The Gentlemen's Hour

65

That is to say he’s a soils engineer.

We always think of houses or any buildings being constructed from the foundation up, but that’s not really true. The real foundation is the earth beneath the foundation. At the end of the day, all buildings are constructed on dirt, in one form or the other. If that dirt isn’t solid, then it doesn’t matter how strong a foundation you build, in reality there is no foundation.

But dirt isn’t just dirt. Because it’s made up of broken-down rock and decomposed vegetation, there’s an infinite variety of types of dirt—depending on the type of stone and vegetation, its moisture content or lack thereof, its compaction and stability.

It goes deeper than that, literally. Dirt always sits on something—either water or rock—and again, depending on the depth of the soil, its humidity, the angle or slope at which it sits, it rests in various degrees of stability or, in the negative case, instability.

Same with the rock or the water it sits on. The rock might be whole and stable, or cracked—in the most severe instance, for example, by earthquake—and resettling, shifting, moving. Any of this instability will likewise affect subterranean pools of water, which further impact surrounding rock and the soil that sits on top of it.

So when we look at soil, it appears to be inert, but that is often anything but the truth. In reality, the subsurface soil is in a state of flux, either rapid—in the case of a landslide—or imperceptibly slow, as is the case of the world’s evolution over billions of years. The truth is that the soil is always changing.

Which would be a gigantic so what, except that we build things on it, most notably our houses, and it’s the job of soils engineers such as Phil Schering to tell us whether the soil can sustain the building, or whether we need to do some work on it, if such work is even feasible or effective.

Southern California has a lot of soils engineers because a lot of people want houses there, and because it’s basically a desert that happens to roll up to an ocean. Which is just fine until you start building houses and subdivisions, office buildings, hotels, streets, and roads on those bluffs, because the bluffs are made mostly of sandy soil and loose clay.

Take, for instance, Boone’s beloved Pacific Coast Highway. The civil engineers who built it basically cut away the bottoms of bluffs, triggering huge internal landslides farther up the slopes. Drive the PCH now, and you’ll see lots of big, concrete retaining walls to keep those bluffs from becoming part of the Pacific Ocean.

But the highway was built decades before the big housing boom in Southern California, and the bluffs could withstand and recover from the pressure of the cutaway. What happened, though, was that more and more people wanted to live on those bluffs. Houses and huge subdivisions were built, often too quickly, and the people moved in.

People need water. To drink, cook, bathe, launder, flush. Most of that water makes it into drains and has little effect on the soil stability. But people also wanted lawns. Lawns are composed of grass, which, unlike cactus, requires water. Lots of it. So the same people who were drinking, cooking, bathing, laundering, and flushing started to water their lawns, and that water doesn’t go into drains, it seeps into the soil of loose sand and clay. Because water is a lubricant, and the most patient, pernicious, and powerful destructive force in the physical world, it further loosens the already loose subsurface soil until the housing developments sit on what is basically a toboggan run, the buildings themselves being the toboggans.

They are going to slide.

As they do, foundations crack, driveways crack, sidewalks crack, stucco cracks, floors buckle, ceilings sag, and roof tiles pop for no (apparent) reason. And, occasionally, houses and condos just slide off the edge, or fall into sinkholes that magically appear and swallow up houses.

Which brings out another Southern California phenomenon.

Litigation.

People sue—insurance companies, contractors, architects, the city, the county, each other. And when they sue, both sides require the services of engineering consultants such as Phil Schering to testify why the soil under their houses, condos, offices, or hotels failed, and whose fault it was, i.e., somebody else’s.

Basically, Phil Schering is a professional expert witness. You can make a very nice living charging five bills an hour as an expert witness. The time on the stand is the least of it—a consulting engineer such as Phil Schering also bills for the time he spends evaluating the case, time spent preparing his testimony, meetings with lawyers—the meter is running, my friend.

Hence the house on Cuchara Lane in Del Mar.

And social proximity to women such as Donna Nichols.

Boone drives back to Pacific Beach.

It’s too late for the Dawn Patrol.