Plumbing

San Francisco constructing officers buried their heads within the concrete — together with gasoline strains

“Quis Custodiet ipsos Custodes?” Juvenal wrote this 1,800 years ago: “Who will take care of the guards?”

“The fox not only guards the chicken coop, the fox has also opened a KFC franchise.” My writing partner Benjamin Wachs and I wrote this just 11 years ago specifically with reference to San Francisco. And you know, both of them feel painfully relevant in the moment.

On April 21, Mission Local released a report showing that during the city’s thousands of mandatory seismic retrofits, an unknown number of gas lines were improperly encased in new concrete beams, a component of a foundation – with the potential for “catastrophic” failures conceals. in the words of the city’s full-time plumber inspector in 2017.

This situation was identified by on-site building inspectors and submitted to the building inspection department five years ago – and inconsistent enforcement, nonsensical processes and possible emerging consequences were discussed in detail in the department’s structural subcommittee four years ago.

No action was taken. Worse still, the problem was buried with those pipes.

The then chief construction inspector Patrick O’Riordan wrote a dictum to the construction inspectors in 2017, expressly ordering them not to “cease work” when a gas pipe is encased with a new concrete foundation.

O’Riordan – now interim director of the entire department – also directed construction inspectors who encountered such an issue to inform the plumbing department in 2017. But a source in the plumbing department says that building inspectors who actually followed this rule and did so “were posted. They made noise and that was not the right thing to do. “

In the last few months the building authority – according to our reports and others in the media – has promised that it will “own” this situation. But its representatives have also minimized it, obfuscated it, and made bizarre and misleading statements in public forums.

So we should be skeptical that the department that raised a problem five years ago decided to silence its internal critics and minimize things – and they are still minimizing – is getting to the bottom of it. Especially if it were an indictment against elements of the current leadership of the department.

In short, we instruct the guards to guard the guards. Watch how it works.

A gas pipe with yellow tape around which a new foundation is being built.

During a June 7 supervisory board hearing about gas pipes surrounded by beams, Department of Building Inspection officials said some of the stupidest things.

First, they have no idea how many mandatory retrofits a gas line can have in a new leveling board (and the department’s practical dandy estimate that only a third of the 4,000 projects completed required a new leveling board was based on a “survey” – what means that these are hardly any hard data to extrapolate from).

But what is even more worrying is that they have no idea what the condition of the pipes that are now buried under the concrete are like. The installation code would require them to be “jacketed” – essentially protected in a hard, larger pipe. But officials from the San Francisco Department of Construction claimed at that hearing that merely “wrapping” these pipes – which is exactly what it sounds like – is a “legal practice.”

Well that was a bloody thing to say. First of all, as code expert and former Santa Clara oversight plumbing inspector Douglas Hansen explained at the hearing, this is dubiously sufficient. As he noted, wrapping a pipe is supposed to protect against corrosion – but not against structural problems like those that might occur in an earthquake (or even over the years, earthquake or not).

Consider this example: wearing a knitted hat can keep you warm. However, it would not be advisable to put one on instead of a crash helmet and ride the motorcycle. These are drastically different items designed to perform drastically different tasks.

But wait, there’s more: the Department of Building Inspection’s claims that pipe wrapping is an “approved method” are not the same – such approvals are not derived from a wand or royal declaration. Rather, it is codified in an administrative bulletin.

Such a bulletin does not exist. It was noteworthy that the building authority fell into the bait trap before our municipal supervisory authorities to use the term “recognized method”. Especially when the chairwoman of the June 7th hearing, Myrna Melgar, was on the building inspectorate – and knows damn well the need for an administrative bulletin. And that it’s not about wrapping gas pipes.

But wait, there’s more: without an administrative bulletin that defines exactly what the heck wrapping is and what the heck you can do, almost anything is possible. So the stories of the construction inspectors of pipes that have been wrapped with tape, electrical tape, construction paper, or nothing at all, play a big role. You can wrap your pipes in Bazooka Joe comics and, as long as a construction inspector doesn’t make any noise, fair.

And remember what happens to building inspectors who make noise.

Nine days after a sobering appearance in front of the supervisory board, it was left to the building authorities to explain this situation to their own building supervision commission.

This, too, was a strange exhibition.

O’Riordan, for example, said that gas pipe wrapping was an “accepted practice” in his 24 years in the department and probably well before that.

The building inspectors in San Francisco – and maybe the building inspectors everywhere – have a constant joke about what happens when a contractor is informed they’re doing something wrong: They say, “I’ve been doing this for years.” So it was strange that the supervisor was essentially using this line.

O’Riordan also called the wrapping of gas pipes the “industry standard”. Very interesting – but it’s not in the regulations the Department of Building Inspection is supposed to be enforcing.

And the codes for wrapping these pipes are clear. If the building inspectorate wanted to change it and see the packaging as an “approved method”, they could have created an administrative bulletin. It didn’t. Instead, anyone wishing to wrap a gas pipeline and / or run it through a foundation could have tried Administrative Bulletin 005 and sought approval for an alternate process that would have been inconsistent with the regulations on a case-by-case basis.

That didn’t happen.

Separate and apart from so-called “industry standards” – those are the rules. These are the codes. And there’s a reason we have building codes in this and every town, and not just troops of men walking around saying, “That’s how I used to do it”.

When construction inspectors in San Francisco saw gas lines running through foundations, they passed their concerns on to management. They were told not to “stop working” – and according to several sources, they were punished for pushing the issue forward.

That’s how it went here. But not everywhere: When Los Angeles construction inspectors discovered the same problem with mandatory seismic retrofitting in that city in 2016, the issue was taken seriously.

This document is the entry point for 12,147 retrofits in Los Angeles and 8,801 approvals to date. And you will find that Section 5i states, “Gas pipelines are not permitted in slope beams unless approved by the Gas Company.” If such approval is granted, applicant must complete 5j, “Possible Pipe Intrusion Information”.

In San Francisco right now we have no idea what’s buried in these new beam foundations. There isn’t a line on a checklist that explicitly asks if a gas pipe went through it. All we know is that the inspector who may have done 12-15 inspections in a day and knew or did not know or cared about the differences between wrappers and wrappers – and may or may not have been on the rise – marks, that everything is fine.

“The determination to add this to the proof sheet was based on feedback from our field workers,” said Jeff Napier, spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Building and Security. “Existing gas lines from the utility were at times in areas where new beams were installed.” These lines must be laid without the gas company ‘s approval.

“This often resulted in construction delays as the utilities did not allow their gas lines to penetrate the concrete beams. In order to avoid these construction delays, attention was drawn to this problem in the planning phase. ”

This is not a perfect document and the Los Angeles construction division is not a perfect entity. But a document like this would have solved so many problems in San Francisco.

This would nip the problem of gas pipes in foundations in the bud. It would have given everyone a clear and unambiguous record of what was among the thousands of mandatory upgrades. And it would have eliminated the month-long delays that arise when PG&E is unexpected and involved in the final stages of a project rather than at the beginning as planned.

San Francisco Gas Pipeline FoundationA gas pipe in a new concrete foundation

In short, we would have avoided the fine mess we are in.

And more generally than the problem of gas pipes in concrete, civil engineers have been complaining since 2016 about the overall shabby construction of the city’s thousands of mandatory soft-story projects – by engineers who may not even have visited the site. They have also raised concerns about poor construction and lax or non-existent inspections by the city. But the warnings of the engineers were rejected by the building authorities for years.

Now that this is a newspaper story, however, the building authorities are more receptive. And that’s great. But five years have passed since engineers first hoisted that red flag, and thousands of projects have been completed at the Interregnum.

We can still regret this long period of hindrance and denial. As Miami area construction officials can easily tell you, better avoiding a calamity than retrospectively piecing together how it happened – and what was missed.

“I don’t tend to shine and brighten the Los Angeles sign, but this is a formidable document,” says Lonnie Haughton, a contractor and building codes expert who has several long stories about the San Francisco Building Department and its building codes .

“The fact that all of this work has been done here with no such document, no administrative bulletins, no guidance, and no clear focus is a black mark on the city and county of San Francisco.”

It didn’t have to be like that. But it was. And it can stay that way – as long as we continue to give the guards the supervision of the guards.

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Joe was born in San Francisco, grew up in the Bay Area and attended UC Berkeley. He never left. Your Humble Narrator was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly and Senior … More by Joe Eskenazi from 2007-2015

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