By JANELLE STECKLEIN
Herald-Banner Staff
May 28, 2008 02:56 pm
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County officials may have had advanced warning that the Hunt County Criminal Justice Center would have structural problems if certain things were not done prior to construction, a report released by Hunt County last week revealed.
And nobody can agree who is at fault with each party pointing the finger at someone else.
But a decision — apparently made by a whole slew of individuals including county officials — to ignore suggestions designed to prevent structural problems at the facility, may be the cause of most of the problems, several depositions reveal.
The facility’s architect, Norris Fletcher, acknowledges in his deposition that even before the Justice Center opened, there were already problems that included a large crack in the foundation.
In fact, problems may have existed as early as April 1999 — almost three years before the facility opened, according to a diary book kept by Fletcher.
On April 15, 1999, Fletcher notes he received a call from Terry Turner, the county’s construction manager on the project.
“Something is happening on jail,” the entry reads. “(Former County Judge Joe) Bobbitt may be in trouble.”
Fletcher said he does not recall what the entry meant, but attorneys say the notation came shortly after the county had received two different geo-technical reports.
The geo-technical reports were designed to educate the county officials on the suitability of the land designated for the Justice Center and explain to county officials how to build a structurally-sound building on that land.
“As previously indicated, highly active clay soils were encountered at the boring locations, and shallow foundations supported on these clays could be subject to movements (heave and settlement) due to the moisture fluctuations in these soils. ... We recommend the use of cast-in-place concrete underreamed drilled shafts to transfer foundation loads to the deeper shaley clay soils,” according to a report released by the county’s initial geo-technical engineer Terracon.
The Terracon report was missing from the county’s jail files when the Herald-Banner initially went looking for it in 2007.
“Due to the highly active nature of the existing clays, treatment of the building pad will be required to reduce potential floor movements to acceptable levels for grade-supported slabs. Select fill in conjunction with water pressure injection of the underlying subgrade soils is recommended at this site.”
If the report isn’t followed, geologists warned, movements as much as six or seven inches could occur.
“Due to the highly active nature of the soils at this site, we recommend a combination of select fill and water pressure injection of the subgrade to reduce movement potential ...”
The basic purpose of water injections is to pre-swell the expansive clay soils beneath the facility so the clays would lose some of their expansive qualities, experts say.
However Fletcher, the architect, Bobbitt and current County Commissioner Ralph Green apparently had discussions about water injection at various points, and acknowledged Bobbitt wasn’t particularly comfortable with the proposal.
Fletcher said Bobbitt was concerned with Terracon’s report.
“It called for water injection and he (Bobbitt) didn’t particularly like water injection,” Fletcher explained during his deposition.
The reasons, Fletcher said, were that it took too much time, made too much of a mess and cost too much.
By skipping the water injection process, Bobbitt learned he could save the county about $125,000 and have the jail completed on schedule, Bobbitt said during a separate deposition.
So Bobbitt decided to bring in a second geo-technical firm — ADJ — to get a second opinion. Those documents and recommendations were also missing from county documents during the Herald-Banner’s search in 2007.
“... Commissioner Green and I met Terry Turner out there and we looked at that job site,” Bobbitt explained of a trip to a strip mall site on Traders Road where Turner was using the water injection process.
“And they had a tractor out there that had pipes on the back of it that were pushing the pipes into the water and injecting more water in the site and making, in my opinion, just a terrible mess of it. And I talked to the rest of the commissioners about it and no one that I talked to saw any big need of putting more water into the ground when we couldn’t get on the job site the way it was. And I asked for a second opinion on what we needed to — on what we needed to do. And that’s when the other soil company got involved with it.”
That organization’s recommendations were almost the polar opposite of Terracon’s.
ADJ officials only predicted a four to six inch shift, though they note additional movement could occur depending on the conditions.
But perhaps the most dramatic change that apparently appealed to county officials was no water injection was required in the ADJ report.
Instead of water injection, that firm recommended French drains be installed around the facility.
“Therefore, the French drain system shall be designed to prevent any water intrusion from the perimeter of the building site and to drain any water that may enter the select fill and migrate down to the clay subgrade,” the ADJ report reads.
The county’s structural engineer, Frank W. Neal, apparently disagreed with ADJ’s report, according to a memo dated March 31, 1999.
“(Terracon’s) method would help reduce the potential movement to around 1 (inch),” Neal noted in the memo.
Fletcher, however, does not recall ever receiving the memo and does not recall discussing it with either Neal, Bobbitt or the commissioners. It’s not clear if county officials ever received the memo.
And despite the support for the Terracon report, nobody apparently recalls trying to dissuade Bobbitt or any of the other commissioners from an apparent “consensus” decision they made outside of the Commissioners Court to accept ADJ’s report over Terracon’s.
Bobbitt said it didn’t appear to be an odd recommendation to install a French drain beneath the criminal justice facility.
As to why Fletcher didn’t intervene, he said he always honors his client’s wishes and he assumed Bobbitt had extensive knowledge of the construction process and knew what he was doing.
Green, however, said the water injection process was never really explained to him. He also told attorneys during his deposition that he wasn’t sure if deciding between geo-technical plans was something that would normally be voted on during a Commissioners Court meeting.
“I don’t have any way of knowing what’s normal and what’s not normal since this is the only construction project that I’ve had anything to do with since I’ve been on the court.
“... But in this case we hired a construction manager to do that for the county, and the county was, more or less, the — the general contractor.”
He said he thought it would be normal for the court to vote on decisions, “but with all that being said, when you hire a professional construction manager, you have to, I think, turn a certain amount of responsibility over to him because he’s — he is the professional involved, him, the architect, the engineers that you’re paying good money to. And depending on their professional abilities, they know a lot more about how to build a 110,000 square foot facility than any member of the commissioners court does.”
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