Grading and Excavation Contractor

John Trotti

By John Trotti

In our previous issue’s Editor’s Comments, we introduced the thought that:

In the next five years, the acceptance of digitally enhanced/controlled equipment and the underlying understandings of its use should be virtually universal, but this is only the entry ticket into the arena where the dramatic changes lie...the real-time digital job site and emergence of highly flexible, nonlinear project management processes, techniques, and visions.

This is a vision that many of you already hold, but for those who don’t, I’d like to encourage you to pay particular attention to this issue’s “Technology in Construction” that descends into machine control’s underlying layer … the Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) and in tandem one of the many methods for developing data (in this case a GPS-toting ATV).

Over the past year our “Technology in Construction” section has used machine control as its entry point into more detailed discussions of the digital job site. This was not, as you might suspect, by accident, because we wanted to root the grander subjects in something that made obvious and immediate sense—a blade, a bucket, or a compactor wheel in your favorite environment … dirt. Now we turn to the underpinnings of a revolution changing the way all of us will do business with TINs at the forefront.

If in this and several succeeding installments we do nothing more than acquaint you with the purpose of TINs, along with a familiarity with the features on which they are based, we will have arrived at the doorstep of what must be regarded as the most significant revolution in project management since the emergence of the computer.

No surprise that the management process begins and ends with a total understanding of what the project is about, but less than a half-step behind comes the need for a precise knowledge of the job site and what it takes for you to get from any point in time or space to where it is you plan to go.

Now more than ever before, your ability to swiftly, accurately, and confidently determine work to be done—the amount of material to be dug, scraped, pushed, compacted, and hauled; how this relates to machine time, fuel consumption, payroll, and the myriad details you once lumped into a category called “miscellaneous”—is fundamental to your survival in a business whose margins for error have shrunk to near zero. Love it or hate it, that’s the reality of the modern job site, brought to you through the wonders of technology.

Bottom Lines
Your primary concern in these discussions has to do with the efficiency with which you are able to marshal your resources of leadership, knowledge, people, and equipment to move dirt … and ultimately to prosper. That’s where our focus will continue to lie, and that’s why you’ll want to check in with our “Technology in Construction” column every issue. But there’s another matter here that is all too often overlooked, or if considered, apt to be regarded as pretty much a regulatory matter … soil conservation, the bottomest of all bottom lines.

Before you can so much as scratch the surface of an acre-or-larger parcel of land, you have to create and swear vile oaths to live up to stormwater and erosion control plans that often seem to be—and sometimes are—exercises in governmental overzealousness (efforts we cover in great depth in our Stormwater and Erosion Control magazines). Even when we see the necessity for installing and maintaining best management practices to counter the forces of wind and water because of their impacts on air and water quality, rarely does our vision include the effect our activities are having on the most precious and irrecoverable of all natural resources, the dirt itself.

Right now, energy has front stage in our pantheon of public concerns, and without belittling its importance (after all it’s the focus of another sister publication, Distributed Energy) its challenges are far less daunting than those of either air or water quality. But even those challenges pale by comparison to soil loss. It’s one thing to deal with dust and turbidity where we have the means to limit and remediate situations in time in our own lifetimes. But soil loss? Here we’re talking remediation not only out of our hands, but out of processes that operate in geologic terms, where the replacement of just one millimeter of new topsoil will not occur in your or even your children’s lifetime.

Think Greece 2,500 years ago, when it was a veritable Garden of Eden. Then think about it now … for the most part, a rocky barren reminder of what lies in store for much of the world, including us. There are areas in the US that have lost over half their topsoil in the last 100 years, and it’s not coming back! So while the new tools and the revolution they support are important to your prosperity, the results of their precision and efficiencies will be felt by generations yet unborn … a pretty good opportunity, don’t you think?

GEC - November/December 2007

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