This morning the Scouts did a Basil Read car wash, Basil Read being the Airport Contractor, and some other cars. Washing and cleaning 30 cars inside and out we raised over £350 in 4½ hours towards the Scouts Trip to Ascension later this month. It was hard work; and I spent most of my time keeping records of who had paid, what order the cars came in and then moving them around to get the clean ones out and the next dirty ones in.
Luckily (luckily is, I think, the correct word) it all went ok. We ended up with 4 floor mats out of someone's car, but I'm sure we'll find where they belong. An hour and a half in, one of the first people called by to see how we were doing and we discovered that somehow his truck had been missed! The two either side had been done and the overspray from the hose made it look like his had too, but it hadn't. We asked for another 10 minutes just to 'finish it off' luckily it took him 15 minutes to finish his coffee and when he came back we were nearly done!
Last week, despite being a short week, was a looonnngggg weeek. It feels like I did a full weeks work in 3 days. I think part of this is that I had probably the most stressful incident of my career. Without going into too many details someone has built a bridge over a highway ditch to access their building plot. They have planning consent, but they didn't get highway consent. I had 3 days to consider the matter before making a recommendation to committee on Monday on whether to approve the retrospective application or not. Looking at the design that was submitted to planning it was pretty simple, in the sense that it looked like a bridge, but very few structural details and no structural calculations were included. Despite this I calculated that the overall design was ok as it was one of these 'over engineered' designs.
I then delved a little deeper and started to discover some more things, like they didn't actually use reinforcing steel as it wasn't available, they just used slightly larger normal steel. Hmmm, divide strength by 2, touch and go, but ok. Then I checked the depth of the slab, it's only 80% of what was shown on the drawings, hmmm, recalulate, not a huge difference, but starting to not look strong enough for the big lorries. Then I realised this normal steel wasn't ribbed like rebar is, but was smooth. Hmmm, that isn't allowed, how do I calculate it? Hmmm, change the way I'm doing the calculation, make up a new system based from first principles on how to assess the strength of the steel. Hmmm... not good.
I knew that recommending that the bridge was demolished was not going to go down well. In the end I've gone through the detail and I think I can recommend approval with a few alterations as conditions and a 5T weight limit. But, I'm not saying it's safe, no way!
Bearing in mind that, before Wednesday, the last time I designed a Concrete Slab was at Uni (10 years ago), and even then I hated Concrete Design and ALL my projects used a Steel Frame!
Anyway an easy weekend doing nothing now, except that it's already 5:40 on Saturday!
No comments:
Post a Comment