The $3 Million Second Opinion

Smart moves save money - just ask 160 West End Avenue. When this Manhattan co-op faced a $4 million facade repair project, their board sought a second opinion. The result? A more targeted approach that brought the cost down to under $900,000. John Galetta, principal at Superstructures Engineers and Architects tells the story to Habitat’s Paula Chin. Lesson learned: a thorough investigation before starting repairs can lead to massive savings. 

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!

Transcript

Paula Chin: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about challenges facing New York Co-op and condo board directors. I'm Paula Chin of Habitat Magazine, and with me today is John Galetta, a principal at Superstructures Engineers and Architects. Welcome John. It's every board's nightmare. They're doing a routine facade inspection and safety check, and boy, they run into some unexpected structural issue that has the potential to put a big dent in their finances.

You dealt with this recently at a very large co-op . What happened? Let's start. What is the building and how big is it? 

John Galetta: The building is 160 West End Avenue. It's about a 30 story residential apartment building. That was constructed in the sixties, I believe.

Maybe the early sixties. It's a cavity wall brick building. We actually got involved with the building because we were working on its sister building. The building is kind of a twin so 170 West End Avenue shares a common wall with 160 West End Avenue. If you look at it from walking down the street, it looks like, one enormous building, but it's actually two separate buildings.

We actually did a facade inspection and we were in the middle of a facade restoration project at 170 West End Avenue when I got a call from a member of the board, I think he's the president of the board at 160 West End Avenue. Had a few questions for me.

He understood that our project at 170 West End Avenue would've been about a $600,000 project. We were restoring some brick, we were restoring some concrete and some loose concrete railings. They hired a different engineer to basically do their FISP inspection, facade inspection, safety program inspection at the building.

And they finished their investigation and were being told that they had somewhere in the neighborhood of a $4 million restoration project to do and since the buildings are so similar he was wondering, how that could be. It turns out that the original engineer did his due diligence when he did the facade inspection.

There, there are requirements from a FISP that under Cycle Nine you have to, for cavity wall brick buildings, you need to take some investigative probes to check for the presence and the condition of masonry veneer tires. 

Paula Chin: So you were originally working on 170 and the sister building 160 called you guys in. 

John Galetta: We are working on 170. So that's why they called us. 'Cause we happened to be on the building next door, which was further along, in terms of the project being done. I

Paula Chin: see. And they had already brought in an engineer to do their FISP report. Let me jump back. What is a cavity wall building? 

John Galetta: So a cavity wall building is a building where the exterior walls are composed of basically a four inch layer of brick, which is the material that you see from the outside when you're walking down the street. And then behind that brick is actually an airspace.

 It's a cavity. And then beyond the airspace is another layer or sometimes two layers of masonry which basically makes up the entire wall. The cavity is there for basically waterproofing. Water will enter the first wythe of brick, it gets in somehow, and then it is free to travel through the cavity and then weed out at channels at the bottom of the wall.

So that basically serves as the waterproofing system of the building. But when you construct walls that way, the outside wythe of brick needs to be. Fastened to the backup construction. And that is done with what are called veneer ties masonry ties, which are basically these metal straps or or metal hooks that are connected to the backup.

They span over the cavity and then they're set in the brick wall when the wall is being built. 

Paula Chin: So these are metal pieces that are drilled into the brick. And then on the other side is it an L shape that it's fastened to the inside wall or is it also just drilled in so it's a straight connection?

John Galetta: There are all different kinds. Depending on when the building was built they used, original veneer ties. Basically just looked like a one inch or one and a half inch piece of flat metal that's corrugated. It's got these little ridges and it was just when they built the building, it was set in one side of the, in the back of construction, in the mortar joint.

And then when they built the outside wythe, the part that was sticking out of the wall was set into the front wall. But they're usually installed in new buildings they are installed while the wall is being erected. And are, set into mortar joints.

There are all different types. There are adjustable types. There are all different, shapes. And some are better than others. There are special types you use when you restore a building. But basically what they are is a fairly thin piece of metal, a metal tie, if you will, that connects the front wythe of masonry to the backup masonry to keep the veneer wall from basically falling off. 

Paula Chin: So at this building my understanding was you did the facade inspection or the engineer had done it right. And, there was a problem with the ties? Was that the issue? 

John Galetta: The previous engineer as part of the work required to to prepare a FISP report, did some investigative probe work at the building.

And the reason the building department requires this for these types of walls is to basically check for again, the presence and condition of the ties. So they opened up a few probes and while in most of the probes they opened, ties were present, they were spaced pretty randomly.

And they did a good job. And they actually went above and beyond the minimum number of probes required as part of the investigation. And they discovered that the building had an issue with the spacing of their ties. 

Paula Chin: So meaning the spacing was erratic and therefore there weren't enough ties or just that it was, laid out erratically?

John Galetta: Let's just back up a second. One of the important parts of the subject of brick ties is actually putting them in, in the right place. And because they are fairly thin, you rely on the redundancy of these ties to actually do their job.

So they're usually, they're installed at regular intervals within a wall. And so if you can imagine just like a grid, of these masonry ties behind the brick that are all working together to do their job. If one fails for any particular reason, there's redundancy ties around it so that it doesn't become a big problem.

And the code requires that ties being installed at these particular intervals, which nowadays is, basically a 16 inch drill. 

Paula Chin: And this engineer found what? That there weren't enough of them? 

John Galetta: Right. That they were spaced beyond that spacing.

There were some areas where none existed. But, , in most locations there was evidence of, of ties being installed, but they were spaced pretty far apart. So they weren't actually doing the job that they were intended to do. So they did discover this problem, which did not manifest itself on the outside of the building by the way, that they the facade looked to be in very good shape and didn't have any of the conditions that you would usually find if there was a lack of wall ties. 

Paula Chin: And the diagnosis of this engineer, what did they recommend? What kind of repairs? 

John Galetta: So they identified the condition and clearly something needed to be done. Their solution based on their investigation was to specify that helical ties, which I'll explain in a minute, be installed basically every 16 inches along the facade of the building. So what they did was they didn't have the confidence, know where the ties were and where they weren't. So with a broad brush, they just decided to assume that there were no ties there at all for the sake of argument and install brand new ties at 16 inch intervals vertically and horizontally to comply with the building code. 

Paula Chin: And this is a 30 story building. I imagine the price tag on that was pretty steep 

John Galetta: Yes. It was over $2 million I think just for the ties. And with the other masonry work that was required their cost estimate for the work was above $4 million. 

Paula Chin: So did the board at 160 call you in essence for a second opinion? 

John Galetta: Yes. We reviewed what the other engineer did and, it was a little bit of a broad brush solution especially since in most of the probes ties actually were present.

So we felt that the project that was gonna be required wasn't the magnitude that the other engineer felt it was. We didn't so much provide a second opinion as, as much as we were hired to do another investigation, so we did our own due diligence as though we were hitting the building for the first time.

We did use the other engineers' probe documentation. We did our own probes also. We did use that as background information. It was good reference. But we did our own independent investigation, which consisted of several scaffold drops to get our hands on the building.

We did several borescope surveys, which was basically we drilled a hole through the facade and put a camera inside the cavity to check for the presence of the ties and the condition and the spacing. We used what's called a pulse dive, which is like a metal detector if you will.

We basically hit the facades in their entirety along the scaffold, the representative scaffold drops that we went on. And we used this method to map out where the ties were. We actually had little chalk circles on the facade where we found them. We went back to the office and mapped them out on the facades, and we were able to identify some patterns on particular facades.

There were areas, let's say under windows that, that seemed to comprehensively not have ties installed. And then there were other areas of the facade where the ties seemed adequate for the most part. So we basically interpolated our findings and came up with a more, I guess I'll say realistic scope of work.

Paula Chin: So you did a sample of the building, a sample area, because obviously this is, a 30 story building. And then based on what you found there, and I would imagine there's a certain pattern of the windows you extrapolated for the rest of the building? 

John Galetta: Again we were able to identify some patterns to where they were missing which clues you in on good crews working on the job and maybe not so great ones when the building was first built. What we found predominantly was that the ties were actually in pretty good shape. And the ties that existed, we could reuse. We didn't have to ignore them.

And the solution to the problem was really more in supplementing the the number of ties by installing more at the locations where they didn't exist. So for cost estimated purposes and the purpose of designing a project, we took our findings from the representative drops that we did and interpolated the percentage that we applied to to the entire building.

 Long story short, by doing that and by acknowledging that the current condition of the building we actually were able to specify a project with replacing the ties and doing the other restorative work necessary on the building. I think we just got bids back recently.

It looks like the project will probably be awarded for for somewhere in the neighborhood of of under $900,000. 

Paula Chin: The entire project. In other words, it went from 4 million to less than one? 

John Galetta: That's right. And that's for the entire project with what we expect to find. And then what will happen during construction is when the contractor is doing his scaffold drops to do the restoration work we will be using the pulse dive and again, more borescope findings to map out the ties that we were not able to do when we did our representative drop to actually just locate where these helical ties or these restoration ties should be installed. So it's a little bit more upfront investigation time.

But you can see, you know what, just a little bit extra time and analysis can do to save the the building, what in this case is going to turn out to be a very great deal of money. 

Paula Chin: That's a huge savings. Is there any way you can quantify, for example, with the first engineer they were recommending, replacing all of them, how many ties are we talking about and how many ties are you estimating that will need to be supplemented? How many new ones to be put in? 

John Galetta: The actual number of ties I don't know. I, okay. We could probably do a quick calculation, but I don't know that offhand. Clearly considerably less. 

Paula Chin: Yeah. Where where does the project stand now?

John Galetta: The project was designed and bid. We got bids back that we analyzed. And I'm not sure if the client has made a decision on who to go with, but I suspect we'll be in construction in the spring. 

Paula Chin: Okay. And John, what would you say is the takeaway here? Second opinion, that engineers can play it too safe. What's the lesson? 

John Galetta: I think ultimately what it really is what I just said before where, engineers are different and I guess they'll have different opinions but my feeling is that a thorough investigative job and a well-designed project, it makes a big difference in construction. Both in terms of just doing the work properly, and creating a good roadmap for the contractor to follow in terms of detailing makes a big difference. Spending a little bit extra money.

So when owners are reviewing proposals from engineers, if you spend, $10,000 more during the investigation phase to get a much better picture of the condition of your building, , you can save exponentially over the course of the project. 

Paula Chin: So in this case, front loading the project or just doing more on the front end did indeed save them a lot of money on the back end. 

John Galetta: Especially for conditions like this kind of thing. The biggest problem was a problem that you can't see. If it's brick cracks if it's all manifesting itself on the surface it's easy to quantify that stuff.

 But these conditions that are not visible, that require some, out of the box thinking and some creativity in terms of, getting to the bottom of the issue. It's this type of project that an owner should consider going above and beyond, don't just rely on a visual examination.

 And do some more, hire the engineer that's gonna do more due diligence. Or hold your engineer accountable. 

Paula Chin: John, this is a great story, a great example of what a board should do. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

John Galetta: Okay, my pleasure.