Fifteen Years, have we become complacent ?

[cda]

I think one of the major factors that have influenced the building inspection industry, at least here, is liability. People aren't willing to take responsibility for their decisions and end up suing us. Even when we win, it costs a fortune, so we have to idiot proof everything.

We recently had a situation where a builder was constructing a single family residence. The lot was in-filled, so they had to get an engineer for the soils and build an engineered pad for the building. All of this went fine and they placed the foundation on the pad. Then, they decided to connect to the sewer lateral serving that lot. Well golly-gee, the foundation is too low and that bathroom in the basement won't work. Now they should have taken an elevation shot off the lateral to dictate where the foundation needed to be, but they didn't. Instead I get a phone call that they will be suing us because we accepted the foundation.

No problem with the foundation!!!

 

[conarb]

I think one of the major factors that have influenced the building inspection industry, at least here, is liability. People aren't willing to take responsibility for their decisions and end up suing us. Even when we win, it costs a fortune, so we have to idiot proof everything.

We recently had a situation where a builder was constructing a single family residence. The lot was in-filled, so they had to get an engineer for the soils and build an engineered pad for the building. All of this went fine and they placed the foundation on the pad. Then, they decided to connect to the sewer lateral serving that lot. Well golly-gee, the foundation is too low and that bathroom in the basement won't work. Now they should have taken an elevation shot off the lateral to dictate where the foundation needed to be, but they didn't. Instead I get a phone call that they will be suing us because we accepted the foundation.

Tell them to put a sewer pump in the basement, I've done that many times, one time I built an entire 5,000 square foot house on a sewer pump because of no sewer in the lower road, another time with a 6,000 square foot house the sewer district wouldn't let me bridge a creek so I installed the sewer lateral down to the bottom of the creek and a sewer pump to pump the sewage up to the sewer in the road. It's not your problem, you inspected the foundation and it's not impossible to make the system work, just more money.

 

[tmurray]

Tell them to put a sewer pump in the basement, I've done that many times, one time I built an entire 5,000 square foot house on a sewer pump because of no sewer in the lower road, another time with a 6,000 square foot house the sewer district wouldn't let me bridge a creek so I installed the sewer lateral down to the bottom of the creek and a sewer pump to pump the sewage up to the sewer in the road. It's not your problem, you inspected the foundation and it's not impossible to make the system work, just more money.

Exactly. And that is what they ended up doing. Luckily their site work guy works in the town all the time and told them the costs to continue to bring the foundation up to the point to get a gravity feed would have been about 20x the cost of the sewer pump so they dropped the action.