A Lesson From Beirut

Port of Beirut after the explosion photo by Mehr News Agency, 2020

The blast was horrific, judging from the photographs, heard as far away as the island of Cypress—from a massive amount of ammonium nitrate:

“According to the Lebanese government, about 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer was stored in a warehouse on the Beirut waterfront and caught fire, later exploding. The fertilizer arrived in the city more than six years ago aboard a Russian-owned cargo ship that made an unscheduled stop in the city. Lebanese port officials said they made several requests to the courts to have the stockpile removed, but got no response.”
from NY Times article by John Ismay, Aug 5, 2020

“The blast registered as magnitude 3.3 on the Richter scale, and caused devastation usually associated with major earthquakes. Two days later, the death toll rose to at least 130 people with another 5,000 injured. Beirut mayor Marwan Abboud told Agence France-Presse that 300,000 people are unable to return to their homes, as the damage covered half the city and could cost up to £11 billion to repair.”
from National Geographic article by Sarah Gibbens, Aug 7, 2020.

Beirut has seen such manmade violence in the latter part of the 20th Century–the people there must have been thinking ‘and now another round.’ Only instead of malevolent intent, an indifferent caretaking role seems to have caused it. Any number were responsible–anyone in an official position who failed their community.

We know ammonium nitrate from the Kansas City bombing, a homegrown terrorists’ attack. By comparison, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols used only 2 tons to destroy the Federal office building there. Two tons of fertilizer. There’ve been any number of previous explosions caused by ammonium nitrate, so storing such a massive amount with no plans to dispose of it sounds like a failure meant to happen.

In the States, we believe we’re better at regulating that the Lebanese, but I have my doubts.

For me, it recalled a warehouse-maintenance project for a small town outside Washington, D.C. Not a wealthy place, judging from the public works building they had been using–possibly since World War II? Theirs was an old dilapidated warehouse-cum-auto repair building perched on the edge of the Anacostia River–elevated barely six feet or so out of the 100-year flood plain, and only feet from the water itself. So whatever contamination was generated by the facility easily washed into the water. Along with raw sewage, that was the way things were done in the 50s.

Our firm had designed and overseen construction of previous maintenance facilities. But this was to be done as a ‘design-build’ project. Under the traditional design-bid-build process, architects and engineers are retained directly by an owner to design and prepare the construction documents, then contractors bid the documents, one is selected and builds the project–inspected by the designers who report back to the owner. During construction, an architect’s role is to ensure the building is built according to the documents, AND according to best practices in regard to life safety.

For the past several decades, contractors (notice the noun isn’t ‘builder’) have been pushing the design-build process, giving them a great deal more latitude on cost, their specialty of interest. Cost savings in inverse proportion to quality and safety–not always, but all too often. And there’s no truly independent voice speaking for the public.

A good analogy is the FAA allowing self-certification by the airplane industry.

In a ‘design-build’ project like this public works facility, the contractor signs a contract to design and construct the project for a fixed price, including architectural and engineering work. Meaning the architect and engineer contracts are held by and managed by the contractor (that term again) who builds the project.

Contractors see the world in terms of contracts, and one’s much like another in their eyes, particularly when the project managers are twenty-something, i.e. green. It takes an architect eight to ten years just to obtain a license to practice. Doesn’t mean we’re geniuses, but it does give an idea of what’s there to learn.

Architects are educated, then trained and licensed to protect health, life safety and welfare in the communities where we practice. Like doctors, we risk making life-threatening mistakes. When an architect’s contract is directly with an owner, the obligation is to provide the owner with our best advice, regardless of cost when it comes to life safety. Alternatively, if one’s contract is with the contractor, we are under an obligation to help that entity make money–that’s the business deal that we’ve struck. And since repeat business is the art of keeping clients happy, disagreeing with the contractor is frowned on.

I’ve never been a fan of design-build construction. There is an inherent conflict when one’s contractual obligations move you away from who ultimately will use the facility. An old adage goes, an owner can have a very well-built facility, on time and under budget, but can only have two out of the three.

This particular facility would be my first and last design-build project. On principle, I’d chosen not to do one before, and only took on this one when a senior associate left the firm–leaving a mess of a project in his wake. He had negotiated and signed with a contractor and failed to understand the owner’s requirements, including some key life safety issues. One ‘joy’ of owning an architectural practice is cleaning up the mess made by others.

Beginning a project, no one has all the answers–but you need to anticipate the questions. And resolve them early in the process when the changes won’t cost as much time and money.

Very soon I discovered the project I’d inherited was behind schedule, supposedly beginning final construction documents, and missing a building code analysis–meaning no one had reviewed the building program against what the building code required. For a simple project, caught early enough, it’s a recoverable mistake, though it’s still a mistake.

A single-use occupancy, say a modest office building, requires one apply the code requirements for that single use. When you combine office, training, sleeping, vehicle repair and warehouse functions, now the requirements are geometrically increased (not simply additive).

With the unresolved questions this project still had, in reality it really hadn’t gotten out of preliminary design.

Warehouses store things such as paint, tires, and yes, ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Vehicle repair facilities employ solvents, oil products, gasoline, diesel, antifreeze, and any number of combustibles, environmental contaminants and health risks. Office workers sit at desks with computers and phones, or in a lecture room for instruction. In bad weather, the crews sleep in the classrooms off shift when they can. And need fresh air to breathe. So what they’ll store in the warehouse next door matters. Road salts, fertilizers, poisons and paint? The volumes of stored materials matter. Will a paint booth be required? Arc welding? Are there to be overhead cranes? lifts for the vehicles? What the hell sized vehicles will be maintained–will they fit? Pretty basic questions, you would think.

For the first meeting with this owner, I prepared a multi-page questionnaire on how they planned to use the new facility. Types of vehicles they planned to maintain, from SUVs and pickups to garbage trucks, dump trucks and snow plows. Had they hired a specialty contractor for the vehicle exhaust system–since that had been excluded from our scope–and what about the lifts? To save money, they’d contracted for a pre-engineered metal building shell, to house this awkward kit of parts. And they wanted future cranes hung from the pre-engineered frame, but they couldn’t say what capacity crane they might buy, so how does one size the roof framing?

The public works folk seemed like well-intentioned people who had never built a facility. Not unusual, but not being able to get our questions answered was most definitely unique.

In a previous life, I’d designed a maintenance facility for a Metro maintenance yard, complete with overhead cranes to lift entire transit cars from their trucks (the wheel assemblies), again with a storage component for road salt and fertilizer among other things, and again with an office component. But the building program had been well detailed, so the answer was straightforward: separate each function with fire walls. It may sound counterintuitive, but given a sufficient volume of road salts sitting next to ammonium nitrate fertilizers, explosion venting needs to be provided in addition to fire walls.

They don’t teach you these things in school, but they do teach you to review the code and do your research.

If one has warehouse, repair and office functions in a single building, fire walls separating each are required. How in hell do you create decent firewalls in a pre-engineered building when the owners couldn’t even afford masonry? And how would you even begin if the owners couldn’t give you a list of the items they planned to warehouse? Gasoline goes boom. So you have a ignition source. Sodium nitrate is an amazing accelerant. So WTF, talk to me!

Crickets.

The site of the future facility sat atop an asphalt spoil pile. Accumulated over decades, to a depth of nine feet across a wide part of the site, next to the Anacostia River. With the same volume generating petroleum byproducts leaching into the river. No one swims in the Anacostia River. Long before I’d inherited the mess, the decision had been made to build on top of the spoil pile, leaving it in place (friction piles would be cheaper than excavating and removing that volume of contaminated material).

And a site plan had already been filed accordingly with the county permit folk–before the building was fully designed. Site plans these days take a year or more to be permitted, so the twenty-something contractor’s project manager brightly had the civil engineer working independently of the architect, unsupervised. The lead lemming, so to speak.

Compared to indefinitely storing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, siting a facility on top of nine feet of asphalt spoils was probably not the worst decision ever made, even if its long term potential to leach petrochemicals will remain for as long as the facility sits on top of it.

I was asked to leave the firm I’d help found nearly thirty years previously, as the new managing partner claimed because I had “a bad relationship with the clients.” Seems he believed the client was the contractor, whose ‘maintenance’ was the most important thing in his eyes, whereas I thought protecting health, safety and welfare of the community was what the firm had been hired to do.

The project sat for nearly a year stuck in permit review because the clients couldn’t or wouldn’t deliver their list of stored materials, size of vehicles, minor stuff. It was still stuck in permit review (by an outside consultant team who wouldn’t budge) when I left the firm. I knew the consultants–I had respect for them. And have to wonder if their contract was renewed given their unwillingness to wave incense over the mess. I googled the site yesterday, and sure enough, it’s being built. I just hope they don’t plan on storing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate.

Life’s not perfect, not by a long stretch, but if you don’t make an effort, why get up in the morning? Stay stoned and watch the clouds sail by. Running an architectural practice is hard work, and you need to make decisions that sometimes go against your own financial interests–provided you care about what it is you were hired to do. When things get tight, you cut salaries, including your own, so everyone can keep their jobs, and when clients won’t work in the interests of their community, it’s sometimes necessary to cut them loose. Ethics in business, as in life, matter.

The Beirut firefighters quoted in another Washington Post article said:

“It’s like we’re dying a hundred deaths every day. Every day. Every time we extract one of our friends, we get sad all over again. Then we go to the funeral. Then we extract another friend. Then we go to another funeral. We used to say, ‘We hope they’re alive.’ Now we say ‘we hope we find their fragments.’ For their families.”
from Washington Post article by Sarah Dadouch, Aug 12, 2020