CAPITAL POINTE
Panel hears from city expert
Part of the Bregg Cleaners & Tailors building could fall victim to a shifting Capital Pointe site, according to an engineer called by the City of Regina.
Rob Kenyon testified Wednesday before a hearing of the Saskatchewan Building and Accessibility Standards Appeal Board, which is set to decide whether the city has the authority to fill in the excavation pit at the corner of Albert Street and Victoria Avenue.
He spoke the day after another expert, who was called by the site’s owner Westgate Properties, said the hole should hold up well until December. Kenyon came to a radically different conclusion.
“The site should be considered unsafe,” said Kenyon, who is manager of geotechnical engineering with KGS Group.
His concerns centred on the northeast corner of the excavation pit, an area threaded with gas and storm sewer lines. Kenyon said the corner has shifted “way more than people anticipated at the design stage.”
“The movements are significant,” he said. “If you really were to lose that corner you might lose part of the dry-cleaning building in the process.”
He said there are already cracks in the area. He noted the building has shifted eight or nine millimetres — possibly more at its footings — and warned that the nearby North Canadian Oils Building could also be “impacted” by further movement.
Westgate’s expert, engineer Kaising Hui, acknowledged on Tuesday that the northeast corner had moved. But he said that occurred before remediation work in the winter. He stressed that the site is now “safe and stable.”
He appeared again on Wednesday, when city lawyer Christine Clifford pressed him in the leadup to Kenyon’s testimony. She asked Hui about potential risks from water pooling in the pit, from cracks in nearby asphalt and from movement causing the gas lines to rupture.
Hui played down all those points, again stressing that the site has been stable since remediation work last winter. But he admitted he can’t rule out every risk — since some lie outside of his area of expertise.
“If you ask open question like is the excavation safe, I can’t answer you,” he said. “As an engineer we don’t guarantee anything.”
Hui is engineer of record for the Capital Pointe project, a role he also fulfils for the west section of the Regina bypass. Kenyon has also worked on a local landmark: The new Mosaic Stadium building.
That work became relevant as Clifford prodded him to poke holes in Hui’s report. Kenyon said different assumptions would change the results. He discussed soil properties like cohesion, and said the value he used when doing calculations for the stadium would bode ill for the Capital Pointe pit.
It would bring the all-important “factor of safety” down to a level even Hui admitted would be unstable.
Kenyon said there are many unanswered questions about the excavation pit. He noted nobody has any idea what level the groundwater table is at, since it hasn’t been measured in eight years.
He said a “catastrophic” onrush of water could reduce the factor of safety by even more.
“It can get nasty in a hurry,” he said.
But Westgate’s lawyer hit back with a line of questioning that shifted between tense and confrontational. Sahil Shoor of Gowling WLG asked him why some of his harshest criticisms — including the groundwater issue — don’t even appear in his report to the city.
Shoor also noted Kenyon hadn’t done modelling of the “critical” northeast corner.
Kenyon responded that he has limited access to information about the site. In fact, Hui admitted that lawyers asked him to “hold off ” releasing monitoring data that the city specifically requested. It is unclear whether that information would have assisted Kenyon in preparing his report.
But he was able to draw on much of the data that Hui used for his own analysis. He also reviewed a long list of past documents.
One of those became a source of special concern. Clifford asked him how much weight he would assign to a letter from Capital Pointe’s former engineer of record, which left the project earlier this year. In the May letter, Isherwood Geostructural Engineers called on Westgate to immediately decommission the excavation pit.
“It should be given considerable weight,” he said. “They carried this thing from the beginning ... If there’s a weak point in their design, they know what it is.”
He said it would be “very dangerous” to ignore that warning.
“It’s almost like shame on everyone here if that thing fails tomorrow,” he said.
Excitement. Nerves.
Lots of conflicting emotions going through me.
NATHAN OYSTRICK, on taking over as coach of the Humboldt Broncos