Engineering – Herrick Home Page

My experiences as an engineer:

ENGINEER

Engineering is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comfort of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot, like the architect, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politician, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny he did it. If his works do not work he is dammed.

On the other hand, unlike the doctor, his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort and hope. No doubt as years go by the people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician put his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people’s money….

But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his success with satisfaction that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants.

My contribution was the retention area and the resulting clean waters around the southeast. It was suggested in jest that I put a sign up by the thousands of small retention areas saying “Herrick’s Pond”, but I see them, and am satisfied.

Landbanque

In the early 1970’s I completed my engineering degree and moved to Florida. My first job in 1972 was as a draftsman, it was a temporary job designing house plans for my wife’s uncle to help us until I found a job. It only lasted two weeks because I got a job as an engineer right away. Ralph Hanson Jr. was starting up an engineering firm in Pasco County. Ralph had one client, Atty Roy Spears. Roy had swung a deal with James W. Mitchell. James Mitchell owned 100 square miles of land.

The land was mostly grazing land for cattle. The deal was, Roy would get loans to design and build the roads, sewerage plant, water plant, and get the building sites ready for the construction of homes for what was to be Seven Springs. Roy would then sell the home sites and pay the Mitchell’s a portion.
Ralph Hanson was the engineer, but I was the one who did all the design work. Ralph taught me the basics, but then went about doing marketing leaving me in the office alone. I designed the subdivision (where the lots were going to be, the sewer, water, paving and drainage systems) which was originally called Seven Springs (now called Veterans Village). I also designed the Seven Springs Villas. This was a time when it was the wild west of land development. What I put on paper one day, I took to the contractor and he started building the next. No permitting required.
After the main design was completed I went to the field to make sure it was built properly. I worked with the contractor who was building the main bridge over the Anclote river, making sure that the pilings were driven correctly and that the deck was done right. While driving the pilings I discovered a problem. The standard DOT rules had a requirement something like the last six inches had to take 60 blows or more, if it was less than 60 blows, it was not strong enough. The pile also had to be driven a minimum of 20 feet into the ground. The problem came when a pile went down 15 feet, then took 175 blows and it did not move at all. The top of the piling stated to crack. I told the contractor to stop, that pile was good. We had another interesting episode, a pile was driven about 15 feet and it free fell another 15 feet! That put the top of the pile below where the bridge was to be. The contractor drilled holes in the top, then drilled holes in the bottom of a section of a pile. He then built a collar. He poured contact cement into the area and stuck re-bar into the pile. Then he mated the section of piling into it. I had never known that you could glue two sections of 18 inch square concrete piling together like that. He drove it to the required parameters and it is there today!
The second portion that I was monitoring was the underground utilities and roads for Seven Springs Villas. One day when I was arriving at the site I saw two men with their machines sitting under a tree. One was a bulldozer the other was a front end loader (a big scoop). I asked them what was wrong. I thought that they may have needed more plans or something.
“We were sent here to build a golf course.”
Have you ever built a golf course?
” No. That is why we are sitting here, we do not know what to do.”
In fact no one had designed the golf course. There was a brochure showing a golf course around the villas, but that is as far as it had gotten.

I went back to the office and learned that George Tabrugge was the proposed golf course architect. I called George.
“George, there are two guys out in the field who have been directed to build your golf course.”
“I am in Texas. I cannot come to Florida for a few months.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“Why don’t you design the course?”
“Me? I have never played golf!”
“Easy, just make 1, 9, 10, and 18 holes par four, and the rest par 3.”
“What is a ‘par’?”
“A par three hole is 100 to 150 yards from the tee to the green. Then they have two strokes to get in the hole. A par four is twice as far.”
“When can you come?”
“It will be while.”

So, from that explanation, and with the brochure, I set to work. I took my plans for the villas and sketched in a golf course. I then gave the survey crew the coordinates for the tee’s and green’s and sent them out. The following weeks I spend my days with the two equipment operators giving them directions. “I have seen golf on TV, and I think the tee should be 25 feet by 50 feet, so pile up some dirt here.” and away they went. I had them cut a swale on either side of the fairway and pushed the dirt onto the fairway and leveled it off. When we got to a green, I thought that the green would be about 100 feet diameter, so I had them push dirt up and made it rolling.

We did this for all 18 holes, one hole was right through a cypress head, that was interesting, just cut out the trees and fill it in. When George got here from Texas, we had completed the entire course. He and I walked it. On green for #15 he said it was too hilly, to knock down the mounds a little. Other than that he liked it. We went to the hole that went through the cypress. He took out a tee, placed a ball on top of it and gave me a club. I hit my first golf ball off of a tee in the dirt on a golf course I had designed and built.

George had burlap placed over all the tees and greens, then had them fumigate those areas. They came back and planted grass, and it is the same today.

Ralph decided he wanted to grow the engineering company (it was just him and me), and so he hired another Professional Engineer I will call Sam. Sam was from Michigan. Now it was the two of us in the office with Ralph off marketing. Sam and I got on pretty well until it came time to design a stormwater system. In Florida we get rainstorms (like last night when we got an inch of rain in a half hour), but apparently they do not design for such in Michigan. Sam designed a system using 6 inch pipes. A 6 inch pipe can handle about 1 gallon per minute. Ralph taught me that we always use a minimum of an 18 inch pipe. An 18 inch pipe can handle 22 gallons per minute. With the downpours we have, an 18 inch pipe is always needed.
I told Sam that the 6 inch pipes would not work. Sam said “You draw it that way or you are fired, I am the PE here.” I showed it to Ralph, he agreed with me and I drew it 18 inches.
Later Sam did another one, this time he told me “If you show it to Ralph, you are fired.” I drew it the way he wanted. Later Sam was fired. Ralph looked at the plan and saw the 6 inch pipes and said to me, “You knew it was wrong, you are fired.” So, I was fired either way!!

Surveying firm
I needed to work and got a job immediately with an engineering/ surveying firm. I was hired to draw up surveys. I had told the owner that I wanted to do more than draw, I was an engineer. He told me that after four years as a draftsman he might let me do some design. I left.

Lloveras, Baur, and Stevens

I then went to LB&S, and was hired as an engineer! I continued to design plats, water, sewer, paving and drainage for subdivisions, mobile home parks, condo’s, convenience stores, etc. Sandy Lloveras, PE was great to work for, he was an engineer, Roger Baur, PLS was a surveyor, and Clint Stevens, PE was the marketing guy.
I worked for them for three years. At the end of three years I had worked my required four years under the tutelage of a Professional Engineer tn order to take the two exams to become a Professional Engineer. I took and passed the exams and became a Professional Engineer!
During those three years I came to know that Clint Stevens did not know one thing about engineering. One time I had designed an irrigation system for a Mobile Home park. The source was going to be a 6 inch well with a submersible pump down in the well. Clint met with the owner and came back to me and said “The owner has a two inch well four hundred feet away. He wants to run a two inch pipe from the pump down to that well and use it for irrigating the 40 acres.”

The submersible pump cannot provide any suction, even if it could provide suction you physically cannot lift water more than 20 feet (and it would need 70 feet).
The volute at the bottom of the submersible pump does not have threads to attach the 2 inch pipe (The plumber can figure it out Clint said). Plumbers do not deal with submersible pumps, well drillers do.
A submersible pump uses the water it is submerged in to cool it. Clint had the pump laying on the ground with no water.
A two inch well can produce about 20 gallons a minute, you need 160,000 gallons a day to water 40 acres. There are not enough minutes an a day.

There is not enough water; no pump can suck up any water from 400 feet away and 70 feet down; a pump, if set on the ground (and a two inch pipe welded to the 5.5 inch volute) as he wanted it built, if turned on, would just sit there and burn up. Clint said that he wanted it drawn that way, I took it to Sandy. He did not want to deal with it, so I put Clint’s name on it and took my name off. I had designed the entire project, but wanted nothing to do with that mess!
Another example, Clint (before he came to LB&S) had designed a short stretch of road that dipped down in the middle. A year later when the houses were built on either side, I went out there after a rain. The houses at the bottom had water up to the door knobs.

After that and some other miss-cues by Clint, once I got my PE license, I went to Sandy and told him I wanted a raise and I wanted to have nothing to do with Clint or his projects. Sandy said that it was a tough time and he could not offer me a raise, and Clint was the moneymaker for the company, so sorry. I already had answered an advertisement for an engineering position in Miami. So I bundled up my wife and daughter – rented out our house for a year, and off we went to Miami.

Deltona Corp.

Ii was hired as their permitting engineer. The day I walked into their office they handed me a Visa card, a Master Card, and an Airline card. I was told that I needed to hire a female assistant as they were short on females.

Deltona had many projects across Florida.
Deltona Lakes
Spring Hill
Marco Island and Marco Shores
Citrus Springs
Marion Oaks
Pine Ridge
Sunny Hills
St. Augustine Shores
Seminole Woods, and
Tampa Palms.
Tierra Verde
Rotunda.

They employed one person to design the layout and draw the plats, surveyors to design drainage (an 18 inch pipe wherever there was a low point), people who ran the sewer plants to design the lift stations, and the people who ran the water plant to design the water lines (6′ inch pipe everywhere). No engineers were consulted.

Deltona had two jets, both about 18 passenger and they had on staff pilots. All I had to do was dial 418 and someone would ask when and where did I want to go. I wanted to go to Rotunda, only some of Rotunda had been built and they wanted me to get a permit from Tallahassee to build the rest. The land planner had drawn up a circle, drew in lots everywhere, and they had sold most of the lots. Same with the area to the south of the circle, they had sold many lots there. Now they had run up against Tallahassee saying that they had to have a permit to build all rest of those waterfront homes.
I called the airport. They said that they were flying on that day but I would need to get a commercial plane ticket home.
We landed on their runway (they had built a runway on each of their projects). The surveyors came out and picked me up and took me to the survey trailer. After a half hour I asked the supervisor “When can we go see the property?” He said “Hold on, I am trying to line up an airboat.”
I was stunned, the entire property from the center south was under water!

All the area in green is part of Placida Harbor. Their airport on the right, some dredge and fill where the white lines are.

The land planner had seen on the aerials that most of it was green and mistook the water with mangroves for land. They were not going to get a permit to dredge and fill all of those mangroves. No one was doing dredge and fill anymore as they had in the 20’s (legally anyway), someone did do some dredge and fill out where no one could see them at one time.

The land planner had made the same mistake on another of their projects. He mistook some algae on a lake for dry land and sand in another place for water. They dug 50 feet down where the sand was to make the waterfront lots that they had sold, and had sand front lots, no water. They used the sand to fill the lake, but that did not work either.

The land planner was a great friend of the owner of Deltona Corp, Frank E. Mackle III and when I told Mr. Mackle that it would be best for me to look at a site before selling lots, he fired me.

Small engineering firm in Miami.

For a short while I worked for a small company. The owner of the company took off to South America and asked me to run the company for him. That did not last long. George Shimp, surveyor from Palm Harbor, called me and asked if I wanted to build an Engineering and Surveying business with him. I said yes.

Herrick & Shimp, Engineering and Surveying.