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A near-miss with a buried pipeline in Mobile Bay made me rethink our survey process
We were working a channel deepening project and our cutter head was about 12 feet from hitting an uncharted gas line. The old charts were wrong, and our side-scan sonar had a blind spot. Now I push for a full multi-beam sweep before ANY cut, but the office says it adds 48 hours of non-billable time. Do you eat the cost for the extra safety scan, or trust the provided charts?
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hall.ruby5mo ago
That 48 hours of non-billable time is cheaper than the bill for a major incident, right?
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dylan235mo ago
Exactly. I read a case study where a company skipped routine maintenance to save money. When their system failed, the recovery cost was ten times what the preventive work would have been, not counting lost business. It's a classic example of being penny wise and pound foolish. Investing a little time upfront almost always saves a huge headache later.
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the_vera4mo ago
48 hours of non-billable time is nothing compared to the cost of a lawsuit or someone getting killed. Charts can be wrong, sonar can miss stuff, you already proved that. The office is just looking at the money side but they aren't the ones holding the liability. I'd rather eat that two days and sleep good at night than explain to a jury why I skipped the safety step. That pipeline could have blown your whole project sky high.
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