But I'm not.
In my part-time gig as a building inspector, I review plans. Recently, we have received permit applications for two pre-engineered steel buildings. The way those work is, the steel frame and everything from the column bases up is designed by engineers working for the steel building manufacturer. They calculate all the loads that will be applied to the bases of the columns (vertical down, vertical uplift due to wind, and horizontal due to wind or seismic). A local engineer then designs the foundation to resist those loads.
The foundation for one of them (the larger one, a warehouse that will be 60' x 100') was designed by an engineer we don't particularly like or trust, and I had a LOT of questions about some details in his foundation. The other, smaller building (45' x 60') had the foundation designed by a different engineer ... but the site/civil engineering was done by engineer #1. It turns out that became significant.
I was talking to the boss this morning about the smaller project, because engineer #1 told the owner he had submitted new plans to me on February 24, and I didn't receive anything from him on the 24th ... nor on the 22nd, 23rd, 25th, or 26th. In the course of my chat with the boss, though, I realized that building #2 had started out as a wood frame, two-story structure and then changed to a one-story, pre-engineered shell to save money. I had never looked closely at the new foundation drawings because we generally trust the engineer who drew them.
So this afternoon I pulled them out and looked at them. And some of the details looked ... er, um ... shall we say "familiar"? So I pulled out the plans for building #1 and looked at the foundation details sheet.
IDENTICAL.
Engineer #1 didn't design a foundation, he just scanned and reprinted the details from engineer #2 and re-printed them with his own title block. Aside from the being blatantly illegal ... building #1 is higher as well as wider than building #2. The horizontal, lateral loads at the base of the columns are higher ... by a factor of TEN!
I really don't want to believe that a licensed PE (Professional Engineer) would do such a thing -- but the proof is there in front of our faces. We haven't decided yet how to respond to this. I want to light him up and report him to the state licensing board, but the town attorney probably won't let me do that (for political reasons, naturally). We have a meeting with the town engineer in the morning to get another opinion before we start making phone calls.
I thought I had seen a lot of skullduggery in my career, but this I think is a new low. "Scurrilous" doesn't even begin to describe it.
