate them, each of which will add another factor of uncertainty.  If your 70' control line is neither long nor short, but is skewed by just 0.05' in that 70', that translates into a relative positional error with respect to the site of 1.00' over the 1400' site if you did nothing to add other sources of error.

The site designer worked from a pre-construction site survey.  There is positional data associated with that survey that they must give you.  That would be in the form of dimensions to and along the project boundary, coordinates on the project boundary corners that can be related to building corners, and/or to broader project control.  They would be wise to provide that data subject to you verifying it prior to relying on it, but they need to provide it in order to make the plans usable.

Even engineers should be expected to understand error propogation.

If you get inadequate cooperation from the engineer, explain these issues to the prime contractor and/or to the person representing the main client.  Alternately, if the people associated with the project who are in a position to insist on cooperation from the engineer can't understand the issues and decline to do anything to help, take the issue to the State Licensing Board.  Sometimes a call from the Board's staff engineer works to educate one on proper practice so that a project can move forward and no formal complaint needs to be made.

I'll weigh in as an engineer and approach it as I might issue site plan documents for construction.  I have had many industrial clients (and some Fed) with plant grid layout derived from hand drafted plans prepared in the 1950s.  Our survey crew might (or might not) come off the old control or use an assumed control, depending on how quickly it can be found or if the plant is even still using it.  That would likely be using total station and NOT GPS.  Recovery of property lines might not be part of the civil's scope.  We always try to find them, but state in the contract that we are not doing a boundary survey for topo work and will work in a local coordinate system usless otherwise directed by CONTRACT.

A contractor's request for SPC with site plans prepared on an assumed coordinate, offset base line or plant control would be met with a simple NO, use the control the site plans provided; here a grid base line. Have you even checked the provided local control to verify if (or if not) a propagation error is present and preventing you from staking off of it?

My advice would be to spend a 1/2 day verifying control, plotting the building stakeout corners in CAD and issue "a going once, going twice" RFI with the proposed coordinates.  Construction contracts usually provide for a defined time of response to any RFI by the Owner or their rep.  Here a Federal job?  Yes you will get an answer, but you have to ask the question in the form of an RFI.

Based from experience, make sure the firm designed the site from a recent as-built survey that ties in the boundary and or control base line and hasn't been designed using what they've been able to assemble for the site by themselves, such as using old construction plans. You are ultimately responsible in locating the structures on site.


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