Because Langley City is built on a floodplain, we have challenging soil conditions when it comes to the construction of buildings. As a result, when people propose constructing apartment buildings in Langley City, the City requires a geotechnical review to ensure that the construction and building designs will work in our soil conditions. This review includes the design for excavating underground parkades. Under provincial law, the City's only power is to ensure that a geotechnical engineer signs off on these designs. When an engineer signs off on a design, they take on the liability for any problem that could result from the design.
For as long as I can remember, this process worked well until December 2022, when there was a partial cave-in of a retaining wall put in place during the excavation of a parkade. This cave-in was extremely concerning, but it was a one-off. Then, in August of this year, there was another partial cave-in at another construction site. Council learned late last week about another soil shift event at another construction site. This is now a trend and is 100% unacceptable.
At Monday night's meeting, Langley City staff updated Council that the City will now require peer reviews on all geotechnical designs. This peer-review process means that at least two geotechnical engineers from different firms must sign off for an apartment project to move forward. The cost of this peer-review process will be on the builder. This new process is meant to ensure that a cave-in never happens again and restore trust in the design and construction of underground parkades in our community.
3 comments:
Back in the "old days" you couldn't build on a floodplain??
Langley City as a townsite was established in 1911 and is on a floodplain.
Of note is the fact that all previous comments have been removed, as I suspect this one will be also.
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