Inspections at crux of building fiasco

People responsible for documenting inspections, doing inspections and dogging missed inspections failed to do their jobs in Homosassa.

HOMOSASSA - On Wednesday, a blue-ribbon citizens' committee will begin its investigation of the botched construction project at Homosassa Elementary School. One of its missions: Find who is to blame for the $4-million fiasco.

No one questions that much of the workmanship - especially the masonry - was terrible.

Structural engineer Jimmy Schilling had only to look at a handful of construction photographs last May to conclude the new media center didn't meet code.

Later that month, a testing team hired by the school district found that walls in the new media center and cafeteria lacked most of their strengthening steel and grout, beams that should bolster the walls above windows and doors were missing altogether, steel roof attachments that should have been anchored in solid concrete were anchored in little more than thin air. Hundreds of defects were uncovered.

Schilling has a saying: "You don't get what you expect; you get what you inspect."

And that, in the end, is where the Homosassa project failed: in its inspections.

A St. Petersburg Times examination of more than 250 school district records shows:

The district's facilities office was supposed to document all inspections. It didn't. Many district records are contradictory, inaccurate or missing altogether.

Project manager Sam DiGuglielmo, who was supposed to be the district's eyes and ears on the job site, set up a system for logging inspections, but didn't make sure the inspectors used it.

For the most important function in a construction project - the inspections - the district relied on a series of letters hiring Berryman & Henigar, a private engineering firm. Though the agreement laid out in the letters gave the job of documenting the work to the district, there was no one person in the district office assigned to stay on top of the paperwork and make sure all the required inspections took place.

Though the district failed to establish a clear chain of responsibility, the Florida Building Code is more precise:

The way to ensure construction meets the code's minimum standards is through inspections. It is the builder's job to request the more than three dozen mandatory, formal inspections required by the code.

At Homosassa Elementary, that task fell to Mitch Feaster, the construction superintendent for builder Robbie Graham.

On at least three separate occasions, there is no district record that Feaster requested inspections - or that inspections were performed - on reinforcements used to strengthen block walls.

Those walls were later shown to be so defective they had to be cut open and strengthened with steel and concrete.

Feaster said that despite the lack of documentation, he called for all required inspections.

The state code has another safeguard: One phase of work can't start until the previous phase has been inspected and approved by a state-certified building code administrator.

But at Homosassa, district records show, concrete beams on top of the walls were examined and approved by building code administrator Harold Varvel, even though there is no record to show that walls below them had been inspected. Those walls were later found to be substandard. Varvel was employed by Berryman & Henigar.

Varvel declined to discuss the project without the approval of Mark Stokes at Berryman & Henigar. Stokes did not respond to two telephone messages from the Times.

The end result: Homosassa Elementary, a long-neglected school with the greatest number of low-income students in the district, got two new buildings so riddled with defects and a renovation so behind schedule that the children had to be farmed out to Crystal River campuses while repairs take place.

The project is being investigated by the state's Board of Professional Engineers, the Board of Architecture and the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which licenses contractors and inspectors. A state attorney's review found no criminal wrongdoing.

In an internal review, school district investigators Theresa Royal and Mary Kay Lucas said they couldn't assess how well the district facilities department administered the project. However, they said, all of the facilities employees, except project manager DiGuglielmo, performed as they were supposed to.

DiGuglielmo told the Times he believed his method for tracking the work was sufficient, but said he incorrectly assumed that the contractor and hired inspectors were doing their jobs.

Feaster, the contractor's representative, told the Times he called for all of the more than three dozen inspections required by the district and the state building code. He said the district's records are incomplete.

Builder Graham's Orlando attorney, Chris Weiss, said Berryman & Henigar must take some responsibility one way or another: Its inspectors either failed to spot missing inspections - if, indeed, they were skipped - or performed such inexpert inspections that construction defects were overlooked.

Before ending an interview with a Times reporter, Varvel, the Berryman & Henigar representative, blamed Feaster, saying he did not call for all the inspections required by the Building Code. He referred further questions to Berryman & Henigar.

This time last year, district officials were tackling dozens of construction and maintenance projects with only two employees to supervise them.

Given its limited resources, the district outsourced the job of inspecting the big construction jobs, hiring Berryman & Henigar to perform inspections at several campuses, including Homosassa Elementary.

The national engineering firm specializes in overseeing public construction projects. And it was no stranger to the district; it once employed facilities director Alan Burcaw and building official Richard Dolbow.

At Homosassa Elementary, the firm was to inspect renovations to old classrooms and the administration office and construction of a new administration office, a covered play area, a media center and cafeteria.

The district was supposed to handle the project's documentation.

According to the district's system, here's how the inspection process was supposed to work:

As each phase of work was completed, Feaster, the builder's representative, was to contact the district's facilities secretary to ask for an inspection. She was to e-mail Varvel, Berryman & Henigar's representative, with the request.

The inspector was to relay the inspection results to the district; then Berryman & Henigar was to bill the district for the inspection.

In addition, once the masonry work was inspected, concrete was to be delivered to the site and a sampling of the wet concrete tested for strength.

The district's project manager, DiGuglielmo, added one more step: He asked Feaster to have the inspectors initial and date the on-site blueprints each time they performed an inspection.

With all that, there should have been documentation every step of the way - at least five records per inspection. But that's not how it turned out.

The records are a mess.

For instance:

District files include no inspection requests from Feaster for:

The media center's footers or its stem wall, the underground concrete structures that are part of the foundation;

Part of the cafeteria's slab or some of its concrete beams.

But Berryman & Henigar billed for the inspections. Later tests showed the cafeteria slab was fine but many beams were defective.

There's no record of strength testing for two shipments of concrete.

There is no record that an independent testing laboratory examined the roof welds in the cafeteria, though there is a record of such a test on the media center. Later examination showed roof welds were missing in the cafeteria.

District records show the blueprints were initialed for only 21 of 40 inspections performed.

When the district began examining what happened on the project, it found itself short seven inspection requests and, according to Varvel, came to him for proof the requests were made; he had copies of e-mails sent to him by the district's facilities secretary.

Feaster said there was no lack of inspections; there's just a lack of records.

"I may call for a footer inspection on the cafeteria," he said. "At the same time, I'm doing stem walls in the administration building, for instance. Then, while the inspector is there, I say, "While you're here, I've got this ready up front.' And he walks up and inspects that too."

Feaster said "that happened several times" at Homosassa.

"The inspector would tell me, "I'll take care of the paperwork,' " Feaster said. "If you tell me ... "I'll do the paperwork.' I'm assuming you're doing the rest of your job."

Feaster's boss, builder Robbie Graham, said Feaster sometimes told Varvel or DiGuglielmo when they were onsite that he needed an inspection. As a consequence, the district wouldn't have a record that Feaster requested an inspection, Graham said.

The district, Varvel and project engineer Ted Williamson said it is probable some inspections never took place.

For instance:

Records reflect at least three occasions when Feaster ordered shipments of concrete grout to strengthen the buildings' walls. But there is no record of the mandatory wall inspections that should have occurred before the grout was poured:

not in the facilities' log of inspection requests,

not in the e-mailed requests to Varvel,

not on the on-site blueprints that were sometimes initialed by inspectors,

not in Berryman & Henigar's bills,

and not in a chronology of events produced by Berryman & Henigar after the construction defects were revealed.

"That very easily could be," Varvel, the inspector, told the Times before declining to answer further questions. "I said all along that we weren't called for inspections."

Those inspections should have ensured that steel rods were set inside concrete block walls and that mortar and debris were cleaned out of the wall's hollow blocks so they could be filled with wet grout to strengthen them and hold the rods in place.

What did it matter?

Later tests showed one wall had an adequate amount of concrete and the required steel bars in only nine of 17 columns of blocks. In another wall, just seven of 31 columns were adequately strengthened. The tests showed workers had attempted to fill some columns with grout, but the grout didn't go all the way down the column.

The lack of sufficient grout and steel left the walls too weak to withstand hurricane-force winds, according to structural engineer Schilling, who first raised alarms about the soundness of the buildings after looking at photographs of the construction.

DiGuglielmo was the district's project manager at two concurrent construction jobs: Crystal River Middle School and Homosassa Elementary.

Though he was ostensibly charged with making sure the project followed the plans and met the code, he said he wasn't supposed to watch over the contractor. That, he said, was the inspector's job.

On both campuses, DiGuglielmo asked the contractors' superintendents to have inspectors note their visits on the blueprints kept in the construction trailers.

"On days I visited the job, I would look at the blueprint on the plan table and see highlights and initials. Did I get down and see every inspection was done in the right order? Nobody does that," DiGuglielmo said.

DiGuglielmo acknowledged that the blueprints often were not marked by inspectors.

"I sit here flabbergasted every time I read the articles" about the construction mess, said DiGuglielmo, who resigned his district job in July due to ill health. "I felt like such a fool, but by the same token, I knew I was expected to be everywhere at one time."

At the time, he thought his system was sufficient, DiGuglielmo said - it worked at Crystal River Middle School, where by all accounts the project went smoothly.

Although the middle school work used a different system of construction management and was undertaken by another contractor, Welbro Building Corp. of Maitland, DiGuglielmo was the district's representative on that job and Berryman & Henigar performed the inspections.

DiGuglielmo blames the Homosassa debacle on Feaster and Varvel.

The way he sees it, DiGuglielmo said, "You have a contractor who didn't call for inspections, which violates the building code. And you have an inspector who knowingly did the next inspection, knowing the last inspection was not done, when he should have shut the job down right there..."

DiGuglielmo isn't the only one pointing fingers.

Varvel, Berryman & Henigar's primary inspector on the job, said Feaster failed to call for some inspections. Feaster said he did request the inspections, but Varvel didn't report them or the district didn't keep good records on them. Graham, the builder, and his attorney scoff at Berryman & Henigar's claim that it wasn't responsible for making sure all the inspections took place.

According to a chronology of events Berryman & Henigar prepared for the district after the defects were discovered, Varvel complained repeatedly about uninspected work.

On Nov. 14, he saw that walls in the media center had been built, the chronology showed. According to the plans, the walls were supposed to be constructed in 4-foot-high sections, with inspections at each level.

Varvel asked Feaster if the walls had been inspected as required, and Feaster's answer was no, the engineering company said in its account.

According to Berryman & Henigar, Varvel told Feaster "not to pour any more cells without being inspected." The engineering company said Varvel repeatedly warned the district's facilities secretary and DiGuglielmo of the uninspected work.

Both have denied having any such conversations with Varvel.

If Varvel "would have ever told me about uninspected work, I'd have locked the gate," said DiGuglielmo. "This is a school. This is children's safety. What do they think I am? I'm going to let it go? God help me."

The Florida Building Code says one phase of construction can't begin until the previous phase has been inspected and approved. It also says that none of the steel reinforcement should be covered or concealed until it has been inspected and approved.

The code doesn't spell out what inspectors must do if they find uninspected work.

But each of five construction experts contacted by the Times said work on the project should be shut down until the builder proves the uninspected work meets code.

"If they call me for an inspection and I notice something done that was not inspected, I'll tell them they need to go ahead and get it inspected. And I'll stop all work until that's done," said Tony A. Barber, an inspector for the city of Tallahassee and former member of the state's board of Building Code Administrators and Inspectors.

If work has been covered over and can't be seen by an inspector, the builders "have to get an engineer to come in there to verify what they have built is structurally sound," Barber said.

That's also the procedure commonly used by the University of Florida, according to David Kramer, the university's building code inspector.

Structural engineer Schilling of Satellite Beach said Varvel "should have been raising holy hell."

Schilling said it is the inspector's duty to shut down the project until it has been proven that the uninspected work meets code.

"You stop the job and get the procedure corrected. You pound your shoe on the table," he said. "If need be, you can make them tear it down."

Varvel referred questions to Berryman & Henigar's local representative, Mark Stokes. Stokes did not respond to two telephone messages from the Times, which described the overall contents of this news story.

In a June 4 letter to the district, Berryman & Henigar said it performed all the inspections it was requested to perform.

The letter points to a crucial distinction.

In its arrangement with the district, the engineering company was to conduct inspections the district requested - not track all the inspections required by the Florida Building Code. The district was to keep the administrative record.

The company performed as required by the agreement, Berryman & Henigar said in its letter to the district.

Until January of 2004, Berryman & Henigar did not have a detailed contract with the district. Instead, for two years, in a series of letters, the engineering company agreed to be paid at an hourly rate to perform inspections on various district projects on an "as needed" basis.

Weiss, the builder's attorney, said that - formal contract or no - it was clear to everyone that Berryman & Henigar was the sole inspection agent on the job.

As such, Weiss said, it was up to Berryman & Henigar to ensure inspections took place.

"It staggers my imagination to think, if I'm Berryman & Henigar, that I'm being paid to inspect the construction of this building and I'd see the building go from the slab through the roof ... and didn't question why I didn't get called for inspections?" he said.

Given the enormousness of the construction debacle - hundreds of defects found in both buildings - Weiss also questioned the quality of Berryman & Henigar's inspections.

"If I'm the man doing inspections," he said, "at the end of day, when it's discovered the steel is not there and the grout is not there, I'd ask myself, "Hmmm, they paid me to do inspections. How did this happen?' "

Before the dust settles, the district may have to file suit to recoup money it has spent trying to resolve the problems. As it is, district officials are withholding about $200,000 from Graham's payments. Graham has pledged to make the buildings right and pay for all repairs, which will likely take until late November to complete. Feaster is still on the job, but now serves as assistant superintendent. Berryman & Henigar continues to perform inspections on the school, though Varvel has been assigned elsewhere.

And the children?

They return to the campus on Monday. But they only get to occupy the old classroom space.

Their new cafeteria and media center are still being fixed.