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Imperial to Metric to Imperial, 1997 style
I’ve been cleaning up 28 years worth of work files and have stumbled across a couple of my favorite misadventures in both print and email form. Here’s one of my favorites.
In December of 1997 Deschutes County, in conjunction with the Oregon DOT, had let a big contract for an overcrossing project of Tumalo Road at Highway 97 between Bend and Redmond. The project included building 2 bridges, one over Highway 97 and one over the Central Oregon Irrigation District’s Pilot Butte Canal.
At that time ODOT was waffling back and forth about having all projects in metric. The feds had a vague decree about metric conversion by the year 20?? and ODOT was leading the way. In 1995 at the beginning of our initial project scoping and preliminary design ODOT said is was to be metric project. Soon thereafter they changed their mind and said imperial units would be OK. We surveyed the project in Imperial units and then our engineers designed the new alignment. The highway bridge was designed by the ODOT bridge section using our field data and the canal bridge was an in-house design by our engineers.
We determined the required R/W takings, negotiated with landowners (nearing condemnation proceedings with one) and produced construction plans. The plans went to ODOT for final review in the fall of 1997 and they said “whoa, whoa, whoa… back up the truck, these plans now have to be metric”. Having a small engineering staff who had moved on to other projects it was decided to send the imperial plans to an engineering contractor to have them converted to metric. They did a fine job, the metric plan sets were sent out with the bid documents and Wildish Construction of Eugene Oregon got the contract.
The bid was awarded in early December. On the 11th our receptionist sent this email to our engineer:
Now I’m no Jeane Dixon, but this was my prophecy all along and I wish I’d made big money bets on how soon the contractors would request Imperial information to work off of. It wasn’t too long after this that ODOT and the feds divorced themselves from the metric system. For the time being.
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8 Replies
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Stuff like that was why I left construction to others at the end of the 80s and decided to only do boundary surveying.
If it was not the engineer wanting what plans we turned in changed to feet and inches or metric or it was the other way around, they would send me plans in feet and inches or metric and expect us to work off control that was in feet.
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It seems to me the reasonable way to convert people is to start with dual dimensions. Once they are used to seeing both sets of numbers then drop the imperial.
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I left construction inspection/management because the contractor thought I was an unrealistic asshole and the designer thought I was letting the contractor get away with shoddy work. No fun being the middle man.
One that comes to mind, 2 years after final the engineer says some item wasn’t done, I said really, the project was an overbudget mess, had to do a lot of trading to get it done. A couple of weeks later I remembered that was one of the minor things we traded for something else that had to be done. No thanks for saving your disastrous design, no, just nitpicking little stuff.
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Bill – and that’s what ODOT did, meters with parenthetical feet measurements on their metric survey drawings for the 5 or 10 years they gave metric a go. For our county project, the hair-puller was that at the end of design (with full blown plan sets all done in feet including the ODOT bridge design which we folded into the overall County plan set) to then renege and say, we want to make this metric statement now. The proof in the pudding was that Wildish, a big player in the state construction business at that time, didn’t want to monkey around with on-the-job training on a big dollar project and requested Imperial drawings. All my deed legal descriptions (and subsequent R/W maps) were in feet, most the deeds had been recorded before the state waffled.
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Metric is unnecessary. If France want’s metric, fine. I like diversity, we don’t all have to think the same.
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The difference is easy enough to understand. It is working in one system one day and the other the next that is asking too much. Make the switch, stick with it for about a month, and the pain is mostly over.
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We used metric for NYDSDOT plans from 1996 to 2006. The survey and mapping conventions for distances and grades were simple. The contractors struggled with materials in metric such as earth volumes, pipe sizes, rebar, steel, etc.
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We designed and constructed (and also shelved) a number of metric projects in WSDOT back in the mid-90s because it was federally mandated. It was fine for construction staking IMO but for boundary stuff… no way. Especially when the R/W contained spirals.
The last metric project I worked on was back in 2007 which was widening about three miles of roadway to five lanes plus two short bridges. Said project came off the shelf from circa 1996.
The only superior evidence is that which you haven’t yet found.
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