For many years, insurers have promoted the benefits of mediation as a means of resolving disputes between a design firm and its clients. We recently surveyed senior professionals at 250 design firms and found that no fewer than 40% of respondents who had used mediation to resolve a dispute considered the outcome unsuccessful. Is our confidence in mediation misplaced? Have we oversold its benefits? I don’t believe so. Having seen thousands of design professionals looking down the barrel of professional liability claims, I can attest that the vast majority of disputants who go to mediation ultimately achieve a settlement. The
Your editorial (“The Gulf Oil-Spill Disaster Is Engineering’s Shame,”) is an insult and assault on the engineering profession. ENR should retract the editorial because it misplaces responsibility, cites an honorable profession as something far less than deserved, makes an outlandish connection between disasters such as Three Mile Island, the Challenger, Hurricane Katrina and the BP Oil Spill and the engineering profession as a whole. It also indicts a profession with only a slight mention of what the engineering profession has contributed to the world’s society. Your lame point that somehow “engineers have to help each other protect against corporate power
The federal government is re-drawing floodplain maps under a deadline that should be pushed back to allow local governments time to evaluate and fix levees. The haste is undue, and the cost of going too fast could be high. Let me explain why. Photo: Andrea Booher/FEMA Nearly one-third of the nation is at risk for flooding, says the National Weather Service. More than 100,000 miles of levees crisscross our country, ranging from sophisticated systems of concrete floodwalls to simple piles of dirt and sand. Each year, millions of homeowners and businesses rely on this under-resourced daisy chain to protect against
Raising the Quality Of The ‘Integration’ Debate The A/E/C industry will benefit greatly from Nadine M. Post’s recent article “Integrated Project Delivery Boosters Ignore Many Flashing Red Lights”. The article raises the quality of the debate about integration’s benefits and how best to achieve them. Integrated project delivery (IPD) offers a variety of advantages in aligning the interests of the parties engaged in delivering a project. Its various forms rely heavily on building trust and cooperation among participants while engaging the general contractor (GC) and key subcontractors earlier in the design process. However, very similar results are achieved on traditional,
They’ve already started recovering the corpses of oil-poisoned dolphins, sea turtles and birds from the troubled waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Another casualty in this slowly unfolding catastrophe is the reputation of the engineering profession—and not just petroleum and oil-drilling platform engineers, who certainly have much to regret about the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The disaster affects the reputation of all engineers. Photo: AP/Wideworld What’s happening now in the Gulf is another failure for a profession already deeply afflicted with an identity crisis and which questions its role in U.S. society. Part of the problem stems from much-publicized disasters of
All it takes is one: one off-color joke sent from a company e-mail account or one hotheaded e-mail transmitted without a thought about how it could later be used to devastate the company’s side of a legal case, even if the e-mail or its author is entirely unrelated to the subject of the litigation. In the ever-expanding world of electronic documents and communication, businesses need to take proactive steps to prevent the creation of damaging documents, and they have to be prepared in the event litigation does arise by implementing an e-data management system before litigation. Advanced information technology has
ENR Clarifies Key Issues Unresolved in BIM, IPD I wanted to express my gratitude for the series on building information modeling and integrated project delivery that Nadine Post delivered through the pages of ENR, most recently in “Integrated-Project-Delivery Boosters Ignore Many Flashing Red Lights”. Post brings a level of discernment that was lacking in other attempts to cover these complex, interrelated subjects. The primary difference between this approach and the others is a willingness to address specific areas in which these tools and forms of agreement require further development. The credibility of ENR and the objectivity of the articles encourage
SANT Every year brings a sad anniversary to my family. Early one March morning in 1986, I received a call from my weeping mother saying that Sandra, my younger sister, had just been involved in a serious auto accident. We didn’t know if she would live through the night. I took the next flight to Boston and rushed to the hospital. I did not make it in time. My last goodbye was to my beautiful young sister’s cold and broken body. And 40,000 times each year, families make such heartbreaking farewells to other crash victims. The drunk driver who killed
Offshore Legal Relief Costly and Unlikely Missing from your otherwise clear reporting in “Chinese Drywall Cases Mount” is the fact that getting a legal judgment against a foreign corporation and/or manufacturer is far different from actually collecting the judgment against them. ENR should cover this issue to help homeowners manage unrealistic expectations as well as help plaintiffs judge how much money they should spend in court to get a potentially hollow judgment. When the pockets empty out at the top (in this case, Taishan Gypsum), the trickle-down liability, finger-pointing and collateral lawsuits could be endless. William a. Tolbert Chairman and
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