Another DOT story

Jul y 17, 2005
The contractor was putting in culvert pipes on Lang Road. Sue was watching the pipe crew. I showed up later in the morning and one of the pipes just didn’t look right to me. It was too short. I did some calculations, and because we changed the slopes from a 4:1 to a 5:1, it screwed things up a little bit. On my calcuation I determined that we needed to add about 8 feet to make the pipe look right. I had the contractor order an extension for the pipe. I should tell you at this point that there are only 11 pipes on this job so it should be pretty easy to keep track of all of these pipes. The next day the contractor installed a 10 foot extension on to the pipe. Now I should also tell you that the diameter of the pipe is 24 inches in real life and also in the plan. Since I was there I did the measurements and when I went back to the field office to pay for the extra pipe I went to the spreadsheet that had all of the 24 inch pipes on it and it was blank. After a little investigating I found that Sue had measured it up at an 18 inch pipe. This is obviously a mistake, but it is something that probably shouldn’t get over looked. Maybe I am wrong.