Geotechnical News • June 2018
27
GEOTECHNICAL INSTRUMENTATION NEWS
their customer’s project, are they
exposing themselves to profession-
al liability concerns? Remember
Nicoll Highway in Singapore!
In closing, I encourage you to pay
more attention to human factors in
the future than you have in the past.
As Ralph Peck said to us,
“We need
to carry out a vast amount of obser-
vational work, but what we do should
be done for a purpose, and be done
well”.
References
Link to a video of a lecture by Allen
Marr, given in Cambridge, Eng-
land last year:
watch?v=67gAXmxcokA
Martin Beth’s article in GIN, titled
“Eight common sense rules for suc-
cessful monitoring”.
-
calnews.com/instrumentation_news.
php. June 2016.
A 13-step procedure for systematic
planning of monitoring programs. I’ve
published various versions of this. For
the latest, e-mail me at
john@dun-
nicliff.eclipse.co.uk
or visit Geokon’s
website (see below).
Discussions of above points 8 and 9 by
manufacturers of instruments
David Richardson, Durham Geo Slope Indicator
At DGSI, it is not our practice to
provide recommendations to the
designers of monitoring programs on
what instruments are needed on their
projects. We will assist by offering
advice for the appropriate style of a
sensor (e.g. pneumatic vs. vibrating
wire piezometers or traversing vs. in-
place inclinometers), but we will not
recommend which sensors should be
installed.
As the manufacturer, we typically
do not know the detailed informa-
tion about the site, and we are rarely
provided the geotechnical or the pro-
posed structural loading information
required to make informed recom-
mendations about the most appropri-
ate instrumentation. Even though we
have geotechnical engineers on staff,
providing “consulting services” is not
our practice.
David L. Richardson
Product Line and Tech Support Man-
ager
Durham Geo Slope Indicator
2175 West Park Court, Stone Moun-
tain, GA 30087, USA
Tony Simmonds. Geokon Inc.
I discussed this with Barrie Sellers
(President Emeritus, Geokon Inc.)
and believe he sums up the concern
regarding designers of monitoring
programs and instrument manufactur-
ers very well with the following;
I think you could say that manufac-
turers represent a valuable source
of knowledge and expertise on the
choice of instruments and methods to
accomplish a certain measurement
but they are not the ones to decide
which measurements are necessary to
answer which geotechnical questions
or concerns – these should be within
the purview of a registered geotechni-
cal engineer.
In keeping with this and, as an added
resource to those customers who
approach us in need of direction, we
have included a link on the Projects
page of our website
.
com) to John Dunnicliff’s article “A
13-step procedure for systematic plan-
ning of monitoring programmes using
geotechnical instrumentation”. [This
article is the same as the one included
as the last of the three references
above. JD].
Tony Simmonds
Director
Geokon Inc., 48 Spencer Street
Lebanon, NH, 03766, USA
Author’s/Editor’s Note
I invited eight manufacturers of instruments from North America and Europe to send me discussions
of the above points 8 and 9, in the hope that we’d be able to agree on how to chart a way forward with
these issues. Six sent me discussion, which follow, in alphabetical order of company names.
