41–50 of 126 posts
I feel that the title is misleading. Caltrans faulted by practicing terrible project management. If someone underbids the next contractor by $250 million on a job they've never done before, you're supposed to politely laugh them out of the room. Edit: for the benefit of those now arriving, the title and link have been changed.
caltrans and california gov ... just way too corrupted
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really love the progress bar on the top of the page. I wish more long form articles were like that.
Lucky for you, it's baked in to every modern web browser in existence - just look to the right for a built in progress bar that even lets you click to a particular section of the article based on it's progress.
What a fiasco. This story just keeps getting bigger and bigger. So many lessons to be learned about a flawed bidding and construction process. And from what I see, it's immune to politics. No party can take the higher ground. Public sector graft and private sector lying, cheating and thieving, both need to be stopped and big, small government, or running government like a business doesn't seem to help. Instead, worki…
It seems like the author is trying to make the assertion that all sorts of poor decisions were made - it'd be helpful to have a comparison to other similar projects, in order to make that determination. Otherwise, these could be completely routine issues for all I know (as a layperson). If you took any software engineering project, and described it by detailing all the mistakes in isolation, it would look like a comp…
The weld is really the key difference here. For welds to be structurally sound, and for them to work in the calculations that have been performed for the structural integrity of the structure, they have to meet a certain standard. These welds didn't. The company said that they themselves would state whether those standards were met. So this would be more akin to a computer chip manufacturer, where every Nth chip is f…
It's nice to see software engineering practices being backported to more conservative and stagnant forms of engineering. 8)
WTF... I know a lot of us here are contractors. Tell me the last time you got paid MORE because you weren't doing your job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really love the progress bar on the top of the page. I wish more long form articles were like that.
Lucky for you, it's baked in to every modern web browser in existence - just look to the right for a built in progress bar that even lets you click to a particular section of the article based on it's progress.
My comment was specifically about It's about the fact that the bar is at the top of the page. It's a completely different user experience than the standard scroll bar.
I feel that the title is misleading. Caltrans faulted by practicing terrible project management. If someone underbids the next contractor by $250 million on a job they've never done before, you're supposed to politely laugh them out of the room. Edit: for the benefit of those now arriving, the title and link have been changed.
Most of the time, you can't, at least not for government projects. Because of procurement laws and rules (designed, among other things, to allegedly be transparent and to provide accountability), a government body is required to accept the lowest bid from the contractor that met all of the requirements. Seeking an "experienced contractor" is usually seen as code for "we want to use our friends" by a skeptical legislative body, so things like tenure and past projects can't be considered.
I feel that the title is misleading. Caltrans faulted by practicing terrible project management. If someone underbids the next contractor by $250 million on a job they've never done before, you're supposed to politely laugh them out of the room. Edit: for the benefit of those now arriving, the title and link have been changed.
>As the project wound down, ZPMC reaped tangible rewards, sharing with ABF more than $250 million in cost overruns and incentive payments.
It is a little hard to understand how serious it all really is. It sounds like inspections were quite rigorous. Past half way down the article, there's two pictures, one of the internals of a box girder, and right below it, a 10mm crack in a tack weld. I mean, the scale differential of the two images is amazing. I can't imagine cracks in the tack welds make a bit of difference in a bridge like that. The bridge looks incredible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really love the progress bar on the top of the page. I wish more long form articles were like that.
Lucky for you, it's baked in to every modern web browser in existence - just look to the right for a built in progress bar that even lets you click to a particular section of the article based on it's progress.
In this case, sacbee doesn't seem to have any comments at all (good for them!) but I don't read them often enough to have that fact memorized.