Too Big to Fall

By Barry B. LePatner; with special comments by Hon. James L. Oberstar, Chairman, U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure; forward by Robert Puentes, Sr Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institution

Foster Publishing, New York, in association with University Press of New England to be published Nov 2010

The author, Barry LePatner, is a well-known construction lawyer whose firm offers construction project management as well as forensic services. He authored another book entitled Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America’s Trillion Dollar Construction Industry, 2008.

The current book is scheduled for release on November 9, 2010, a few days after the 2010 Congressional elections. This may be significant in that the rise in government spending and record-breaking deficits are a key issue in this election. Mr. LePatner’s book appears to look for solutions in much greater federal control by larger federal bureaucracies placed in the role of deciding where large amounts of money should be spent by the government to inspect and test transportation infrastructure and also plan where new facilities should be erected.

The reason for this vast increase in federal government control and financing, according to the book, is that local governments have neither the expertise nor the money to perform the necessary supervision.

Mr. LePatner also faults the present federal bureaucracies for lack of proper oversight, and then suggests that the solution to this is the addition of more federal bureaucracy which will somehow be more successful because the legislation authorizing its creation will so state.

Having said all of that, this book is well written and contains important information that should be read and understood by structural engineers as well as others in our society. Our infrastructure is under-funded and its importance is not understood or acknowledged, neither by the public nor by our representatives in government.

How we deal with that fact and with the fact of limited financial resources is important to consider. Too Big to Fall deals with that question and should be read by all of us; especially so to our profession, the engineers who design the structures upon which our society depends.

It will make us aware of the problems that exist, although its analysis may be superficial in some respects, in that it is clearly political, and it is biased to reflect the interest and limitations of its author.

It is superficial in that it uses gross figures for the number of bridges and the extrapolated costs for maintenance. Only a small percentage of the thousands of old bridges cited could experience a failure that would result in numerous deaths and major disruption of vital traffic. The I-35 West bridge collapse in Minnesota was caused not only by age related deterioration but, primarily, to a design flaw, to changes in level of usage, and to the construction of modifications in conjunction with continued usage that added unacceptable loading additions. The book’s description of this scenario is interesting, but no plausible reason is given as to how all of those decisions would have been improved if left to some group of bureaucrats in Washington D.C. The premise of the book is that the latter would simply have recourse to an unlimited amount of money to be able to cover all eventualities. Anyone who has witnessed the quality of judgment that comes from the “magic kingdom inside the beltway” would only laugh at that supposition.

This book correctly states that much of the construction industry is inefficient when you look at cost overruns, the number of change orders, and design and construction errors that require costly fixes. The solution presented in the book is, in addition to more federal bureaucracy, to utilize more modern technology. Mr. LePatner compares construction with airplane manufacturing with its greater reliability testing prior to and during production. He fails, however, to note the difference between the control that can be exercised by a single manufacturer of thousands of identical products with the construction of each unique bridge or building, which is produced by a group consisting of an architect, structural and MEP engineers, an individual owner, general and many sub-contractors, a unique set of jurisdictional planners, plan checkers and inspectors. Unfortunately, here, where the real problems of breakdowns in communication and differing biases exist, nothing is discussed or even acknowledged.

Therefore, while this book is important to read, rather than concluding that the only way to fix the problems with our infrastructure is to increase the centralization and remoteness of control that has largely created the problem, we should look at why the architects, engineers and contractors cannot understand each other and work as an integrated team to design what needs to be built, and construct what has been designed to eliminate inefficiency, cost overruns and mistakes in this industry.

Reviewed by Richard L. Hess, A.E., S.E., SECB, F.ASCE, CSI, CCCA, Consulting structural engineer in Southern California for over twenty-five years, specializing in structural retrofit of existing and historical buildings and supports for non-building structures and non-structural elements. Prior experience: fifteen years industrial and commercial facilities engineering, real estate development, and construction management. Past President of the Structural Engineers Association of Southern California and Chair, Existing Buildings Committee. He is a member the STRUCTURE magazine Editorial Board.

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