Chapter 38 Quiz — Heavy Civil Construction

C. You bid a rate. The agency multiplies each rate by its own estimated quantity to produce a comparable total. What you are actually paid is your rate times the quantity measured in the field, which may differ substantially from the bid total with no change order at all.

C. Incidental means required and not separately paid. It is the single most expensive concept in a DOT specification for an estimator who reads item names instead of clauses — Ingrid's first job cost about $14.50 per foot of pipe on exactly this mistake.

B. Revenue 2,880 × $38.50 = $110,880. Cost (2,880 × $20.00) + $48,000 = $105,600. Margin $5,280, or $1.83/CY. Of the $35,520 lost, $19,200 is stranded fixed cost and $16,320 is overhead and profit on units never built.

B. Type I compares the actual condition against what the contract documents indicated. Boring logs showing rock at elevation 1,202–1,210 are an indication; rock at 1,247 differs from it materially. Always analyze Type I first — it is a comparison of a document to a measurement, whereas Type II requires you to argue that a condition was both unknown and unusual.

C. Notice before disturbance is typically a condition precedent, and the owner's response — "we were never given the opportunity to inspect" — is often enough on its own. The claim usually dies from a rational field decision to keep working, not from a weakness in entitlement. Whether a particular notice provision is enforced strictly varies by jurisdiction and contract.

B. A GBR converts an unpriceable unknown into an allocated, measurable one: conditions worse than the baseline are compensable, conditions better belong to the contractor or are shared. It does not guarantee anything about the ground; it allocates the risk of the ground.

B. Neither changes the bid total. Modest front-end loading reflecting genuine early cost is normal and defensible; agencies often cap mobilization for that reason. Quantity-error unbalancing prices items away from their cost because you believe the quantities are wrong — a wager against the public — and a materially unbalanced bid can be rejected as non-responsive.

C. CPM answers "what must finish before what." A time-location chart answers "who is standing where, when." Two crews overlapping in time looks entirely normal on a Gantt chart and is a productivity and safety crisis in a 40-foot corridor. CPM has no concept of space.

B. 23.23 ÷ 6.23 = 3.73, rounded up to 4. Three trucks makes the excavator the waiting party and drops production roughly 20%; five trucks means you are paying for a unit that idles. Swell matters for converting loose to bank measure, not for matching the fleet.

B. Rising means cut (material becoming available), falling means fill (material being consumed). The curve is a running algebraic total of cut minus fill along the alignment; it has nothing directly to do with the road's elevation profile. Where the curve ends above zero you have waste; where it dips below zero you must borrow.

B. 1,180 × $93.37 = $110,176.60; × 0.95 = $104,667.77; loss $5,508.83. The material stays in the road, the cost to place it was identical, and the entire loss comes out of margin.

C. And the contractual sting is that the utility owner usually has no contract with you — no liquidated damages, no schedule obligation, its own budget and backlog. Your remedy, if any, runs against the owner through the delay provisions, and many public contracts limit the agency's liability for utility delay or grant time but not money.

False. Unit price protects you from quantity error in the direction the drawings anticipated. When the ground's character changes, the schedule can pay you less while your cost per unit goes up — exactly what happened on the Cottonwood Creek shafts, where paid quantity fell 48.1% (616 LF to 320 LF) while rock drilling cost roughly six times what augering soil cost. That gap is what the differing site conditions clause exists to fill.

False. The contractor is obligated to comply with the conditions, and the conditions contain hard schedule constraints — in-stream work windows, clearing restrictions, stabilization limits. The contractor who fails to put those windows on the schedule owns the consequence, as the eleven-month culvert delay in §38.8 illustrates.

False. They shift weather risk in time to the agency; the contractor still absorbs it in cost, because equipment, salaried staff, bonds, and the field office are on the job whether or not the day is charged. Neither calendar-day nor working-day contracting is free — they are two different answers to who owns the weather.

False. The blast plan designs the blast. The pre-blast survey is a documented condition record of nearby structures, wells, and utilities before the first shot, and its entire purpose is evidentiary: it is the only reliable way to demonstrate that a crack pre-existed your work.

False. An unsigned ticket is your opinion; a signed one is in practice a payment. If the inspector declines to sign, you write on the ticket that he declined and why, and you send it to the resident engineer the same afternoon. CO #14 at Northgate is the cautionary case: of $186,400 incurred, only $121,000 could be substantiated and the settlement landed at $142,750.

False. It is a safety finding as much as a productivity finding — a pipe crew in a trench next to loaded haul trucks, a grade checker in an excavator's swing radius, a roller beside an open excavation. It is theme #4 in geometry: schedule pressure is a hazard.

1. The unit-price bid schedule — paid the measured quantity, which fell from 616 LF to 320 LF and cost Kestrel $121,952 of revenue.
2. The quantity variation clause — recovered stranded fixed cost on a 48.1% underrun of a major item ($22,500 allowed).
3. The differing site conditions clause — paid the increased cost per unit and the consequences of the changed character of work: rock premium, tooling, standby ($135,216 allowed, including markup).
4. Force account — paid the directed verification coring, which had no pay item ($44,160, every ticket signed the day it was worked).

The management point is that a manager who reaches for only one mechanism argues the wrong case or leaves money behind. Total recovered: $201,876 — and Kestrel still finished the item $38,796 below its planned margin.

Neat-line measurement pays for a theoretical prism defined by the plans — a footprint plus a stated offset on a stated slope — regardless of how much material you actually removed. Safe sloping, working room outside the prism, and sloughing are all real excavation that is not paid. In §38.5.1 the actual volume ran 1.35 times the neat-line volume, so a cost of $14.79 per BCY moved became $19.97 per CY paid. If you build a unit price from cost-per-yard-moved without applying that factor, you have underpriced the item by about a third.

An assembly is a recipe with a roughly stable cost per unit — a linear foot of stud partition costs about the same whether you build 100 LF or 18,600 LF. A cycle has no stable cost per unit: the rate is the output of a calculation involving bucket size, fill factor, cycle time, efficiency, swell, and fleet balance, and it changes completely with the haul distance. Bid-day consequence: changing the haul from 3.2 miles to 6 miles moves the paid unit cost from about $20.00 to past $24.00/CY — a 20% swing on a single logistics assumption that no unit-cost book can tell you. The haul road is a line item in disguise.

Minutes 0–5. Stop work in the affected reach. Nothing else happens until this is done, and it is done verbally, on the radio, to the operator and the foreman. The pipe is not moved, cut, or exposed further.

Minutes 5–20. Document. Photographs from at least three angles with a scale and a station identifier in frame; measured horizontal offset from a survey control point and measured depth to top of pipe; note material, apparent condition, direction, and whether it appears active. Enter it in the field book with time and the names of everyone present. If the agency's inspector is on site, walk him to it now and ask him to initial the entry.

Minutes 20–35. Notify. Written notice to the resident engineer identifying station, time, the condition, the contract documents it differs from (or the absence of any record of it), the fact that work has stopped, and a request to inspect before the condition is disturbed. Reserve rights to cost and time. No dollar figure. Simultaneously, call the one-call service for an emergency locate and start calling utility owners.

Minutes 35–60. Redeploy, do not idle. Move the crew to a reach that is unaffected — this is mitigation, and you will be asked about it. Open a dedicated cost code for the event and tell the foreman that all hours and equipment associated with it go to that code starting now. Begin the daily force-account-style record even if no directive has issued yet; it is far easier to discard than to reconstruct.

The two mechanisms. (1) Differing site conditions — likely Type II if the pipe appears in no document at all, possibly Type I if the plans affirmatively depicted the corridor as clear; it requires prompt written notice, non-disturbance, an inspection opportunity, and documentation of the actual condition. (2) Force account / extra work — for whatever the agency directs you to do about it (support it, relocate it, hand-excavate around it); it requires daily records of labor by name and classification, equipment by unit with operating and standby hours separated, materials with tickets, a narrative tying the work to the directive, and the inspector's signature that day.

The superintendent's instinct to finish the reach is not stupid — it is the rational production response, and it is exactly the instinct that destroys valid claims. The cost of the stoppage is a few hours of crew time. The cost of the destroyed claim is the entire event.