Half-baked designs seem especially prevalent in underground construction, as I know firsthand. During the past 45 years, my company, Tri-State Drilling, has drilled tens of thousands of shafts into the ground. We know that no matter how many test borings or investigations are done, you simply can't foresee the tremendous variety and bizarre combinations of variables in the subsurface. Let me give you an example. We were asked to install drilled shaft foundations for a large power transmission tower in the Midwest. Drilled shafts are great foundations for these towers. They're relatively straightforward to design, and we've installed hundreds of
Last month, details of a federal probe into alleged environmental data fraud by a Texas laboratory were splashed across the front pages of the national press (ENR October 2 issue p. 12). Prosecutors said the possible faulty data by Intertek Testing Services Environmental Laboratories Inc. could affect thousands of waste sites. The story didn't have any particular impact on me. I don't own a lab company, and I don't work for one. But as a long-time business consultant in the environmental services industry, it pains me to see some of the ill-informed or wrong-headed reactions to this incident. Some impressions
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