Forensic Engineering

Civil Concepts provides engineering in virtually every engineering discipline including:

Civil Concepts specializes in forensic engineering services including cause and origin studies resulting from wind, fire, earthquake, flood, hail, collapse, construction defects, explosions, human error, third party damage, etc.

We provide forensic engineering related to structural damage of any type including roofing damage, mechanical damage, electrical and automation damage. We have worked on commercial, residential and industrial buildings; roads, bridges, power generating stations, data centers, manufacturing plants, wells, temporary shoring, cranes and equipment and process plants in North America and Asia Pacific region.

During our response to the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquakes, Civil Concepts was asked to perform a complete engineering peer review of the scope of damages and methods of repairs to a 12-level moment frames reinforced concrete hotel/condo building that sustained structural and liquefaction damage during the earthquakes. Prior to our involvement, the original “engineer of record” (working for building owner) and our predecessor engineering firm working on behalf of insurance market spent 9 months diagnosing the damages and developing a schematic method to repair and bringing the building up to required 67% of the building code. The previous team of engineers could only offer a partial strengthening plan to meet code and estimated the cost of repairs to exceed the $55 million dollar insurance policy limit.

Within 3-weeks of our initial inspection, Civil Concepts completed our initial site inspection and assessment report, developed a schematic plan to fully repair and strengthen the building to code requirements and prepared a 4D Model-based presentation for the insurance market and building owners. The 4D Model based presentation demonstrated the spatial impacts and incompleteness of the previous team, simultaneously showing the time and cost savings of our proposed Carbon-Fiber Reinforced Polymer plan. The owner recognized and appreciated that our plan would have little to no effect on the spatial building layout and reduce repair time by 50%; the insurance carrier would realize a multi-million savings on repair costs. All parties supported and authorized Civil Concepts design and receipt of full “consent” (building permit) for the earthquake repair/code required strengthening of the Heritage Hotel using a complete C-FRP wrap repair and retrofit.

We refused to accept outdated methods to retrofit, we went beyond where the previous engineers’ teams were willing; we were the first engineering firm to receive consent for a full C-FRP repair in the country of New Zealand. Based on our work, the claim settled for approximately $20 million, saving our client almost $35 million when compared with the $55 million reserve the claim was set when we began working on this claim.