What is the responsibility of the architect for the poor estimations on soil at RMS and asbestos at HHS?

The responsibility for determining soil quality and asbestos quantities is shared by the architect and the staff. When it was evident that there were problems with the soil at the middle school site we did additional test borings. At that point we believed we understood the scope of the entire project and had budgeted enough additional funding to cover the problems we anticipated. We were wrong. In a building as old as the high school it is very difficult to determine the presence of asbestos. This summer, for example, Jonathan Brush set out to replace asbestos tiles only to discover that they were held in place by asbestos-based adhesive that then penetrated into a wood floor that, when it was removed, was covering another set of asbestos tile. While this kind of layering is anomalous and, fortunately, limited to one small room, it does illustrate the difficulty we experienced in determining how much asbestos is present in the high school. • Why would it take another $400,000 in ...  more