I’ve sat down to write this post several times over the past two weeks and never managed to finish it. Now I’m a week behind on my posts. The last two weeks have been rough, partially in ways common with my co-workers and some uniquely mine. Let’s get through the bullets and then talk about some feelings.

Bullets

April 21, 2025

Provided timely, policy compliant, and technically sound technical assistance to field staff on multiple active construction projects.

Project 1 – Rock slope construction, regular blasting, inspection, and reinforcement
Project 2 – GRS-IBS submittal reviews, discussion of construction methods
Project 3 – Finalized global stability analysis, with help from junior engineer
Project 4 – Evaluated alternatives for for construction detail that no longer works due to change in site conditions since design

Provided timely, policy compliant, and technically sound review of design deliverables.

Project 5 – Design rock reinforcement

Performed COR responsibilities for multiple contracts.

Project 6 – Proceed to award for geophysical survey
Project 7 – Proceed to award for geotechnical investigations

Led peer exchange between geotech and design teams
Prepared design calculations and quantity estimates for rock reinforcement as a context sensitive rockfall mitigation

April 28, 2025

Provided timely, policy compliant, and technically sound technical assistance to field staff on multiple active construction projects

Project 1 – Rock slope construction, regular blasting, inspection, and reinforcement
Project 2 – GRS-IBS submittal reviews, discussion of construction methods

Provided timely, policy compliant, and technically sound review of project design deliverables
Performed COR duties for multiple contracts

Project 6 – Proceed to award for geophysical survey
Project 7 – Proceed to award for geotechnical investigations

Prepared preliminary soldier pile wall design for a project in Nevada

Our office is feeling pretty low energy; we’re down about 30% of our staff from the beginning of year. Our theoretical cap of full-time positions is around 250. Once everyone who has taken a deferred resignation is off the books, we will have somewhere around 175 staff. We were already understaffed relative to what we wanted to meet organizational goals for project delivery, that is having a large majority of our projects delivered “in-house”. Everything that has happened since January 20 has just made this worse. We will be more dependent on consultants to deliver projects. Hiring consultants comes with costs to our program; they are more expensive than in-house staff. They also tend to have less experience in our particular types of projects and our partners.

The people we lost were a representative sample of our organization. Staff from various levels of experience. Many of them “high performers”; really enthusiastic people who otherwise would have stayed with our organization for many years, some with potential to have risen to leadership.

All of this has me worrried about our ability as an office to deliver our program of projects, without relying heavily on consultants.

In other news, and as somewhat of an explanation for why my post is late this week: I crashed my bicycle on the way to work. It was nothing serious and there were no cars involved. I scraped my hands and face up, and bruised a rib. I took a sick day, followed by my regular day off and the weekend to recuperate, then was back at the office on Monday.

That’s all for this week. It's getting late, and I need to get ready for another day of work. Best of luck to you all, especially other feds.

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