No steel on the pier yet – but boulders were put in place last week to shore up the natural beach that was formed.

By Pepper Parr

BURLINGTON, ON   June 1, 2012   It was a painful evening for our civic administration when they informed council about the problems surrounding the installation of a turbine on the Pier.  Turns out that no one even knew about the availability of a process called “net metering”, a procedure we could be using tomorrow that gets around all the nonsense and misunderstanding about the ability to send energy from the turbine to the electrical grid.

Council chose to just walk from the whole thing – foolish, irresponsible and bad stewardship but unless someone decides to revive the matter – that is a dead duck.  BurlingtonGreen, an organization not known for giving up easily, is expected to be back at Council June 11th and we will see what they can do.  The turbine is not over yet.

Geese know a good thing when they see it. Mini- beach formed on the west side of the pier will be shored up with large boulders that were delivered on Friday.

The other news about the Pier is the delay in getting fully tested steel to the fabricators so they can cut the plates of steel which are 7/8ths of an inch thick; 40 feet long and ten feet wide.  It has to be tested and the documentation that came with it has to be checked and if that’s a go – then the process of cutting the steel begins.

The sense at this point in time is that we will not see steel beams on the site until sometime in July and more likely late in the month at that.

As difficult and as embarrassing as all this is for the city administration they are not going to let this delay result in attempt to take short cuts to make up the lost time.  There will be some work done on what city manager Jeff Fielding calls,  schedule mitigation – looking for ways to shift work around and do tasks now that were scheduled for later in the construction process.

One such task is shoring up the western side of the pier site where a natural beach has formed.  This wasn’t a planned feature – just a small benefit that came our way and with this project the city will take every benefit it can get.

A flat bed truck delivered a load of large boulders that will be used to shore up the waters edge on the west side. Once the steel is tested, cutting will begin followed by welding and galvanizing.

Large boulders are being trucked in and will set down and create an edge to this natural beach area.  The work was done on one of those days when it wouldn’t have been possible to do much else on the site.

Staff believes that with the fifty four weeks left until Sound of Music 2013 they can get the job done.  That will call for several breaks weather wise and we may have had all the breaks we are going to get.  We had a very easy Winter and Spring was good to us for the most part.  That time was lost.

The one thing city hall is going to ensure doesn’t happen – no more screw ups because they didn’t know what was happening.  The city has two consultants in place to oversee and advise on what is being bought and ensuring that what is bought is thoroughly tested before it gets used.

The steel used for the beams that will form the deck of the pier has been a problem from the beginning.  I’m not competent to tell you what the problem was and it appears that many in the engineering department were in over their heads as well.  That is not going to happen this time around.

The city has brought in Mettko to oversee the testing and to ensure the testing done is thorough and complete. Bill Katsiroumpas, P.Eng. a Principal in the company and the Senior Project Manager on this task, explains what is being done:

The Quality Program is developed to ensure the quality of the work, thus protect the interest of the City of Burlington.  It essentially involves two parts, the Quality Control (QC) Program which is implemented by the Contractor and the Quality Assurance (QA) Program which is implemented by the Consultant.  The QC Program is specified in the Contract Document, while the QA Program is developed by the Consultant based on industry standards and experience.

With this kind of weather there wasn't going to be much work done on the Pier. We will need a great second half of July, August and September to get caught up. Prayers are acceptable at city hall..

The Quality Program is applied to all work components, in particular granular base and sub-base, concrete and steel.  In general, the Contractor is required by the specifications to perform QC tests in accordance with stipulated standards to demonstrate conformance. Some common standards are the American Society for Test Methods and Canadian Standards Association (ASTM and CSA).  Another component of the QC program requires that qualification certificates from the accredited institutions be provided for companies and individual performing work on the project, for example Canadian Institute of Steel Construction or the Canadian Welding Bureau.

The Consultant performs independent QA tests to ensure quality compliance.  The QA tests performed by the Consultants are approximately equal to 25% of the QC tests performed by the Contractor in accordance with the requirements of the stipulated standards. The Consultants also review and verify that the qualification certificates provided meet the requirements of the contract documents.

There is very little doubt that anything faulty is going to get through this kind of process.  And that explains a large part of why there is no steel with workmen bolting it all together on the deck of the pier in weather that was made for outdoor construction work.

It will get done and it will get done properly.

 

 

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