Hundreds of California homes, buildings used plans drafted by 2 phony engineers

[knight1fox3]

Hundreds of buildings -- from houses to strip malls -- could face the wrecking ball after California authorities unraveled a decade-long scam involving a pair of phony building engineers who used stolen software to craft bogus blueprints, officials told FoxNews.com.

Wilfrido Rodriguez and Ruben Gutierrez, allegedly posing as licensed professionals and using stolen software, drew up engineering and architectural plans for homes, apartments, commercial properties and strip malls in at least 56 Southern California cities beginning in 2003, according to police. Neither had the training, expertise or credentials to vouch for the safety of the building plans, and authorities are only now grasping the scope of the problem.

“There has never been a case involving alleged engineering fraud of this magnitude,” Detective Rod Barton, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Fraud and Cyber Crimes Bureau, told FoxNews.com. “Because this involves fraud related to structural engineering, we just don’t know if the houses are safe, unsafe or suitable for habitation.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/02/09/hundreds-california-homes-buildings-used-plans-drafted-by-2-phony-engineers-say-authorities.html#

This part is particularly interesting......."pass several grueling exams".

Legitimate professional engineers must have a degree in civil engineering, pass several grueling exams and obtain five years of experience before they can sign off on design documents for implementation

 

[SNAPE/SMOTT PE]

Wow...well, would suck to own one of those homes. Unless you want a new home, then yay, you can get out of the one your in.

 

[knight1fox3]

Saw a comment about this on FB that really didn't sit well with me.  The comment said:

"Personally, i hate that 30% of jobs require permission from the government in the form of licenses..... 
They sold plans for hundreds of houses and buildings? Did any of them fall or burn down when they shouldn't have due to their negligence? No? Then they're probably designed better than i could do... 
I went to engineering school.... It wasn't that hard... Experience trumps education almost any day..."

I felt compelled to respond.  And probably somewhat too harsh.

 

[kevo_55]

Ironically I heard about this in an ethics seminar yesterday. Our presenter turned on YouTube for a LA county sheriff news conference on it. Some of the questions from that video were good. 

Like it is 100% legal that anyone can draft drawings for 1-4 family homes/ apartments if you use standard wood construction layouts. Of course signing them with someone else's seal is bad. Also the homeowner would need a PE if they want some crazy atrium or something else nonstandard in their house which goes beyond standard wood construction. I knew this because I am licensed there but most MN PE's that I was with thought that this was interesting because they weren't licensed there.

All the more reason to adopt real digital sealing practices.

 

[SNAPE/SMOTT PE]

I think TX may be like that, too. Not 100% sure, though. We have had a couple people I work with build houses, and create their own plans. But they worked with a builder, and I'm not sure if they have a licensed person reviewing and stamping. I haven't built a house, so no experience with that type of thing. Not likely to build one soon, either (I want to work on becoming debt free first).

 

[mudpuppy]

Saw a comment about this on FB that really didn't sit well with me.  The comment said:

I felt compelled to respond.  And probably somewhat too harsh.

There is something to be said for experience; there are designers here (technicians) that know way more about how to build a substation than I or many other engineers do.  On the other hand, experience doesn't teach everything.  If you're living in California, do you really want to live in a house designed by someone who never learned anything about seismic events?  Maybe none of these people's houses have fallen down or burned up YET, but who knows what will happen when the Big One hits.  There's a reason they teach this stuff in schools, and a reason engineers are licensed. Some people are just too short-sighted to see why.

 

[Freon]

Texas actually has a flow chart on the website for "When a a PE is required"

https://engineers.texas.gov/downloads/TBPEDiagrammatic2014.pdf

 

[SNAPE/SMOTT PE]

I remember seeing that flow chart now.

 

[MA_PE]

I found this rather dramatic.

On the architectural side, the value of architectural licensure is “immeasurable,” said Matt Tinder, spokesperson for The American Institute of Architects, in Washington, DC.

“Without it, the entire built environment could serve as a public safety hazard,” Tinder said.

It seems these guys stole repetitive plans from a legitimate engoneering firms and then changed the project name and resold them.  Pretty brazen.  I think the media hype that all of these buildings are a threat to public safety or "face the wrecking ball" are rather hyperbolic.  Without any plans, structural evaluation of all the buildings could be a sizeable effort.  I know in MA a builder can design single (and I believe small multiple) residential structrues without a PE.  If the sdtructure is "regular" i.e. a rectangular shape with a pitched roof, there are quite a few design tables and guidelines to create details without doing all the analysis.  Also, depending on what (stolen) software they were using, many of the available design software will analyze the model structure and produce designs based on codes.

These guys were pretty ballsy, but just because the plans weren't legitimately sealed doesn't mean they aren't adequate for the application.  Just trying to put things into perspective.

 

 

[thekzieg]

What happened to all of the plans reviewers? They're almost always nit-picking some part of the design on my company's actual legitimate designs....

 

[ptatohed]

Gosh, if I was going to be a scam artist, I'd want easier money than this!  Sounds like these guys had a full time job scamming.  And seems like they new what they were doing.  At that point, you might as well put in a little more effort (get licensed, form a business) and do it legitimately.