Construction Site Success Stories from Utilizing Photos

By: By Gary Kennedy, P. Eng., PMP (2023-11-21)

Construction Site Success Stories. The miraculous help of Photography in the field. Similar success tales are welcome in the comments!

As many folks know, I've gathered a healthy trainload of photos from my construction sites since the early 1990's. With friendly stakeholder permissions, I continue to use those photos. I've had great construction mentors since I graduated Civil Engineering in 1990. One of the many significant "lessons learned" from these experienced construction masters was:

"Always use a camera on site on a routine basis. You DO NOT have to wait to use a camera when there's a dispute or crisis going on. You should get photos that might be routine snaps today that might be VERY valuable some day in the future."

Here are a few examples of the HUGE benefits:

(A) Materials Identification Example:

After I finished a highway construction project in a previous year, I was able to help my previous supervisor reconcile excavation quantities with a subcontractor. I had "routine" photos archived that clarified whether rock, sand, or swamp had been excavated between a few certain locations. It saved a lot of money and resources instead of sending equipment back to a remote site for ground verification. Everyone wins.

(B) Location Identification Example:

On large jobs, like highway construction, the authorities and general pubic are always watching (which I WELCOME) for environmental and safety concerns. As I've been mentored, I snapped routine photos of the silt fences and other erosion protection around the sites. If members of the traveling public expressed any concerns about silt in the water or erosion protection levels, we were able to use the photos to quickly "help" address the concerns. Sometimes, LOL, the good people raising the concerns were naming the wrong bridges or streams that were miles away from construction. It would still remain a valid public concern, but at least the photos could help us narrow down where it was (and that it wasn't on that particular project site).

(C) Critical Enforcement Example:

A few decades ago I was working on a large highway construction project in a mostly rural area. The project included roads, bridges, culverts, relocation of intersected utilities, and other features. As commonly happens, I had an engineering student riding in the truck with me for the Summer term. While driving slowly over the new road subgrade to look for cleanup items (nothing yet open to the public) we noticed a bulldozer in the distance heading towards the buffer zone of a healthy stream. The student commented that it looked like the dozer intended to cross the stream, which would be a MAJOR offense by our subcontractor. I hopped out of the truck and started yelling towards the equipment operator, but it "seemed" that he could not hear me from the dozer noise. So I grabbed the camera out of the truck and made it VERY obvious that I was taking pictures of the bulldozer. Magically, LOL, the bulldozer turned 90 degrees away from the stream and continued working from higher ground. The student said "The camera idea worked just great! I thought that camera ran out of film a few hours ago!" I replied back to him, "It certainly did! But we turned that dozer around anyway!" We had a good laugh!

(D) Ground-Truthing Example:

For highway construction, survey crews usually try to get preliminary topographic data along the proposed highway routes before the Winter sets in. This allows the highway engineering group to spend part of their time plotting centreline profiles and cross-sections to produce quantity estimates and preliminary designs. In northern or other remote locations, these rough data collections sometimes have errors, and the surveyors may not have always noted the:

• type of excavation material (e.g. rock, sand, bog, good re-usable fill, other)

• direction and approx size of brooks, streams, rivers (prelim info preceding hydrographic & hydraulic design)

• tree clearing information: locations, heights, density, (or clear & grub), etc.

I've discovered the significant benefits of at least walking the rough route of "next year's" proposed highway centreline with a camera to take stills (and now smartphone vids) of the terrain - before our field crews demobilize for the Canadian winter. Those photos and vids usually turn out to be VERY valuable during winter design and quantities calculations.

(D) Remote Troubleshooting Example:

For a bridge construction project we were driving H-piles that was later realize to be on top of a giant boulder suspended in a soft matrix of other material (rather than the bedrock that the test pits indicated). Rather than continuing to drive downward from the ground surface, we were shocked to see the pile shoes started appearing BACK UP to ground surface after curling up from below! We realized then that the piles were glancing off of the relatively smooth round boulder beneath the ground surface. The underground boulder was likely the size of a house, so it was tricky to interpret the pile driving responses. It was unbelievable, and a bit scary, to see this extreme deviation!

I thus made an urgent satellite phone call (in 1995) to the homes of our Geotechnical Engineer and Structural Engineer on a Sunday morning (I certainly owed them donuts and a Thank-you Card, LOL). I then drove promptly for about 3 hours on the rough woods roads to a town where I was able to FAX copies of the Polaroid photos to our HQ.

Thankfully, we managed to eventually solve the pile-driving challenges with workarounds because of:

• my routine photos snapped during the seemingly "normal" piledriving process,

• my routine photo taken on previous days of the nearby hills and rock-cuts during construction,

• the photos "after" we realized our unusual and challenging pile-deflection situation, and

• the expertise of our Geotechnical and Structural Engineers who interpreted the photos and coached me step-by-step over the satellite phone to achieve a revised safe and satisfactory placement of the deep foundations.
  

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Please contact Gary Kennedy if you wish to submit similar success stories from using photos. You can also add them in the comments under the LinkedIn post of this article.

Thanks! gk

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