A tale of two groutings
Even though I am fully retired, albeit not wholly voluntarily, I still enjoy reading the journal. All credit to the editorial team. I read Sarah Fox’s article in the June 2022 issue ‘Do you have a right to finish your scope?’ with a lot of interest and found myself reminiscing. As one gets older, one is allowed, even obliged, to do so. It brought back a story from my contracting days.
The story is in two parts with the first occurring in Gibraltar in 1974. We were contracted to repair a Victorian retaining wall that supported the road to the south of the peninsular at Europa Point. Once we had underpinned and buttressed the wall we started grouting. When we tendered I suspected that the billed quantities were very low so inserted a generous rate.
By the end of the first day the first (of about eight) grout tubes had consumed the entire bill allowance and still no back pressure. ‘Gosh’ or similar expressions from the resident engineer “there must be a really big void. Keep going!” After about four days with still no back pressure, an elderly gentleman came toiling up the hill and stopped to ask what we were doing. After we explained, he told us that he was the lighthouse keeper at Europa Point and strangely the sewer outfall had turned a grey colour. A pit excavated in the road showed a collapsed brick arch sewer with a grout tube right alongside. My pricing strategy had worked although in a rather unexpected way
Part two happened in the mid 1980s. The contractor for whom I worked, successfully bid for a large roads project that involved a significant amount of grouting of old mine-workings. “Ah-ha ” I said: “Been here before.” Seeing that the billed quantity was clearly understated. Again, a generous rate was inserted offset by reductions in the preliminaries bill. The employer subsequently entered into a separate contract with the same firm that was to be our subcontractor for grouting in an adjacent area. The engineer pointed out to the employer that the rate in the grouting only contract was significantly lower than the equivalent rate on our contract. The engineer announced his intention to omit the grouting from our contract and add that work to the adjacent grouting contract. It fell to me to tell him that he couldn’t do that. “Why?” He asked. I did what any self-respecting quantity surveyor of the day would do and looked up Max Abrahamson’s book Engineering Law and the ICE Contracts 4th edition. When I pointed out Max’s comments, the engineer capitulated. When the quantities far exceeded the bill quantity, I was swiftly removed from the Christmas card list.
Having read Sarah’s article and having recollected the foregoing saga, I repeated my earlier action and dug out a rather dog-eared copy of Abrahamson’s book. It says:
“The engineer may omit only work if it is not to be done at all, not to have it done by another contractor; any other rule would permit the employer to employ a contractor only for the parts of the works on which the contractor had low rates, by omitting the parts on which the contractor had placed his profit and giving them to another contractor.”
Max quoted authority for that view from 1961, 1970, 1976, 1954, 1941 1975.
The problems up in Aberdeen with which Van Oord and Dragados encountered and set out by Sarah, go back a long way albeit on other forms of contract. Ok now back to being retired...
David Carrick FCInstCES, Past President