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8.18.04 Inspectors watch crews waste time The morning of July 15 was cool and dry, but the Rupert Construction Co. workers were just leaning on their shovels at 108th and Fort Streets. City inspector Kyle Livingston sees the wasted time from poor coordination on job sites. "Everybody is standing around, making money, but doing nothing," said Matt Rupert III, son of the company's owner and a member of the crew. It's times like these that city inspectors can get as frustrated as a motorist in a bottleneck. Inspectors are at ground zero. They see firsthand the confusion and wasted time on construction jobs. Rupert Construction Co. is a subcontractor on the Fort Street project. The workers were waiting for WBE, the general contractor, to bring concrete from its plant in Valley, a half-hour away. Rupert complained that this wasn't the first time work has been held up by a lack of concrete, which construction workers sometimes call "mud." "A four-hour pour takes eight hours," he said. "We can't get done with no mud." The work had been slow all morning and earlier that week. Workers and the city inspector, Terry Rial, said the driveways and a right turn lane could have been done days before if concrete had arrived faster. WBE put up a concrete plant for this job. It's a giant red castle-like structure northwest of Fort and 120th Streets. Rial said it has been dormant all year. "The most frustrating thing is poor coordination as to what everybody is doing," Rial said. He went to 120th Street, where one of the workers told him the crew had failed to lay a pipe under the road far enough. "We're six feet short under that slab," he said. "How'd that happen?" Rial asked. "I don't know," came the reply. Workers had to tunnel under the road by hand to get to where the pipe stopped, then fill it back in with concrete. Several hours wasted. Rial headed back to 108th Street. He noticed the paving crew had put a curb cut for wheelchairs in the wrong spot. A stake for the center was off to one side. "It says right here -- center line," Rial read off the stake. "I can't read that good," Rupert joked, then added, "It's OK, it's still soft." Reshaping the curb didn't take long, but it was extra work. Fort is not the only job site with confusion. A few days before, City Inspector Kyle Livingston was tugged from one end of the 72nd Street project to the other. Shortly before 9 a.m. he got a call from the Metropolitan Utilities District crew putting in a hydrant near 72nd and Spring -- workers had unexpectedly hit a couple of storm sewer pipes. Livingston peered down into the hole, then consulted his road plans. They showed only one active storm sewer pipe there. The other must have been abandoned, but which pipe was which - no one knew. "Just another little surprise," Livingston said. The M.U.D. crew members decided to work around both pipes even though that would slow them down. Livingston then noticed that a subcontractor crew had started pouring the base for a traffic signal at 72nd and Grover Streets. They had failed to notify him of the pour, he said as he hurried over. The concrete splattered down the 18-foot hole. It stopped just short of the top. The foreman let out a string of curses. "I ordered for a 20-foot hole. There shoulda been a pile of concrete here," he said pointing to the ground next to the hole. The crew had to wait a bit for more concrete to show up before they could finish the job. Even more frustrating for them was that they already had put the pole up once and were re-doing the job. Someone had noticed the signals were going to be too high and too far off the road -- the location for the base had been mistakenly staked out on a hill. |
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