Accountability for engineers: Group advocating change following Elliot Lake report.

• Author: Kelly, Lindsay
• Position: CONSTRUCTION

Even before Justice Paul Belanger released his report on the Elliot Lake Inquiry, which outlines recommendations for improving policies and standards related to the engineering profession, Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) was already reviewing its own standards.

Early on in the process, the PEO, which had standing at the inquiry, allowing the organization insight into the process, identified some common themes coming out of the testimony, said Chris Roney, a councillor with the PEO. That's what the PEO used to develop 11 recommendations to the inquiry, which were almost all endorsed by Belanger on Oct. 15.

"The recommendations that we put forward are all things that we felt fairly strongly about, so we didn't even wait for the report to be released to start work on what it would take to implement those recommendations," said Roney, who took the lead on the organization's Elliot Lake Advisory Committee. "We've been working on them already for some time."

A major area of concern was the quality of the structural adequacy reports generated over the 33-year life of the building. Belanger found they lacked consistency in their calibre and accuracy.

In response, the PEO issued a practice bulletin outlining its expectations for engineers registered with the organization, including how detailed reports should be and what kind of background information should be included.

Throughout the inquiry, testimony demonstrated that reports were often generated more to satisfy clients instead of addressing the major issues surrounding the building's stability, Roney said. "What we saw was sometimes the scope of the reports is influenced by the particular building owners' desires and needs and even budget," Roney said. "If you're giving too limited a budget, the scope is also going to be too limited."

The new recommendation suggests engineers "take some of that scope of control out of the hands of the building owners and make it more of an established standard that everybody has to meet," Roney said.

In relation, the PEO has recommended that engineers who prepare the structural adequacy reports should have a special level of skills, expertise, and training that would qualify them for a special structural engineering specialist designation.

"It requires a particular level of expertise to be able to understand and assess deterioration in an existing building, and it requires a great deal of judgment, and so it's important that the individuals that are...