Storm Water Thoughts 2014

Another year has passed and storm water compliance has been moving along with a few new things finally getting established or standardized. Truthfully not that much has changed, the prime directive is to keep crap out of the storm drain system...all else is in support of this objective.

As an example of CGP interpretation, any project that has a NOI for 3 consecutive months within the reporting year must submit an Annual Report. Interpretation any project that has been active for 2 months and 1 day will be required to submit an Annual Report. There still appears to be some confusion with who is authorized to act as the LRP or Authorized Signatory. It is fairly straight forward, if you have an ownership interest in the project you can be the LRP, if you have significant signatory authority for an organization you can be the LRP or Authorized Signatory. If you are the Construction Manager for the project you do not typically have the legal right to be either LRP or Authorized Signatory. A Contractor can be LRP if they have an ownership interest in the project, or they are authorized in writing by the Army Corp of Engineers for a specific Corp project.

SWPPP's

There appear to be a lot of small companies trying to get into the SWPPP writing business. There are also a good number civil engineering firms that try develop SWPPPs. For the most part I have found that these SWPPPs are less than adequate for several reasons. It appears that the people writing them have never been in field and wouldn't know BMP if it hit them sideways. The second is this concerted effort by certain firms to play with the Risk Analysis to ensure a project is listed as a Risk Level 1, gaming the system. It is my belief that they are doing their clients a great disservice by these practices, e.g. fudging the LS numbers on a significantly sloped site by just evaluating the pads, especially given that the project scope is major slope reinforcement because of slippage. Or tweaking the R Factor by not including all of the project phases, thereby reducing the Risk Level, at least until a COI is required for the next phase. There are times when this is appropriate, e.g. the final design or site disposition is not completed or certain...although a tentative schedule could be made. Or a design change or other significant addition or reduction in the projects scope/size.

Inspections

Over the past couple of years we have managed inspections on over a hundred projects, half of these Risk Level 2. As contract inspectors, we use only certified QSP's, and we have mentored many contractors to the point where they were able to take over the inspections once they had attained QSP credentials for themselves. Recently I have seen several cases where certain inspection services are bidding projects which allow their licensed QSPs to visit a site either every 2 weeks or once a month to pencil whip the inspection reports. Although in theory this practice is acceptable as the CGP allows that an unlicensed inspector who is adequately trained and under the direct supervision of a QSP may perform these tasks. The term adequately trained is far from clearly defined or enforced. I understand when a contractor employs a QSP, who in turn has the authority to train and direct others to perform inspections, BMP installation and maintenance. But I don't understand how an outside QSP has the authority to do anything except inspections given that those performing the tasks are not under their direct control. I believe that if contract inspectors are hired to perform inspections, that is what they should do and any deviation from this requirement is potentially compromising the integrity of the program. As an example, a contract QSP Inspector is tasked and is accountable for identifying potential issues on a project site and communicating those issues to the contractor. It is now clearly up to the contractor to implement the fixes required by the inspection report. But if you are delegating 3 out 4 inspections to a marginally trained contractor, who is to be held responsible for either the inspections or the fixes. I ask the question is, why would a QSP in good standing potentially risk their credibility and their license participating in this kind of charade. Perhaps that is because there has been less than significant over site or consequences for these behaviors, which is a shame because it compromises the integrity of the program overall.

Why we need to inspect...for a copy of the article "Inspector General"

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