Near Nothing Can Make Me Angrier Than What Happens to Capital Dollars
From KUOW,
Seattle's new $297 million high school was built on a peat bog. Then the foundation started settling
Let's start with this - the district knew this situation existed before building. Just like they know the same thing about Hale High School when they rebuilt it and they had to mitigate that issue. (all bold mine)
Months before the long-awaited, brand new Rainier Beach High School opened to students last April, engineers on the $297-million project reported problems with the building’s foundation to the city, records show. The school was settling into the earth more than expected in areas, as much as three inches, and it hadn’t stopped sinking.
“The project is on fairly porous ground, and it did settle more than they expected,” said Tina Christiansen, Seattle Public Schools capital projects spokesperson.
Shortly before the building opened, “it was determined that settlement had stopped,” Christiansen said, and builders dealt with the uneven settlement by releveling the top of the concrete foundation.
While excessive or uneven settlement rarely poses an immediate safety risk, it can require costly remediation, and repairs to elements like cracked walls and floors. The risks depend on factors including the cause and extent of the settlement, said Brett Maurer, a civil engineering professor at the University of Washington.
And when will the settling stop? No one knows.
And get this - the district built the new building on top of this swamp; the original building hadn't been built there. The swampy section was the athletics fields. And they are still going to build a performing arts hall as well.
Who got talked into this? Did the architects say it was possible (because you can do anything but it doesn't make it a good idea)? Did Richard Best, the head of Capital Building, say damn the torpedoes? Because honestly, it feels like SPS is the place where architects go to try out new and costly ideas.
In order to build on a peat bog, Seattle Public Schools was required to sign a covenant acknowledging the “unique risks” of the project, including excessive settlement, and releasing the City of Seattle from liability for short- or long-term hazards.
Are you kidding me?
Over the next seven months, Lydig “measured as much as 3 inches of settlement in the central portion of the structure,” engineers told the city — far more than the one inch of long-term settlement anticipated in the plan.
“But, because building settlements can be a long process occurring over many years, any such prediction inevitably has some uncertainty,” (Brett) Maurer said. (Maurer is a UW civil engineering professor.)
This is a doozy:
Christiansen said she was not aware how much settlement was ultimately measured, whether monitoring was ongoing, or whether a cause was determined. The district’s executive director of capital projects and facilities, Richard Best, was willing to answer all such questions, Christiansen said: “Unfortunately, his schedule doesn’t have a clear break in it until November.”
Know who can get Best in to talk? The Board. Let's see if they do anything.
Comments
Is there even a School Board Director who has enough knowledge to be able to ask this particular specific question?
When did the building and its foundation get pulled apart? What types of foundations were considered amongst the options and why was crushed gravel the one chosen? Was the plan different to begin with, but then got stripped down during the value engineering phase?
Even if there is a SPS lawsuit, after all, a structural engineer would have had to have literally signed off on this, that costs time and money and is never going make to make SPS whole.
VOTE NO
This is another reason why committees should resume.
Water tables are function of several items. One is the amount of surface runoff in the area. The project plan available in the second scroll in the project designs area
https://rainierbeachhs.seattleschools.org/about/r-b-h-s-replacement-project/#f1b2a8f45240
appears to show some drainage ponds. I am not an engineer. I don't know if it is better to keep the peat in its natural state by recharging the water via the ponds, or if it would be better to let the peat dry by removing the water and not letting it go into ponds that then drain into the peat.
I wonder if anyone along the way asked questions about the groundwater? When my friend said the water table was so high in the rainy seasons that they could not do construction at this time of year, it did not occur to me how much the soil could change throughout the year.
So any reporters reading this should look into how water runoff in the area is being handled. If the site has drainage ponds, then the water from there will likely percolate throughout the area. if the water is put in storm sewers, then it will not go into the water table.
https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_list.asp?Search=1&InstName=+Rainier+Beach+High+School&SchoolID=&Address=&City=Seattle&State=&Zip=&Miles=&County=King&PhoneAreaCode=&Phone=&DistrictName=&DistrictID=&SchoolType=1&SchoolType=2&SchoolType=3&SchoolType=4&SpecificSchlTypes=all&IncGrade=-1&LoGrade=-1&HiGrade=-1
Per Seattle Public Schools' own website:
"Rainier Beach High School will be replaced with a new four-story high school of approximately 297,000 square feet. When completed, it will provide permanent space for 1,600 students grades 9-12."
https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/capital-projects-and-planning/school-construction/projects/rainier-beach/#:~:text=Rainier%20Beach%20High%20School%20will,site%20during%20the%20phased%20construction.
On one hand, the occupancy rate of Rainier Beach HS stands at 48%. On the other hand, the district's Capital Building Department has not been scrutinized yet and is still continuing with the plans to build a performing arts hall and a new data center as well.
Seattle is Lost, some of their plans have been pushed through towards this result even during the time period while SPS still had meetings for its "Capital Project Oversight Committee" going. That Committee could never offer meaningful oversight or daylighting or stop the epic waste of taxpayers money.
Epic $hitshow
There was a lot of push back from the committee about including Beach and staff pushed back hard to do both memorial stadium and Rainier Beach if we really wanted to push for Rainier Beach.
I stated that since a high school would cost almost $200 million it was a very poor use of funds to skip all of the other needed middle school projects to finance a spec project at memorial stadium when there was zero demographic data to support another high school.
Flip Herndon told the committee that my $200M estimate was wildly out of bounds and was completely unsupported and that each high school would be less than $100M, so we could do both.
Based on how much Lincoln cost over three district funding rounds, it seemed like $200M a reasonable estimate with inflation. But $300M is 3x the original proposal.
Why would the capital project team withhold this information? If they did not, why did they not record it in the minutes? And, how it is possible for board members to not know about this bombshell, given the magnitude of the problem, and how we all know information travels? The building trades most certainly knew, and they have a rep on the BEX committee.
Wonder what that third-party report says?
For that matter, why aren't capital projects ever a hot topic in school board elections?
-signed-"Who knew what and when"