proHNS LLC - Haines, Alaska

Todd W.

Our experience with this company was an engineering project for a road that had been damaged by a slide. The engineering on the project neglected to perform site visits and to discuss with people living in the area the conditions before the slide or what problems currently or historically exist. They proceeded to push to FEMA for paving of a portion of the road which was never paved before and for which, (for a number of reasons) none of the residents wanted paved. Fraudulently, the paving was sold to FEMA as a landslide mitigation tactic - even though the last landslide deposited material on top of the road (not sure how paving will stop that from happening). The main problem on the road is the absence of any turnaround - but paving the road only acts to increase traffic with no where to turnaroud. On other parts of the road they designed changes adding large volumes of gravel fill which has been done in the past only to be graded into the ditches and fill up the ditches. The road as it sat before the work only needed a couple culvert upgrades and the ditches to be cleaned out - instead they engineered a $1.5 million project full of design features solving problems that don't exist and creating ones where there were none. Project management of delivery of the project was also lacking as the project had significant impacts on residents but was scheduled without regard to these impacts: such as closing the road from 6 am to 2pm) preventing anyone from leaving to go to work or to town at a reasonable hour (when the closure just as easily could have been completed during normal working ours hours of 8:30 to 4:30 allowing residents to access town and normal traffic hours). The project was set for a road very busy in the summer with pedestrian tourism traffic, yet the project was scheduled during the highest tourist traffic season. Overall very unimpressed with the engineering product and project management. In the future I hope this company can learn from their mistakes and take the time to gather information on the problem prior to wasting tax payer money and creating great inconveniences for the people living in the area.