Fabrication different from design drawings

An Australian reporter created a design for propping required to carry out partial demolition and re-construction of a small tower on a mine.

Later while on a site visit for another project, the reporter noticed that the propping design had been fabricated and installed but a number of connection details did not match the design drawings. The structure as fabricated effectively had no stability in one plane and there were other non-conformities.

Investigation revealed that the mine had submitted the design drawings to a fabrication company, which had then sub-contracted the fabrication out to a second fabricator who had then sub-contracted out the creation of shop detail drawings to yet another drafting company. Somewhere in this chain of responsibility the decision was made to standardise the end details of each member without getting approval from the design engineer. This had simplified the fabricator's task but completely voided the design intent.

More important, however, was the lack of engineering oversight of the fabrication and construction stages of the build. In the reporter's experience in the local mining industry, small projects such as this one are often done in three stages - design, fabrication and installation.

Typically, all of these are done by different companies. They rarely interact except through the project manager from the mine site who is usually not a qualified structural engineer and often has no engineering background at all. This means that there is a lack of engineering oversight that could identify potentially dangerous modifications or construction defects.