When Jenner & Block attorney Ted Tetzlaff needed a powerhouse engineering company to help bolster his firm`s case on behalf of the City of Chicago in lawsuits stemming from the Loop flood, he knew where to look.
Tetzlaff, the lead attorney handling the city`s defense against flood-related lawsuits seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, reached out to Silicon Valley and chose Failure Analysis Associates to be on his team of engineering experts.
The Menlo Park-based company was no stranger to Chicago, or controversy. Last year, Mayor Richard Daley came under fire after the firm, hired by the city for $400,000 to examine Commonwealth Edison Co.`s operation on the eve of new negotiations on the city`s franchise agreement, praised the utility for offering reliable service to city residents.
It was not the conclusion the mayor wanted to hear, especially after a series of power outages on the West Side. The ensuing criticism in the City Council led Daley to declare ”I am not a wimp” and to criticize his consultant for not being tough enough on Edison.
But now, a year later, when the city faces another high-stakes confrontation requiring highly technical expertise, corporation counsel Kelly Walsh gave Jenner & Block the go-ahead for Failure Analysis to rejoin the team.
”They`re very good,” Tetzlaff said in a phone interview from Chicago.
”They help you figure out what happened, and they transfer it into information that can be understood by a lay jury. I`d rather have them on my side than against me.”
Figuring out what went wrong is the trademark of Failure Analysis, the nation`s largest high-tech engineering company specializing in investigating, reconstructing and analyzing structural and mechanical accidents.
Sometimes referred to as America`s masters of disaster, Failure and its 230 engineers and scientists earn their keep from such horrors as deadly airline crashes, hotel fires, collapsed buildings, oil rig explosions, flawed auto designs and toppled freeway overpasses.
If the firm`s work sounds like one of those television reality shows, it was: Failure`s files provided the material for the recently canceled syndicated disaster show ”What Happened?”
In today`s increasingly complex, technology-driven world, Failure executives see more potential than ever for catastrophe. The firm thrives on the principle that no matter how complicated machines and structures are, it is a good bet they will collapse, wear out or break down. And then they need ever more highly skilled engineers and scientists to study why.
”Most of our clients have unique problems, with unique solutions,” said Robert Kadlec, 50, a native of Fox River Grove, Ill., and Failure`s Western region vice president. ”By the year 2050, the population of the United States will be 350 million. That`s a lot of accidents waiting to happen.”
Often hired by parties in litigation, or expecting to be, Failure`s engineers propose remedial action and testify as expert witnesses. The firm produces animated three-dimensional computer models that can place juries in an airline cockpit or a car about to crash or above an accident scene. The result is a vivid visual reconstruction of a catastrophe in a way that can eclipse the power of words.
”What we do is chronicle the history and try to learn from it so that it will not be repeated,” said Roger McCarthy, the firm`s chairman and chief executive. ”We make money in that process and are proud of it.”
Run down the list of some of the nation`s most spectacular disasters over the last decade, and Failure Analysis was there: the 1981 walkway collapse in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City that killed 114; the Delta Flight 191 crash in Dallas in 1985 that killed 137; the 1987 Du Pont Plaza hotel fire in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where 97 lost their lives.
The firm was hired by Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, and it investigated aspects of the Challenger space shuttle explosion. When a Northwest Airlines DC-9 crashed on takeoff in Detroit two years ago, Failure Analysis` computer reconstruction helped show the pilots failed to properly deploy their flaps.
Working with homeowners and contractors after the Oakland Hills fire last year that killed 25 and left thousands homeless, the firm helped identify and restore usable portions of building foundations to speed rebuilding and reduce repair costs. When a chemical plant in Henderson, Nev., leaked chlorine last year, sending 55 workers to the hospital, Failure helped the company find the cause of the accident and redesign the system to avoid its repetition.
At the American Bar Association convention in San Francisco last August, Failure produced a glitzy, high-tech model of a 21st Century courtroom for a mock retrial of Lee Harvey Oswald.
A favorite of automakers and large insurance companies, Failure has built the nation`s largest independent database of deaths and accident records, more than 300 million, listing fatalities in the U.S. since 1974. The company boasts its own independent auto-testing facility in Phoenix and offices in nine U.S. cities, Canada, Western Europe, Poland and Hong Kong.
All of that costs money, and Failure can be expensive. Engineering rates range from $200 to $550 an hour. The size of the firm, and its roster of mainly corporate clients, prompt the most stubborn criticism leveled against Failure Analysis: that it is a hired gun of big business, willing to make its conclusions fit the needs of its clients.
More often than not, Failure Analysis is the expert witness for companies in trouble, or afraid they might be. Retained by General Motors Corp., Suzuki Motor Corp. and Ford Motor Co. in a range of liability cases, the firm in each case helped defend the manufacturer against charges of design failure.
In 1988, it helped Suzuki fend off a recall petition for the Samurai car filed with the National Transportation Safety Board by the Consumers Union. The petition was denied after the carmaker used tests by Failure Analysis to help refute Consumers Union`s test results that concluded the car had an unsafe tendency to tip over.
McCarthy makes no apologies for the firm`s work on behalf of automakers, but insists it does not pre-cook its results to suit its clients.
”The days when commercial advantage can be purchased at the expense of health and safety, that day is over. Forget it,” said McCarthy. ”Any economic advantage you gain at the expense of health and safety, you`re going to pay the piper.”
McCarthy, 44, who majored in philosophy at the University of Michigan before earning his doctorate in mechanical engineering at MIT, said the firm often reaches conclusions its clients do not want to hear, but passes them along quietly.
”We give a lot of bad news to clients,” he said. ”We just don`t publicize it.”
If a client resists its advice on a safety matter, McCarthy said, Failure Analysis has an internal policy of moving steadily up the client firm`s chain of command. As a last resort, Failure would notify authorities, but he said it never has come to that.
Sitting behind a messy desk in his office at the firm`s new state-of-the- art facility in the heart of California`s high-tech Silicon Valley, McCarthy was reluctant to talk about the company`s experience with the City of Chicago or its current work in the flood case.
Senior Failure executives pointed to the Edison controversy as proof the firm will stand by its guns, no matter how unpopular the results. But coincidentally or not, the main consultant to the city in that case, William Snowden, no longer is with the company.
Critics complain Failure Analysis is priced out of reach of most smaller clients, a charge that McCarthy does not dispute. But even those who have found themselves on opposite sides of the firm give it its due.
David Pittle, research director for Consumers Union, still believes the group was right in its accusation that the Suzuki Samurai was an unsafe car prone to tipping over. He would not want his son or daughter driving one, he said.
”But I think any manufacturer, any injured party, has every right to have technical backup to illustrate every point they want to make,” Pittle said from his home in Yonkers, N.Y. ”Just because they are expensive and only big business can afford them, does not mean they are not honest.”
As a company, Failure Analysis is known for its effective testimony. McCarthy is said to be in a class by himself. He estimates he has given more than 100 depositions and has been cross-examined countless times by hostile lawyers determined to shoot down his findings.
By all accounts, McCarthy, like his subordinates, enjoys that part of the job. And Failure Analysis can be an exciting place for an engineer to work;
one night, employees can find themselves atop a construction tower figuring out a crane collapse, and the next day crawling through a sewer before taking a star turn as an expert witness in a high-profile, big-money liability trial. Launched by five engineering Ph.D.s who got together in a coffee shop near Stanford University in neighboring Palo Alto one spring day in 1967 and each chipped in $100, Failure Analysis has grown into a $70 million business. Profits were down last year, partly reflecting the slump in the auto industry and partly President Bush`s relaxation of enforcement of many federal safety regulations.
Still, in one of those perverse facts of life, the future always looks good in the disaster business. Regulation should be in vogue again under the Clinton administration. Failure Analysis hopes to apply its experience to the environmental field, eventually ”mapping” the risks for everything from certain foods to medicines to development in congested areas.
Recently, the firm has turned its attention to the former Soviet bloc, opening an office in Poland and sending its Polish-born principal engineer, Piotr Moncarz, 43, on several trips to Russia.
The beleaguered government of Russian President Boris Yeltsin reportedly is eager to have Failure Analysis contribute to efforts to convert its military production facilities into commercial ventures.
The company owes its success, as much as anything, to America`s prodigiously litigious society. Besides wanting to avoid risk, Americans want to blame someone for creating it, especially when bad things happen, as they often do.
For McCarthy, that is good business, and, he argues, good news for the nation. ”Some people say we`re paranoid as a society for not tolerating violent, premature deaths. I`m sorry, I think it is a measure of our civilization,” he said. ”When the technology is available (to prevent accidents), there is a moral imperative to use it.”
That belief is heartfelt here. In 1978, Failure`s first president, Alan Teitelman, was killed in a plane collision over San Diego while on his way to investigate a U.S. Navy plane crash.
There will be no shortage of man-made disasters to investigate over the coming years, not to mention natural catastrophes, such as the big earthquake that inevitably will hit California.
But human nature being what it is, many will not heed even expert advice to shore up their homes and workplaces now. When the Big One comes, McCarthy admits with a smile, Failure Analysis will be there.
