November 2006 ISSUE
President’s Notebook
Laval Tragedy Brings to Light Regulatory Roles
BY DAVID CHALCROFT, P.ENG.
APEGGA President
The Laval overpass disaster on Sept. 30 was a stark reminder of the critical role professional engineers play in protecting the public. News of the collapse and the five fatalities reached me while I met with presidents of our sister associations in Ottawa at recent meetings of the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers.
We were encouraged to discover that representatives of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec were at the scene within hours of the collapse. OIQ issued a press release on Oct. 1. The relased noted that, if OIQ has reason to believe that an engineer has violated the Code of Ethics, a disciplinary process will be set in motion with an investigation.
OIC “must see to it that all engineers respect their obligations,” said the release.
The Laval tragedy aroused public concern about the safety of the infrastructure we all use in our daily lives, and called into question the engineering that has gone into it.
The Canadian Council of Professional Engineers also issued a press release expressing condolences on behalf of all associations across Canada. The CCPE press release was published in an October e-PEGG and the October PEGG.
For years CCPE, the Association of Consulting Engineers of Canada, the Transportation Association of Canada and others have been lobbying government about the lack of funding for highway infrastructure. The Transportation Association of Canada calculated the deficit on our national highways system alone at over $17 billion.
Until recently the federal government had made no investments in the national highway system for years, in spite of collecting over $4 billion per year in federal taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel.
This event displays in a nutshell how important the regulatory function is that APEGGA and our sister associations play. It is critical that the investigation and discipline process, whenever its use is warranted, is thorough, transparent and seen to be fair.
This is how we maintain, and in some cases restore, public confidence in the engineering profession, allowing the true value of its contribution to society to be fully appreciated.
APEGGA Plans To Speak Out
At our strategic planning meeting in May, APEGGA Council and staff updated the
APEGGA Strategic Plan and set priorities for 2007. One of our priorities is to
provide “leadership on professional issues and technical issues affecting
society.”
The plan is that your Association implement a proactive policy for speaking publicly on important issues — ones through which we can contribute to the public’s understanding and to positive solutions.
APEGGA needs to be prepared to speak out should a disaster like the Laval overpass collapse occur in Alberta. Just as importantly, we need to speak out on issues that are in our domain, those which can affect public safety and well-being — and not just after a disaster occurs.
President-Elect John McLeod, P.Eng., is chairing a task force to develop the terms of reference for APEGGA to address public policy issues.
Let me illustrate more completely.
Highway Safety?
In Canada there were 2,766 traffic fatalities in 2003 and 150,000 injury accidents.
This works out to over 220,000 deaths in an average 80-year lifespan.
Alberta had 385 fatalities, which is very high in relation to our 10 per cent share of Canada’s population. Passengers, pedestrians and other innocent parties accounted for over 45 per cent of the fatalities. Lack of seat belt use, alcohol and road conditions were significant contributing factors in most cases.
Dr. Louis Francescutti at the University of Alberta School of Public Health is the founder of the Injury Prevention Centre at University of Alberta Hospitals. Here’s what this widely quoted injury prevention expert has to say: “There is no doubt that a global epidemic exists which has been neglected for far too long. This epidemic continues to kill an estimated 1.2 million people a year and injures and disables another 50 million.”
The disease, says Dr. Francescutti, is traffic injuries. “The problem is simple. We as a society have become desensitized, habituated and complacent when it comes to traffic injuries.”
He notes that traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for Albertans under the age of 34 — and for our children.
Public safety has benefited significantly from engineering skills and innovations over the past two centuries.
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Water-borne diseases once killed thousands per year — today they’re virtually non-existent in the developed world, due to engineered water filtration and chlorination systems.
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Marine fatalities once counted in the thousands but are now a rarity, due to engineering advances in ship design, navigation aids and communications.
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Dam failures caused significant loss of life until societal attitudes dictated and engineering principles advanced. Now dams in Canada are designed to never fail. There has not been a fatality in Canada due to a large dam failure in at least 50 years.
However, one area of public safety that has not yet succumbed to engineering is highway safety. And why not?
Surely we can engineer seat belt ignition interlock devices to prevent a car from starting until all seat belts are secured. Surely we can design a breathalyzer and ignition interlock to prevent a car from starting if the driver has consumed alcohol.
Isn’t it time to outlaw the building of new two-lane, high-speed highways, which statistically have several times the fatality rates of four-lane divided freeways?
We need a change in societal attitudes to make progress on this front. Can we, the professions, help society and decision makers understand these issues and move them towards making the right decisions?
The Bre-X Scam
The Bre-X scandal caused significant financial loss to the Canadian public. As
many of you will remember, Bre-X was the Canadian company headquartered in Calgary
that fell quickly into disrepute over its supposed gold find.
In the mid-1990s, the company explored a gold prospect in Indonesia and progressively reported 200 million ounces of gold contained in high-quality ore (worth over $100 billion at today’s price), which drove the share price from pennies to over $280 in a few short months.
The market capitalization exceeded $4.5 billion on the Toronto Stock Exchange. A due diligence drilling program carried out by a prospective partner, Freeport McMoran, discovered that, as a Klondike prospector might say, there was no gold in them thar hills!
Earlier core samples had been salted with river deposited gold flakes (which would have been easily spotted by a professional geologist). In days, $4.5 billion in investor assets vanished.
A number of irregularities subsequently surfaced. Bre-X had not split its core samples to have half-samples tested by an independent assay lab. The site core lab “burned down,” destroying all evidence of the fraudulent core. During the run-up to the $280-per-share price, Bre-X principals sold significant quantities of stock, pocketing 10s of millions of dollars.
At least two geologists were involved in the Bre-X scam — chief geologist John Felderhof, who was in charge of exploration and the publishing of data, and field geologist Michael de Guzman. Mr. Felderhof escaped to Cayman Island and is on trial in Ontario where sentencing is expected in the near future. Mr. de Guzman reportedly fell or jumped out of a helicopter and was declared deceased days after the fraud was unveiled, although a report in 2004 claimed he was still alive in Brazil.
So far the only penalty meted out to any of the participants required that Mr. Felderhof to return his Man of the Year Award to the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada.
According to a board member of the British Columbia Securities Commission,
investment in Canadian mining stocks is still shunned by international investors
as a result of the Bre-X scandal and a perceived lack of improvement in the regulatory
process to prevent a recurrence of this type of scam.
Do APEGGA and its members have a role to play in educating the public and decision
makers about how to prevent this kind of economic damage to society from recurring?
Climate Change
The public’s attitude (and the government’s) is clearly still evolving
on the climate change issue as more and clearer information is made available.
What seems clear, so far, is that climate change is occurring and is likely not
reversible within the present century, even if the Kyoto global targets could
be met.
As a pragmatic response to climate change, CCPE has initiated two programs. These are the Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee, or PIEVC, and the proposed National Round Table on Sustainable Infrastructure, or NRTSI.
PIEVC will oversee a broad-based assessment of the vulnerability of Canadian public infrastructure to changing climatic conditions, including variability and extremes in four principal areas — drainage infrastructure, buildings, roads and related structures, and water resource facilities.
NRTSI will be a non-partisan, not-for-profit advisory body providing counsel to the infrastructure community.
Clearly CCPE is taking the lead on behalf of the professions in developing an informed response to the effects of climate change.
If you’re looking for a highly informative, easy—to-read, and new source of information on this topic, I can recommend Climate Change and Landscape in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, by Life Member Dr. Nat Rutter, OC, P.Geol., Murray Coppold, P.Geol., and Dr. Dean Rokosh, Geol.I.T. Find out more about this book in the September 2006 PEGG Online at www.apegga.org.
Your Views
Your comments will help guide Council to develop a framework to bring APEGGA’s
voice — your voice — to the public policy debate, where we can add
to the public’s understanding of technical and professional issues.
As always, please send your comments and suggestions to me directly at president@apegga.org.