Consider the following Board of Contract Appeals' denial of a large delay claim, in part, because the contractor failed to accurately document weather impacts in the NAS schedule, which would have changed the critical path. In that case, the contractor's expert found that Government changes caused a 41-day delay. Weather delays were not a factor in his assessment. According to the available NOAA data, the contractor should have expected to lose 23 days to adverse weather during November and December. Instead, the actual number was more than double the projection for those two months alone.
Every construction project experiences similar delays due to inclement weather.
In attempting to reconcile schedule delay problems, project owners frequently issue time extensions or adjust the critical path if the contractor can demonstrate that abnormal or unusually severe weather conditions impacted negatively on progress at the time of the impact. It is always incumbent on the contractor, when requesting a time extension for unusually severe weather, to prove entitlement in a timely manner. Concrete columns, for instance, can be poured in light rain, but earthwork would be shutdown. Furthermore, when weather conditions are analyzed, the activities that are on the critical path at the time of the analysis must be considered. In addition, contractors are required to base a time extension analysis on a comparison between actual and historical averages.