Can PE's do these too, or just LS's?
Depends on your state. As far as I know the EC's can be signed by Surveyors, Engineers, or Architects (go figure).
That's a good question based on what it says on the form and the fact that it is a federal form. In NJ they are only supposed to be done by surveyors, but I wonder if a PE could get away with it since it gets submitted at the federal level.
Yes, that's what I'm thinking, that the feds are fine with PE's, (and even architects, go figure), but laws in certain states may trump that.
I would assume architects would be signing if doing based on construction drawings.
Once the house is built or is existing I find it hard to believe an architect is going to do an EC. That's kind of stepping beyond their scope.
Also if it's for flood insurance we have been told by fema and insurance companies that the state of licensure doesn't matter to them as long as it's signed by an LS, even if the house is in a diff state. Go figure.
I believe that the Realtors should be responsible for ECs, they need to be held accountable for something.....;-)
There is nothing particularly demanding to doing them. Most of the field work is being handled by technicians anyway. It makes sense to have more than one profession available to handle them.
Holy Cow, post: 353767, member: 50 wrote: There is nothing particularly demanding to doing them. Most of the field work is being handled by technicians anyway. It makes sense to have more than one profession available to handle them.
That's fine until some goofball blows the datum and uses a GPS NAVD 88 elevation referencing an NGVD 29 FIRM flood zone on a $3 million dollar house in Cape May, NJ. I guarantee it wouldn't take long to happen....
It's not the guy behind the desk that makes that error. It's the technician with the magic wand. The technician needs to be properly trained no matter who his/her employer may be.
It's not "who" makes the error that's important, it's "who" is responsible for said error and that "who" is the one signing the EC. IMHO it makes zero sense to have anyone other than an LS signing them.
Elevation Certificates must be prepared and certified by a Licensed Land Surveyor, Registered Professional Engineer, or architect who is authorized by Commonwealth, State, or local law to certify elevation information.
DDSM:beer:
Professionals sign off on other people's work all of the time, unless they are a solo operator. Sure they must accept full responsibility for whatever it is they are signing off on. All professions have this issue.
The correctness of the procedure is what is critical to minimize actual risk to the professional. That requires repeated training of the technicians and a sense of trust. Mistakes will happen. The signing professional will be held responsible. But, the main mistake may be having too much trust in the technician's ability to supply the correct information for the signature.
The key to success or failure is in the hands of the technician providing the information going on the Elevation Certificate. The label placed on the signing professional is not nearly so critical.
This is no different from designing a building foundation based on the soil tests run by technicians. Errors made in such an essential part of determining the final design parameters may result in millions of dollars of liability to the professional developing the design. Nevertheless, the odds of the soil testing and analysis being performed by the designing professional are about like winning the Powerball.
Dan Patterson, post: 353779, member: 1179 wrote: That's fine until some goofball blows the datum and uses a GPS NAVD 88 elevation referencing an NGVD 29 FIRM flood zone on a $3 million dollar house in Cape May, NJ. I guarantee it wouldn't take long to happen....
Just had something like this happen in Belmar NJ.
Setting up to stake the house and I notice that there are NAVD elevations listed on the architectural plans.
We had prepared a boundary and topo (in NAVD 88) for the property (topo came later) so the client provided our original boundary survey to the architect.
Somewhere along the way he told everyone "I don't need the topo" and proceeded to come up with his own idea of NAVD (he labels them as NAVD only not NAVD 88).
Luckily if someone tried to build the foundation at the elevations on the architectural plans, the first floor would have been under the ground by a foot so it was easy to spot the mistake. Had it not been so evident there could have been an issue.
I asked him where he got the elevations from and he said "I took them from a FEMA map"
Closest BFE shown on that map is about 3 blocks away! Of course when I told him what the elevations should be he was completely undisturbed.
So what's five inches between friends? This ain't a rape case.
In my backyard the difference between the old and the new is very close to 0.42 feet.
Of course, in your backyard that difference may be several feet.
Generally here the difference is about 1'. I have seen differences between NAVD88 and NGVD29 as small as 0.65' and as much as 1.20'.
The problem is, after Superstorm Sandy a lot of new regulations came up about setting your new building to some new elevation above the flood elevation. (These elevation requirements may be dictated locally by people who don't even know what a datum even is, which is a whole separate issue). Anyway, we have FIRMs up and down the coast where some are NAVD88 and some are NGVD29. Knowing the difference and knowing how to determine the differential between the two systems at any given geographic location is not the kind of thing I would want to entrust to a P.E. or R.A. I think only a P.L.S. is qualified for that.
And yes, we are still tearing down and rebuilding things from Sandy here......it was quite a devastating event, and it looks like we are going to see some serious tidal surge from this upcoming snow storm that may test some of the new structures....
In my yard, the difference between NGVD29 and NAVD88 is about 2.5 feet, give or take. And I regularly get requests to convert between the two datums because some agency wants their elevations in this or that frame of reference.
The one I love the most is when a city has their own benchmark system and so they want all of the plans and exhibits prepared to the "City of X Datum". Most likely, their datum is based upon a series of benchmarks established long ago that came from an NGS monument with a NGVD29 elevation on it. But, the City just keeps their datum static and doesn't really update it. So over the years this benchmark system loses its internal consistency.
But then, you get someone at that city that asks for the elevations in NAVD88 because they have to relate it to some other agency's standards and they think I can just click on a button on the computer and instantly convert things to that new datum. And I have to tell them that it doesn't work that way...
Dan Patterson, post: 354029, member: 1179 wrote: Generally here the difference is about 1'. I have seen differences between NAVD88 and NGVD29 as small as 0.65' and as much as 1.20'.
The problem is, after Superstorm Sandy a lot of new regulations came up about setting your new building to some new elevation above the flood elevation. (These elevation requirements may be dictated locally by people who don't even know what a datum even is, which is a whole separate issue). Anyway, we have FIRMs up and down the coast where some are NAVD88 and some are NGVD29. Knowing the difference and knowing how to determine the differential between the two systems at any given geographic location is not the kind of thing I would want to entrust to a P.E. or R.A. I think only a P.L.S. is qualified for that.
And yes, we are still tearing down and rebuilding things from Sandy here......it was quite a devastating event, and it looks like we are going to see some serious tidal surge from this upcoming snow storm that may test some of the new structures....
Bout 1.1 here in NY
