Hi, welcome to today's webinar, Blueprint Reading for Underwriters, hosted by Inland Marine Underwriters Association. I am Eileen Monreale, the education training specialist at IMUA. Thank you for joining us today. On your screen, you will see the attendee control panel, which lets you view who else is in the meeting. We have a great turnout today. This panel also contains the handouts section, where you can download the PDF of the presentation. Most importantly, it's where you can find the question box to share your questions with our presenters. If the control panel minimizes by default, simply click the orange arrow to bring it back. You can always go to the view menu at the top of the control panel and uncheck the auto hide option. Our presenters are eager to address your questions at the end of the presentation, but please feel free to enter them at any time. And to encourage your engagement, IMUA will award a $25 Amazon e-gift card to the most slash best engaged attendee as a token of our appreciation. So without further delay, I'm asking you to please join me in welcoming today's moderator, Morgan Collins. Welcome, Morgan. Thanks, Eileen. Hello, everyone. My name is Morgan Collins. I'm a production underwriter here at Great American Insurance Group. I've been at the company for going on five years as of this month. I began my career as an associate underwriter within our property and inland marine division, working my way into an underwriter role for our Midwest Territory. I now currently work as a production underwriter still here at Great American Insurance Group. And IMUA did ask us to share a fun fact about ourselves. So I'll be traveling to Ireland in the next two weeks. So love to travel, been trying to travel to some international locations as well. A quick introduction to the presentation is that Phil will be discussing various design disciplines of how sets of plans are organized and how to efficiently locate the information that underwriters are most interested in. So in short, Phil is going to help us see through the chaos of the construction plans. I think we missed, we've got a disclaimer here as well. So just this is our legal disclaimer. I'll leave it up for just a few seconds. And then we'll go ahead and get started with our first polling question. So our first polling question here is just to understand which design, which of the various disciplines best suits your role within the industry. This is going to give Phil and I an indication of the audience we're speaking to. So we know how to tailor our presentation. Assuming that a lot of these folks are going to be underwriters, although we could have a number of claims folks joining us as well. Yeah, it looks like that's been a popular answer so far. So we're almost to about, we're almost to 100% here. So we'll give it a few more seconds, then we'll go ahead and close out the vote. But yeah, that's, we're about 88% underwriter right now, Phil. So we've got loss control at 7% though. So that's a decent showing right there. All right, I'll go ahead and close this out. And we're going to share our results here. So yeah, from the polling question here, we can see that we've got quite a few across the industry, primarily that underwriting role that Phil predicted. So a big thing that Phil and I wanted to do to kick off this presentation was to start from the underwriter perspective. So this allows us to just reflect on the pertinent information that Phil's going to be presenting here. And as an underwriter within my first five years of experience, I stepped into my initial underwriting role and was reviewing many builders risk projects. The first couple of times that you receive those, you know, 200 page documents that are just filled with building plans, it can be pretty daunting. You're just wondering how long is this going to take me to review? Am I getting the correct pieces of information and taking those away to my referral to discuss with management? And I did sit through the first iteration of Phil's presentation, and towards the end was just reflecting and wishing I'd learned some of the tips and tricks sooner. There's several key takeaways from Phil's presentation. I'm going to start with the emotional piece and build more into the technical knowledge takeaways. For myself, the confidence boost in my daily role, and just the skills that I gained from deciphering these complex plans was very important. For example, being able to look and glance at the section and knowing immediately I was in the architectural section versus civil, or pointing out that I had masonry veneer over wood versus true MNC was just vitally important to my growth as an underwriter and becoming more autonomous in my role. And it helped my referral team trust my underwriting and knowing that they could validate my referral quicker. Next, these tips helped streamline my inbox. I know as underwriters, we all receive, you know, hundreds of submissions. You're just trying to sort through and filter through the projects that's best aligning with what your company is targeting. So understanding these skills can be a huge time saver. Next, to move to more of the technical knowledge takeaways, these skills can help establish an accurate project construction type. Earlier, I referenced when there was a facade versus true structural components of a building. Sometimes an application will come in marked as MNC, but being able to dig through the drawing set and find that a building is truly wood components with masonry veneer versus MNC, or vice versa is very important. This saves the heartache of sending out someone like Phil in loss control, only to find out the project is in fact a different construction type than originally indicated. Or if you find that a building is better constructed, it could win you a bind order. It is also tough to have to change project indications midterm or discuss an issue with reinsurance. This skill set will help you build your relationship with agents and brokers as well. Being able to educate them on why certain terms and rates were chosen and not having the circumstance of going back to an agent or broker to change project terms will create a better partnership. We're going to launch into our second polling question here, and we really just want to understand what the average experience level we have on the call for the insurance industry. I know personally, I'm option one coming on five years of my career just this month. It's going to be interesting to me, Morgan. I think we could have people all over the board on this just because there's very little training afforded to whether you're a senior level person or a junior level person making your way into the industry with this topic. So it could be a broad range here. Yeah, we've got about 90% of the votes in right now, and the experience is more spread out than I thought it would be. So I think it'll be interesting to see once we close out the vote here. I'll give us just a couple more seconds and see where we can go. All righty, closing our poll here, and I'll go ahead and share our results. As you can see, we had quite a few with, you know, 20 plus years in the industry, followed up by 11 to 20, and then one to five years. I know myself, I'd be in that option A bucket. Like I said, this was a great skill set for me to learn as a time saver. I'm going to be passing it off to Phil now, who will be leading us into navigating the blueprint reading and all the technical pieces of this. Having been on several loss control visits with Phil, I can say he's an excellent teacher. He spent 25 years as a project manager and estimator for large industrial and health care projects, along with other facility management tasks. A fun fact about Phil is that he enjoys volleyball, including spending time with his daughter who plays for a Division III school in southeast Ohio. So Phil, take it away. All right, well, thank you so much, Morgan. Always a pleasure to work with you. Yeah. I want to start by just reviewing the fact that, similar to the insurance industry, there's different disciplines and relationships associated with construction. When I joined the insurance industry, I had to learn for the first time that there were insureds and then there were brokers and agents and how those people related to insurance carriers. Through the course of that relationship, that's how the industry moves forward. That's how information gets distributed. It's not dissimilar to the construction industry. There's different disciplines in design, and that's why we have on what can be a very daunting and overwhelming set of building plans, we have so many different disciplines and groups of drawings, which at times can be confusing. So that's what we want to sort through right off the bat. So in terms of understanding really who works for whom, we have the owner, which in most cases is going to be the insured, not always, but in most cases. We've got an architect. We've got sub consultants to that architect, and that's a group of different people. So you might consider those almost subcontractors to a building trade that work for the architect. So you have this concept of privity, right, in terms of contractual relationships. So the architect has privity with the owner, and these sub consultants have privity with the architect. So that's going to be the information flow during the entire course of design and throughout the project. So these sub consultants are what I want to focus on initially. The structural engineer is a very critical sub consultant to the architect. Between those two, the vast majority of the details of what we care about as underwriters are going to be conveyed. So that relationship is very, very important. Second to that, you also have a civil engineer, completely different engineering firm, also works directly for the architect. The mechanical and electrical engineers work directly for the architect, and they're responsible for the mechanical design, such as the plumbing drawings, the sprinkler drawings, fire suppression, another term for sprinkler, and then heating, ventilating, and air conditioning drawings. And then separate from that, you have electrical sub consultants, which also comprise the fire alarm. So all of these different sub consultants all report back through the architect, and that's why we have these groups of drawings. But the building envelope is driven by the architectural and the structural plans. So that's going to help you save a lot of time as we move forward through this process. So to better understand the architect's role, again, privity to the owner, works directly with the owner, coordinates all of these different design disciplines. They're really the quarterback of the design process. They develop the specifications. They're the ones that are making color selections and going through different renderings, and they're going to be the ones meeting with the municipality to interface with the building department. All of this is responding back to different plan review comments that get made as a result of trying to submit for a building permit, which is a critical path item in the construction process. So they're really the face of the project, and they synthesize all of this design work that comes in from these sub consultants. They work very, very closely early on in the project with the structural engineer. That's the first call they really make, because once they meet with an owner and discuss we have the need for a project, this is the approximate size and scope that we think we need, the first call the architect makes is to the structural engineer to say, okay, what are we going to build this of, what materials are going to be used? This is the height of the building. This is the size of the building. This is how many levels we feel like we need, and the structural engineer is going to come up with a preliminary design based on a series of assumptions that then all these other sub consultants are going to work from. It's important to understand that, because at that point, we've determined what the construction type is likely going to be. So the good news is that as you sift through this intimidating set of plans, Morgan, you mentioned before, hundreds of drawings in a given set. Just yesterday, I was combing through, I had one that came in on a referral to review that was over 400 sheets, and I can understand that initial panic of, gosh, I don't have enough time to get through 400 sheets of drawings to determine or confirm a construction type, and I get that. But the beauty of this, and the reason we spent some time on this this afternoon, is that the architecturals and the structurals are really what matters, and nothing else is really worthy of much time and review. So there's the architecturals and the structurals, and nothing else comes close to comparing to those documents. So that takes us to the structural engineer. This person has privity with the architect, doesn't work for the other design disciplines, those are siloed. That person designs, the structural engineer designs all these structural components. That includes the foundation, the bearing walls, columns, beams, everything associated with what holds the roof up. That's that person's job, and that's what we're the most concerned about if I was looking at the plans, trying to identify what the construction type is. These components support all the building loads, including the loads of the mechanical and electrical and plumbing trades that hang off of those. You are really looking for the materials and what compose those materials. So it's not enough to just identify what the material is, but we need to know what it's made of, if it's combustible or if it's non-combustible. That's going to drive some of the answers that you're trying to arrive at. So specifically, these bearing walls, they might be composed of wood, masonry, concrete, metal studs, precast, and all of those things have different ramifications associated with your construction class. These columns, beams, joists, they might be wood, concrete, steel, it depends on where you're at. I was in a building in Oregon not long ago where it was a joist and masonry building with a precast concrete wall, supporting wall structure, and nothing but wood on the inside. This was a 100,000 square foot warehouse, and that's just how they build in Oregon. So not everything is going to be the same. We have to identify what those components and those members are built from. Floor, this could range anything from a slab-on-grade, slab-on-concrete, slab-on-metal deck, it could involve a wood frame floor system. We won't know, but the structurals and architecturals are going to tell us. Roof structure, these are other components we're looking for. Could be wood trusses, could be light gauge metal trusses, metal joists, metal deck over steel bar joists, things of that nature. Could be a wood decking system, could be a concrete decking system. Those are the things that we're seeking out. So with all of that being said, let's address the elephant in the room, if you will. Describe your level of confidence in efficiently, and to do efficient plan reading as it relates to confirming a construction type. And Morgan, I have a tendency to believe that you were toward the upper end of this spectrum when you, if you were answering this question today. I would definitely say I was within, definitely I could get through it, but it would take me forever. You know, I was sitting there working on my projects, working on my referrals, and it would just take me hours to comb through these different pages, and definitely the tips and tricks of knowing, going to the architectural sections, those structural, finding those like IBC codes, that was always really beneficial to streamline my process for me. And it looks like we've got about, we're getting quite a few of the votes in right now. Kind of those middle two seem to be the popular votes on this one. Can get through it, but it takes me forever. Can find my way, but wish I could do it faster. Seems to just need to be a, there's a need to want to streamline the workflow, it seems to be popular. This is a super tough discipline to address and skill set to address if I was an underwriter, because this concept of imposter syndrome, you don't necessarily want to go to your manager and say, look, I know I told you I had this skill set, but I really didn't have this skill set or I wasn't as familiar with this skill set as what you might have wanted me to be. And it's hard to admit that it takes me way longer than I think it should in order to get help and in order to get some additional training on this. I'm really glad that all of you folks have signed up for this seminar because this is going to benefit you from being able to efficiently manage the process and gain some confidence, which I think is going to overcome that imposter syndrome of trying to fake it till we make it by just developing the skill set a little bit more. So I'm glad you're all here and I'm glad we have such a broad range of experience as well. That means a lot. Okay, so where did we end up with on the results? I think I hid that from you too quick. So we ended up with our middle two options. So we were about 80% between that B and C option there. Okay, all right. I wish we can do it faster. We want to try to be more efficient with it. Okay, where do we find what we need? Well, if we were looking at this, walking this in person and the building was already built, I think all of us could quickly identify that this is a non-combustible building. Unfortunately, we don't have this opportunity to have a rendering from this perspective to identify what the construction type is. So we have to do it through plans. So plans are organized and this is where you're going to gain some efficiency. Plans are organized into a group of these sub categories, if you will, these sub-disciplines. The first section is called the general section on the plans and this is really mandated by the plan officials, the people who are constantly examining plans, the plans examiners, people who issue the building permits throughout the country. There's a national requirement that dictates that every set of plans is going to have a location map or a vicinity map and you can see that on this slide that we've used as a example of a project that we've written in the past. The purpose of that is so that the plans inspector can go find the place, so there's a map. So there's certain criteria that are dictated for every set of plans. Within this general set of plans, there's also code review notes, which tell you a lot of information in one succinct summary. So that's a section that you really want to focus on. Another section you want to focus on are the architecturals, the A drawings, the A series of plans. So hopefully you can see my pointer. The general section, I know I don't expect you to read this, but there's about three drawings to the right up here that are the general drawings. Then this next grouping of drawings are all the civils. You'll notice I didn't bold the civils over here because they're really not that important. We're gonna drop back to that in just a minute and talk about the only drawing that does matter in civils. Then eventually we get down to the architectural plans. Now this is, on this drawing list here, this is what you want to focus on when you get to a set of plans is the drawing list. Stop here first and look at the architectural list and realize you're probably going to look at about half of these drawings, no more than that, but that's that's one section along with the general up here that you're going to focus on. So anything that's bolded off to the left here you're going to want to focus on. So this group is the architectural plans. Then we get to the structural plans. That group is also bolded. That's a very important set of plans. You're going to review maybe two-thirds of those drawings. The good news is after that you're not going to look at another drawing. Everything on this list between the heating drawings, the plumbing drawings, the fire suppression drawings, and the electrical drawings, you're not going to spend any time on because that's not going to give you the answers that you need to the questions that you've been asked to identify the building construction type. It gives you great information in terms of if they were as-built drawings, looking back, if you had a permanent property policy that you were considering, that's where that might be a benefit. But in terms of an underwriter looking at a construction type for a builder's risk policy, the general plans, the architectural plans, and the structural plans is what you need to look at. And ignore the rest. Don't let the rest bog you down. In this case, this particular set of plans that we're reviewing today quickly, there's a hundred and sixty sheets that we could be going through. Out of those, I used fifteen sheets to arrive at what we would classify this as a construction type, which is about less than ten percent, about nine and a half percent of the drawings is what you truly utilize. So don't waste your time on these other non-critical areas. You want to focus on the general plans, architecturals, and the structurals. And that's it. You've got better things to do with your time than comb through drawings that you don't need to review. In terms of these general sheets, I'm talking about that general section up at the top. This is where the plan data and code review information is. And these plans examiners are not stupid people. They wanted their drawings set right up in front, teed up, for them to quickly review the data that they needed. So there's all sorts of summaries and tables that answer the questions that they're the most interested in, like travel distance. And the International Building Code identifies a series of construction types using their own language, which one question came in before the webinar started today about being able to discern quickly between an International Building Code designation and an ISO designation. And is there a quick way to cut to the chase with that? And there is. And we're going to get to that later on in the presentation. But this is generally where you will get some indication as to what the International Building Code designation might be. I ran into one of these yesterday. It was a Class 2B International Building Code designation. And I was able to cross-reference that on a chart that I'm going to share with you at the end of the presentation that indicates that's the equivalent of an ISO 3 non-combustible building classification. So that's a very worthwhile sheet that you want to spend a little time on. I know it looks difficult to read in fine print, but if you find one indication as to what the International Building Code designation is, you might have saved yourself a lot of plan turning by finding that designation on a similar sheet. Another sheet in the general section is the life safety plan. And this on this particular instance, it gives us some color coding that shows the floor construction, whether it's a one-hour, two-hour, three-hour construction for each level as it goes up the building. And of course we need to know that because a portion of this building ended up being fire-resistant because of a three-hour fire rating at the floor. So this gives you some handy information in terms of square footage. Oftentimes we need to know that on applications or verify that. It gives you hour ratings for both floors and walls. Again, a handy sheet to find the life safety plan. It's found in the general section of a set of building plans. So we do have a quick question. In the chat, they're asking if we, if all plans require IBC codes. Oh, well, IBC codes generally. IBC codes are generally designated. They do not require ISO codes, which is frustrating for us in the insurance industry because we have to convert the two. But generally speaking, the IBC designation will be found and it will be found in that summary. Now the challenging thing is about that, that's not a magic bullet to classify the construction by because at any given floor level, the construction type can change. And depending on the risk appetite of the carrier, they could decide to price a project by construction type based on the percentage of each construction type if you've got a very aggressive carrier. Some carriers don't don't price things as aggressively and they might go with the the lowest ISO rating and price the whole building as that. So it really just depends on the risk appetite of the department that we're talking about. But not every set of plans is going to be identical. Not every set of plans is going to give you an IBC designation. But if it has it, that's a big leg up and at least it's a vote of confidence or a confirming factor on what your opinion might be once you go through these structurals and architecturals. Good question. So seeing through the chaos. Oftentimes, less experienced underwriters will focus on elevations. This is the quickest, easiest, most appealing view of the project. Oftentimes renderings are reviewed and while it provides a little benefit in terms of the height of the building, in terms of the number of levels of what the building might eventually look like, there's a lot of limitations to looking at elevations. At times it can be quite confusing and it almost does more harm than good. What does this really show you? Well, it gives you an overall height. It gives you the fact that this is a five-story, in some cases, building with a basement. But it doesn't tell you what holds the building up from the elevations. It doesn't tell you, might assume maybe a brick veneer, but that, as Morgan said earlier, can be confusing because if you assume it's masonry non-combustible, that's a different rate than frame with a brick veneer. So we don't know the answer to the question just based on the curb appeal that the elevations generate for us. So that takes us to the floor plan. The architectural floor plan is where I generally start and what you really want to do is roll up your sleeves and look for these highlighted section markers. So I've highlighted a couple of these. They're triangles that pass through the building, cutting through to this point. It starts with a rectangle and then it cuts through the building and comes out the other side of the building. And then there's an arrow that tells us at the point that we slice through that building, we're going to look to the right. And if this is the north direction of the plan on our left side, this is what we're going to be looking at because we're going to face the right. So the left side is going to be the north side and the south side is going to be the right side. So as we look through for these section markers, think of a five-layer cake that you're cutting through and removing that slice and then examining that from a different perspective. So we want to follow the reference to these details. Now that reference is detail one on I think sheet A-410. The building sections are going to be far more beneficial than the elevations, and I'll show you why. So now we're looking through that same section marker. The left side of the building is the north end of the building. The right side of the building is the south end of the building. Now we we know some things. We know exactly how many levels we have. We know the building height based on this information to the right. And then you can start to see some designations as I go down this right side, this dashed line. This refers to another set of, another detail, another section to go look for and reference. This is again from the plan reference of that section marker. So I'm going to go back a slide. It came off of this designation and what we're now looking at is that cross-section of the building. It shows every story. It provides our building height. It refers you to details. Now this is a broader view. This is a, say, a 20,000 foot view. Now we're going to drill a little bit deeper and look at that section that was off to the side. This came from the section reference. It shows more details. It starts to reveal some components used and it refers to more details in the future. So we're drilling down. We're getting more and more specific. That was the section that was designated on the right side of that last drawing. I'm going to blow the top portion of that up. So this is a zoomed in view of the walls and the connections. So at this point we can see the highlighted section here that talks about the roof assembly. The roof is designated as SYS-1. So that's something that we're going to be looking for here in a minute. And the wall is designated as System 1B. So this shows the general intent of the structurals. Now again we're still in the architectural plans. We've started with the architectural plans. We've gone through some section cuts. Oftentimes this is not real specific. It'll just refer to a system. So it's not going to tell you what the decking is comprised of. It's not going to tell you what the joists are comprised of, which we need to know to confirm this. It refers you to generic and more vague details. At this point looking at the plans, are these joists steel or wood? We really can't tell. We think they might look like, frankly, steel joists based on how they're illustrated, but we don't know the answer to that question yet. So we drop back a couple more drawings. Now we're on sheet A-600, still in the architectural series. And this Roof System 1 gets revealed. And in Roof System 1 it says right down here, going from the top to the bottom, we've got a TPO roof with a little bit of gypsum board, then some insulation. And then as we get down, we've got wood trusses at 24 inches on center, 18-inch fire retardant. FRT is the initial that we'll talk about abbreviations here in a little bit. Wood trusses at 24 inches on center, C structural. So now we're going to be referred to the structural plans. Like I said before, architecturals and structurals, they really go hand-in-hand and they're married up. So without designating with a label, we know this is not steel, that this is actually wood trusses, at least according to the architecturals. The other reference that we were given was this floor system. And again, it tells us the components that are made on sheet A-600, or A-800, excuse me, that this floor system is comprised of. Wood floor trusses, C structurals. So again, it doesn't point and say this is steel, but in this listing here we can see wood floor trusses is what that structure is. The system over here, it's either a two or three hour fire rated floor. If it was floor system two, that's where that's designated. So again, you're going through a couple architectural plans, but we've only looked at maybe four sheets in the architectural drawings and we now know what those building components are. These are the structurals. So this verifies what the architecturals had shown in our previous review. You go through the same process. There's going to be a structural floor plan. There's going to be a section marker with an arrow. You refer to where that section marker takes you. And in this case, it took us to a drawing that clearly says wood connection schedule, and it shows us what these wood connection schedules are. Wood trusses, wood truss framing member connection to CMU wall, wood truss framing member connection to CMU wall, depending on which direction we're going, how that's detailed out. So now we know that we've got a joisted masonry condition on those levels. We've got a masonry exterior wall with wood joists connecting them. So these abbreviations, each subdiscipline will have its own abbreviation sheet. So the civil plans, which I want to talk about soon, will have its own list of abbreviations. So you don't need to memorize these, and these are going to be project-specific in most cases. So don't get caught up in the abbreviations, but use them as a reference. The architecturals will have an abbreviation list. The structurals will have an abbreviation list. And you're not going to look at anything else, but they all have abbreviation lists too. Getting back to the civils, the only drawing that I spend time on, on the civil plans, is the location plan. Because there's going to be 8, 10, 12, 15 civil drawings. And it's going to tell you all about, there's going to be lines going everywhere, there's going to be grading plans, there's going to be utility locations, there's going to be all this stuff that you don't care about and don't need. What you do need, though, is the location plan, because that's going to indicate the distance between one building to the next. If you have, think of an apartment complex with 15 buildings, you need to know the distance between each of those buildings, because you're going to develop an amount subject summary at some point as you're developing your PML to identify how closely connected those buildings are, how closely they fall together. So that's the only civil drawing that you really need to spend much time on, is to understand that amount subject piece. Outside of that, you're not looking at many civil drawings either. General plans, architecturals, structurals. That's it. So, in terms of yesterday's question that I needed to answer, I had an IBC, the construction classification for IBC is shown up here on this horizontal axis. It was a type 2B, type 2B construction according to IBC. This handy dandy cheat sheet refers when you connect these dots, type 2B is married up with an ISO 3, and it's also listed down here in this grouping here. Class 2B, also ISO class 3. So it's a noncombustible building in that instance. I want to go back and just ask and review. When it comes to some of these section views, a lot of information is shared with this level of a cross section. You can see that the construction type changes. Down here we had a different floor system. Up here we had all wood frame construction. So it's important to look at the entire vertical assembly to know what we're dealing with because oftentimes it can change, specifically in a mixed use building where you have a parking garage down below, three levels of wood frame apartments up above. So don't short circuit or shortcut yourself. Do a thorough review of each level of the building because they truly do change. And you're already looking at those sheets. You're not having to go find any additional sheets. So make sure you digest that information when it's in front of you and you have that opportunity. Okay. Any questions that have been generated as a result of some of the information that we've gone through? I imagine they'll be able to submit those through chat. Yeah. I can read those off to you, Phil. Well, one, we have a thank you for the conversion chart. And everyone's just excited to, I think, be able to get the skill set to verify construction time quicker. One situation, one question that came through the chat is, have you ever had a situation where most of the project was masonry and steel, but IBC was IBC 3B ISO 1? If the roof structure happens to be wood, oftentimes that can throw you into that classification, either joisted masonry or wood. But if most of it's steel, generally speaking, when you get into steel superstructure, it's less expensive to have steel joists making those connections. So oftentimes those become ISO 3 classifications, at least various portions of the building do. Our next question. That brings up a great point, though, Morgan, and that is that there are oftentimes hybrids to where it's not just, it doesn't all fit nice and neat into these six classifications. Sometimes you get drawing outside the lines, so to speak. And depending on the risk involved, that might kick you into the lower ISO classification. Do we have a how to differentiate between preliminary plans or final plans? That's a dangerous question, isn't it? We get these preliminary plans sent in and they want to quote, but they're not done with the design. It's half baked. And sometimes during the course of that navigation between the building department and the architect and the owner, changes get made. And they might be wholesale changes to where some construction classification and some components change materials, which alter the construction classification. So if they're going to mark the plans as preliminary, I think our quote needs to be marked preliminary based on these plans. And it needs to be aligned properly with where the design was at that point in time. So our next question here is IBCMNC will allow for some decorative combustible materials where ISO may then consider the structure of a less superior construction type. How do we account for that? It's a challenge when you have, let's say, a wood veneer on the outside of a non-combustible building because zoning departments might require cedar siding and they don't want to see the cold harshness of brick or something along those lines. That changes our risk to some degree, might not change it from a structural standpoint, but if that fire starts on the veneer, it's not going to go too far into the building, but there's going to be damage and there's going to be cost logically associated with that damage. So that changes how you're going to quote that PML risk, right? So that is where it becomes an art more than a science, deviating between what a probable loss is going to be and building the pricing and financing and accordingly because there's going to be more loss associated with those. That's a great question. And it looks like Katie asked how oftentimes she's looking for the final floor elevations. Is there a specific section of the plans where this lives? Looking for the final floor elevations. Generally the building sections off to the side will indicate what elevation each floor resides in. I can take us back a few slides and show that on this example project. It's your overall building. Well, that was a blow up of it, but you can see this floor level is at 46 feet above the first floor. That floor level is at 24 feet, eight and a quarter inches above the first floor level. So along these section views, it's going to give you each of those elevations if I'm understanding the question correctly. Yes. Michelle is asking, I've seen better than frame construction listed as the 5B ISO construction. I was told it was less restrictive codes. Does this make sense? I think she's maybe indicating one set of codes, the IBC versus the ISO being less restrictive than the other. Right. And it can be. Looking back at our cheat sheet, you can see that some of these are married up together. The 3A, the 3B, the 4 are all lumped into what we would identify as a joisted masonry or ISO 2 section. Some of these are combined. The type 5A and 5B, this chart assumes that they're going to be considered part of frame or ISO 1. So some of that gets rather subjective. They are different. They're like different dialects of the same language. People from the south don't understand what soda is. People from the north don't understand what a hollow is. It's just it's the same language, but it's different dialects, different ways of viewing things for different reasons. Mark is asking, why not just use the IBC to ISO conversion chart rather than the plans? Is the IBC to ISO chart always apples to apples comparison? It's not always apples to apples. This is a rough go by. It gives you a good starting point, but I like to understand what the actual plans show. And what these classifications don't do is show you floor to floor and condition to condition situations, whereas the plans, you can you can dissect it right down to the nitty gritty to know what percent of your building falls within frame, what percent of your building falls within noncombustible construction or fire resistive construction if it's a parking garage down below. And you can become more accurate rather than going by what the majority of the building is or what the ISO two thirds rule is, because that's just it's it's painting with broader strokes than what we need to if we really do a thorough plan review. Isabel is asking if the drawings provide cope information besides construction type. She's referencing number of floors, years, square footage, or where we would need to get that information elsewhere. So as far as the adjacent exposures, it's not going to show you a whole lot other than maybe an overall civil plan might show you what's nearby. It's not going to tell you since I'm assuming this is builder's risk that we're looking at. So if it's a renovation set of plans, it might show you what year the original building was built or the most recent addition was built. But outside of that, we have to assume this is new construction and and it's going to tell you some information, but not not everything. Not all your cope information is going to be on there. Bradford is asking how important it is to confirm information from the architectural versus the structural pages. Have you ever seen instances where this information does not line up? I have. As a general contractor, I found them all the time and had to issue what are called requests for information for the architect to sort that out. Generally speaking, they're in step at the point that we're looking at projects to price. This is not the second or third generation of plans. We're the fourth or fifth generation of plans and everybody knows what we're building and how we're building it with what components. Have I seen it? Absolutely. I've seen it. You run a risk on design build projects specifically because so much of this gets started at a preliminary stage and if certain sheets don't get updated, then you have information that's antiquated on a few of those sheets and they aren't always consistent. That seems to happen more in the design build realm more than the plan and spec delivery method. Francis is asking if there's another IBC classification, I previously used heavy timber, but also now use for mass timber projects. Oh, I see, sorry, that was more of a statement than a question, my fault. Absolutely. I came across that out in Oregon, Northern California, Washington, out west in timber country, they didn't use near as much steel, near as much non-combustible and I looked at that and I thought, well, gosh, I hate to classify that as joisted masonry because to get that structural member to burn through to where it's going to structurally impair the building is going to take a whale of a fire and it's not real practical. So I have seen some modifications be made for heavy timber structures, absolutely. Maureen is saying that she has a project that states the type of construction is 2A-3B. She wants to know why that would be and is asking if potentially it's just two buildings or if there's another explanation. Be the same building. It could be a different floor of the same building, just like the case study that we just went through because this would have been a 1A-2B because part of it was a parking garage down below with a three-hour fire rated floor system and the upper levels were type 2B or actually it was more of a wood frame construction, a 5A construction. So that would have been a 1A and a 5A together. That's why there's no quick answer to finding that IBC designation and just using this chart and answering that question with certainty. Don't take that shortcut. Use it as a confirmation, but go through the process floor by floor because it varies. All right, and we've got a few more here and then I haven't seen much more pop through, but Gina is asking if you would prefer to go by the engineering report IBC code versus an ISO report to validate construction type of an existing building. She just is saying could ISO reports be older than the engineering report? I'd be more apt to go with the engineering report with a good description of the existing conditions along with some pictures. Again, we're getting into a renovation type project that she's describing and really we're talking about new construction with this particular seminar today, but I always like to see that engineering report with pictures and describing those existing conditions. They should describe what the composition of those materials are and not just rely on what the IBC rating might be because if you're covering that existing structure, you need to know what sort of condition it's in. And Paul is asking where would we typically see the earthquake or windstorm mitigation elements in code relevant jurisdictions? That's a great question. It's going to be up in the general section. So there's going to be different shoring and different seismic conditions that are all going to be called out in the front end of those general plans. And it will also show up more particularly in the structural plans. Again, if we focus on the general plans, the architecturals, and the structurals, our questions are going to be answered in those components of the plans. The rest, the other 75 to 90 percent, you're wasting your time scrolling through them. So focus on where the answers are and that's general, architecturals, and structurals. All right. I'm not seeing any more questions come through at the moment. If there's any more questions, I guess feel free to go ahead and enter them in the chat. We can give it another minute or so. I hope we were able to gain some confidence today in where to quickly find the answers that you're seeking to answer the questions that we're all needing about specifically construction types and how to do that efficiently. Focus on those areas. You'll become a heat-seeking missile in terms of locating the answers to these questions. And it should lower your anxiety and your stress level once you realize that you're not going to be looking and turning the sheets of 60 to 70 percent of these drawings to begin with. You're going to be intimidating right off the table. So hopefully today's session was beneficial to a few of you. I know we had 400 or so joining us today. So it was a pleasure to shine some light on something that might otherwise be quite intimidating to people who, in many cases, you know, we graduate with finance degrees from colleges and business colleges and we haven't been exposed to plan reading like we have been just in today's discussion. So please, if you need additional help, reach out. You'll be able to contact IBC. They can get a hold of me. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to answer questions if they come up and really wish everybody the best. Yeah. So we do have one outstanding question that came in after I kind of announced that a little bit. Tim wants to know, will the structural plans clearly show the cross-laminated timber or sorry, cross-laminated lumber versus regular wood? Yes. Generally, it'll designate a designated, it'll say delegated design. It could be timber structure or glue laminated beam, well beyond just dimensional lumber. It will designate. There's just structural engineers that design with wood components like that know to call out engineered, graded wood and how that's going to be designed generally not by that structural engineer, but by a provider. Yeah. We have many in the chat saying thank you very much and how informative it was. That's great. We're here to help and I'm happy to know that this presentation benefited many. That's good. You were both phenomenal. Thank you so much for sharing every, all of your expertise with us and for the moderating and expertise and helping us connect the dots, Morgan. This is fantastic. Attendees, we just posted a link in the survey, to the survey in the chat box. Please share your feedback with us. In particular, there's a question about a future blueprint reading on renovation projects, which I think Bill is willing to present. Let us know if that's something you'd be interested in and share any information that he could use for putting together that content. Always looking for your feedback for how we can better serve you. Thank you also for your many wonderful questions for our attendees. That makes the decision for who is the most slash best engaged a little challenging, but was there perhaps a question that stands out to Morgan and Bill? Phil, did you have any in mind? I've got a few names written down from various questions, but I don't know if you had any that stood out to you. I like the question about the various IBC designations on the same set of plans. I thought that was a pretty heads up question myself. Yes, this is a Marine Nugent. And then we also had quite a few, quite a few questions going on. So I think we're welcome to welcome our winner of the day. Congratulations to Maureen. We'll keep Maureen as our winner. Again, we really appreciate all of the questions. I wish we could get everybody in on the Amazon e-gift card, but selecting one, Maureen, your question was fabulous. Thank you. And I also want to thank everybody for being in attendance today, participating. We look forward to seeing you at our next event. Enjoy the rest of the day. This ends today's webinar. Bye.

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