2023-2025

Education Institutional Building

Eric Hamber Secondary School Upgrade Design-Build Compliance Monitoring

Vancouver School Board

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - Virtual Visit

Review construction output for compliance to design criteria at the new Eric Hamber School building and associated site work. Civil engineering features included site grading, rainwater management, parking area, parking entrances and exits, utility connections and conflicts. Bird Construction and Aplin Martin were the key entities for civil engineering on the team that delivered the project for autumn 2025.

Focus only on fit-to-requirements

Monitoring for design compliance is the difficult exercise of consciously pulling yourself away from solving the design challenges to review the work your peers have done for deviation from design criteria. Civil engineering a site within the urban fabric must fit within a narrow set of constraints which makes deviation from design criteria difficult.

Small amount of effort

Working under the project architect and with a landscape architect, I performed field reviews to report on whether the installed infrastructure met the design requirements. I also reviewed whether site instructions and changes to the work met the design requirements.

Most of the civil features interacted heavily with landscape architecture (site grading and stormwater management) with only utility tie-ins, driveways, specific products, and bike access features needing purely civil engineering attention.

Reconnected to past job pursuit

Vancouver School Board interviewed me for a project manager role in 2019 and chose another candidate, so working for VSB gave me a chance to contribute to our community's efforts to improve the aging school buildings we have.